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Cara Giovanetti

@idontevencara.bsky.social

I study dark matter, cosmology, and particle physics for a living at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. On the weekends I write explainers about surprising places physics shows up in the natural world. caragiovanetti.com

862 Posts1193 Follower122 Folgt
SoCal Leslie@socalleslie.bsky.social · 6d ago

Brown pelican doing what is called wave slope soaring using updrafts created by breaking waves to conserve valuable energy without flapping, sometimes over a considerable distance. Very cool. 🪶🌿

Brown pelican soaring effortlessly with the help of updrafts from a breaking wave.
Cara Giovanetti@idontevencara.bsky.social · 7d ago

Heard a suggestion today to ask only for a researcher's top ~five most important publications as part of postdoc/faculty applications, to disincentivize cranking out as many LLM-assisted papers as possible. Apparently this strategy is gaining traction in Europe, US has yet to catch on. ⚛️🧪

Maja Mielke (she/her)@maja-mielke.bsky.social · 2w ago

Brand new #research found that iron-containing cells in pigeons' livers may help them sense the Earth's magnetic field. #Nature is weird. 🤯 #Birds are amazing. 🐦 👇 Read the full story in my latest Beaks & Bones post. beaksandbones.substack.com/p/pigeon-mac... #scicomm #ornithology #pigeons 🧪🪶

Pigeons sense the Earth's magnetic field—with their livers

Superparamagnetic cells in their livers help homing pigeons navigate on cloudy days.

beaksandbones.substack.com

Cara Giovanetti@idontevencara.bsky.social · 2w ago

One detail that seems to be escaping some of the coverage of the possible dark matter signal in LZ: the analysis they ran was not blind. They attempted to blind, but the procedure failed. This means there are fewer protections against investigator bias that could have crept into the analysis. ⚛️🧪

An attempt to mitigate possible analyzer bias by injecting the dataset with artificial signal-like events, a process known as “salting”, was unsuccessful. Drawn from a distribution consisting of a sum of a WIMP SI-like exponential and a flat NR spectrum out to 250 ± 25 keV, the salt events followed a NR model defined before the AmBe calibration was conducted and did not adequately cover the signal region at high energies. Despite the lack of coverage, the analysis selections and likelihood models were finalized before four salt events were revealed (in addition to the seven salt events previously removed as part of the analysis in Ref. [5]). Three of the salt events fell in the WS ROI with one just above, but all four fall outside the 90% containment region for the calibrated NR band. The salt can be seen in the Supplemental Material. Bias mitigation in the region above 55 keV therefore relies primarily on the use of unchanged analysis selections from Ref. [5]. Ultimately, we consider the analysis described here to be a non-blind analysis.
Cara Giovanetti@idontevencara.bsky.social · 3w ago

While the stories about pots of edible honey exhumed from ancient tombs are probably urban legends, it is true that honey has a phenomenally long shelf life. Except… we might be threatening that stability with the way we store our honey. 1/5 ⚛️🧪

Photograph of bear-shaped plastic bottles filled with golden honey, arranged in rows on a table with a price tag of $3.50. Labels on bottles display "Pure Honey" from Bear River Honey Co. Image credit Robert Couse-Baker CC-BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · last mo.

Qualia columnist @nattyover.bsky.social is spellbound by the ubiquitous branching patterns that show up in nature — she even has one tattooed to her forearm. In today’s column, she homes in on the alluring math of ever-evolving river systems. www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-rive...

Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? | Quanta Magazine

A simple scaling law brings order to the chaos of flowing water, rock, and sediment. New findings have extended the law even further.

quantamagazine.org

Cara Giovanetti@idontevencara.bsky.social · last mo.

In the 1970s, a group of farmers digging a well stumbled upon one of the greatest archaeological finds in history. They had found the terracotta army—some 8,000 life-size clay soldiers, buried over 2,000 years ago. The soldiers had real weapons, **which were still sharp**. How? 1/8 ⚛️🧪

Photograph of the Terracotta Army archaeological site showing rows of life-sized clay soldiers and horses arranged in pits under a large protective roof. By xiquinhosilva - https://www.flickr.com/photos/xiquinho/27718581472/in/album-72157669496699682/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147287690
Cara Giovanetti@idontevencara.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I once heard that insects like mosquitoes track you through the CO2 you exhale, and so holding your breath can help you avoid bites in a swarm. Today I am disheartened to report that the sensory tour de force packed into these 2.5 milligram bodies can still counter tricks like these. 1/5 ⚛️🧪

Close-up photograph of a mosquito resting on a wooden surface, showing detailed features like long legs, transparent wings, and segmented body. Image by Alvesgaspar - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11499865
Cara Giovanetti@idontevencara.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The golden ratio is an irrational number; if you divide a line according to the golden ratio, the smaller part relates to the larger part the same way the larger part relates to the whole. And you can compute the golden ratio yourself, with a pinecone. 1/16 ⚛️🧪

Photograph of a hand holding a large pine cone outdoors on a sunny day. This lil guy holds secrets of math and geometry!
Astrobites@astrobites.bsky.social · 2mo ago

From @qwasistellar.bsky.social & Caroline von Raesfeld: The Office of Management and Budget has proposed to completely restructure federal funding. We review the proposal and describe how to submit public comments on it by July 13th. ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/07/03/omb-proposal/

Saving science as we know it: Overview of new proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget, and how we can make our voices heard.

The Office of Management and Budget has proposed to completely restructure federal funding for science as we know it. In this bite, we review the most relevant points in the proposal and describe how ...

astrobites.org