Per Ahlberg
@perahlberg.bsky.social
Palaeontologist at Uppsala University. Early vertebrate enthusiast. Moderately effective gardener. He/him. Views my own. Enemy of AI slop. The photo is me, not some random bloke. Background image from Ymer Island, north-East Greenland.🇸🇪🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱🇪🇺🇬🇧
Today it’s magic mushrooms! But not THAT kind. Together with @janetahlberg.bsky.social I have started experimenting with the strange alchemical art of mushroom dyeing and we are beginning to get exciting results. Have a look at this little fellow! This is Cortinarius semisanguineus.
Another paper, this from a team featuring our own @captain-colosteid.bsky.social. A Late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) tetrapod burrow from New Brunswick, Canada. www.mdpi.com/2813-6284/4/...
mdpi.com
New paper alert! My talented postdoc Dana Korneisel has just published a paper from her PhD project in Nature. First and corresponding author! Experiments using sturgeon (which have a vertebral column with a persisting notochord) indicate that early tetrapods didn't really have a mobile neck.🧪
Summer is over, the garden is settling down for its winter sleep, but it still has one last farewell flowering: the dark blue monkshood. Gorgeous, stately, staggeringly poisonous, it looks magnificent against the fading foliage of Magnolia ‘Galaxy’.
Proud dad time! My lovely daughter Anna has just published her first paper - as first AND corresponding author! @janetahlberg.bsky.social and I are bursting with admiration. The paper, from her Masters thesis, deals with hyena-livestock encounters.🧪 conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The temporal environmental correlates of spotted hyena (<fi>Crocuta crocuta</fi>) encounters with livestock enclosures: Insights from central Kenya
We studied spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) encounters with livestock enclosures, an important but understudied stage of the livestock depredation process. Using camera traps, we examined how encounte...
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Huge congratulations to @timnitgebru.blacksky.app on being awarded the Right Livelihood Prize!!
Russia struck the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. In broad daylight! People are climbing out of windows to avoid burning alive. Freaking barbarians!
This is what people like Le Pen, Mélenchon, Weidel, and Wagenknecht support. These traitors want to cut aid to Ukraine and see even more of this
Waiting with a certain amount of trepidation for the end of the negotiations to form a coalition government, following the Swedish elections, when I was suddenly struck by something interesting - especially perhaps for US friends who are forced to watch in horror as the patriarchy reasserts itself
Here's a petition to save the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Please sign, the closure of this wonderful museum would be a disastrous loss to Philadelphia and the world. actionnetwork.org/petitions/pe...
Petition to Keep the Academy of Natural Sciences Open to the Public
The scientific community in Philadelphia and concerned neighbors are calling on Drexel University to keep the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia’s public-facing museum open beyond their impos...
actionnetwork.org
Watching Mark Carney live, addressing the European Parliament, outlining the new Canada-EU alliance. The breadth and depth of vision is jaw-dropping. The world order is shifting on its axis.
Autumn in the garden. There are not many flowers now, but a few are at their best, one has just opened and one is still to come (so you will have to wait for that one). In the sunny south bed, the last of the dahlias - Pooh - is still in bloom.
Well, we voted this morning, then headed off to the forest to look for mushrooms. And they have started to come! After a rainy week the forest soil is moist again and all of a sudden the hidden fungal diversity becomes visible. Fly agarics, Amanita muscaria, are easy to spot:
One thing that intrigues me about the "AI will exterminate humanity within 10 years!" panic is the hopelessly online and computer-centered vision behind it. Do they really think Amazonian tribes, or New Guinea highlanders, or Mongolian camel herders, are susceptible to extermination by AI? I don't.
Weird report in The Guardian about an Italian man apprehended smuggling the head of a "critically endangered crocodile" into Italy, and now facing a fine or prison. In fact it's an American alligator, classed as "least concern" by IUCN, & probably captive-bred. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Crocodile head found in luggage at Italian airport
Man, who had arrived in Turin from Miami via Istanbul, under investigation for smuggling and faces fine or prison
theguardian.com
RT if you've never had a tab of ChatGPT open, period.
Mr. Tyler CroOoOoOoOok@mrtylercrook.bsky.social · 2mo agoRT if you've never had a tab of ChatGPT open, period.
I spent most of the weekend (except Saturday afternoon when I made jam) at a pottery studio in Stockholm learning to make nerikomi pottery - a traditional Japanese technique using colored clays on mosaic fashion, rather than coloured glazes. I’m pretty pleased with the results!
At last, it’s time for lingon (Vaccinium vitis-idaea), often called ‘lingonberries’ in English, though strictly speaking the correct name is the rather less inspiring ‘cowberry’. Also known as “the red gold of the forest”. The last of the Swedish forest berries to ripen.
As the #SciArtSeptember Day 1 theme is malachite, I’m posting a fake-malachite panel on a key cabinet I made and painted back in the 90s. Because why not.
Star Trek II: The Annoyance of Khan
Stuart Swales@taynappe.bsky.social · 2mo ago2010: The Year We Make Whoopee
🧪 The latest from the Origin of Tetrapods project! For decades our Latvian colleagues have been excavating at Pavari, a Devonian locality yielding the tetrapod Ventastega. Here's a new lungfish from the same fauna, described by @draliceclement.bsky.social and the rest of us.
Dr Alice Clement@draliceclement.bsky.social · 2mo agoNew #lungfish just dropped! Welcome to the world, Jumisodus latus, a #Devonian lungfish from the Famennian of #Latvia! Named for the Latvian figure 'Jumis', god of fertility and harvest, whose symbol represents the tooth plate outline in this new taxon... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Hi, I’m seagulls on the runway at Akureyri Airport!
JunkboxJim@junkboxjim.bsky.social · 2mo agoIntroduce yourself as what almost killed you. Hi, I'm alcohol and drugs!
🧪Another open-access paper from our lab came out a while ago but I forgot to post a link, so here it is. Ossification of the pectoral fin skeleton of a phylogenetically basal stem lungfish. Based on the same material as my very first paper, from 1989! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Ossification of the pectoral fin of Glyptolepis groenlandica: implications for the evolution of the lungfish appendicular skeleton - Developmental Biology Advances
Developmental Biology Advances - Lungfishes are commonly considered to be the sister group to tetrapods. They appeared around 415 million years ago, then rapidly evolved, diversified and spread....
link.springer.com
🧪I'm delighted to present a new open-access paper from our team, describing the contents of a fish coprolite assemblage from the beginning of the Late Devonian, about 382-380 million years old, in northern Russia. Data collected in happier days before the war. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Investigating a Devonian vertebrate assemblage with synchrotron microtomography of coprolites - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Investigating a Devonian vertebrate assemblage with synchrotron microtomography of coprolites
nature.com
