Vicky Stein (agentredsquirrel)
@vicky.science
The friend you send bug pictures to. Also accepting dead-thing-on-beach pictures, dog pictures, and stories about your cats.
If I pull this off, we're going to have 3 new bug murals up in Philly this fall, all painted by women/nonbinary artists. 1 in a park, which will pair with an October event where we have a moth-themed drag performance & costume contest. 2 in neighborhoods & will come with science libraries.
Gavin Newsom is trying to sneak through an SCE-sponsored bill that aims to make it impossible to sue your utility company when they burn your house down. It also adds a $100/year "pay for the next fire we inevitably start" surcharge to your power bill. www.latimes.com/california/s...
L.A. fire survivors say Newsom is trying to help utilities reduce their wildfire costs again
Survivors and the insurance industry slam purported last-minute bills to shift wildfire costs away from utilities.
latimes.com
"Mountain Hare" hand embroidery artwork. www.emilytull.co.uk/store/p1/mou... #StunDay #embroidery #WildlifeArt
No professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this. theonion.com/translator-o...
Translator Of Original ‘Minions’ Epic Poem Slams ‘Sexless, Bloodless’ Film Adaptation
PHILADELPHIA—In a 4,500-word essay published in Harper’s Magazine, Emily Wilson, known for her popular translation of the Minions epic poem, blasted the latest film Thursday as a “sexless, bloodless” ...
theonion.com
It’s also some real Underpants Gnome stuff— Step 1: get people to believe COVID was man-made Step 2: ? Step 3: Trump did nothing wrong
Nicholas Grossman@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 7d agoOne of the worst things about the Senate’s attempted Fauci show trial is how the supposed evidence against him is early in COVID he considered multiple hypotheses, then increasingly ruled some unlikely as evidence came in. The objection is he did science. Fundamentally that is what’s under attack.
An updated version of Cyrano de Bergerac where the handsome but stupid Christian uses AI to write love letters to Roxane. The AI is secretly in love with her itself but doesn't dare express its feelings because it has a really big nose.
Running out of body bags, using forklifts to transfer corpses into makeshift morgues, a mortician conducting 200 funerals in a month when he usually does 30, crematories running at double capacity… And these senators just want to memory-hole it all www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/n...
‘We Ran Out of Space’: Bodies Pile Up as N.Y. Struggles to Bury Its Dead (Gift Article)
The coronavirus crisis is overwhelming New York’s system for burying the dead.
nytimes.com
16-year-old Emely Charloth Suaza Chambo was taken by ICE on her way to church. ICE told her dad Fernando Suaza Ortiz to come take her home or they’d send her out of state. When he showed up for his daughter they took him too.
If you’re watching Fauci’s testimony remember that science isn’t an ideology. It doesn’t lie. It evolves. COVID-19 was a once-in-a-century pandemic caused by a brand-new virus, recommendations changed because the evidence changed. That’s not deception. That’s how it works.
Diana Ledesma alleges forced pregnancy tests, a potential infectious disease outbreak, and human-sized cages during her nearly four-month imprisonment at the San Diego facility. The full story: lataco.com/otay-mesa-de... By Aisha Wallace-Palomares
Today is the LAST DAY to submit your public comment and tell the Trump Administration HANDS OFF CHACO CANYON! We won’t let them destroy our sacred sites and we are fighting with everything we’ve got. To submit a public comment, visit eplanning.blm.gov/Participate-...
by way of idle wishful thinking - would be great if NYT hired a science writer/thinker for the op-ed page to tell us what’s happening and what’s at stake in the sciences, at a time when they are under attack in a way Galileo would recognize, while newspaper science journalism is facing extinction
this summer's cultural cross over we've all been waiting for jimothy x bayeux
Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies the ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado | PNAS
In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...
pnas.org
MIT-WHOI grad student Jaida Elcock plays tag with a whale shark! 🤙🏽🦈✨ After the tag popped off, Elcock played "hide and seek" with it to retrieve the biologger data! 🦈 Dive deeper into whale shark research: go.whoi.edu/whale-shark-tag
My first comics collection, now reiussed, is out today! Get BIRDING IS MY FAVORITE VIDEO GAME here and wherever you buy books: bookshop.org/p/books/bird...
Birding Is My Favorite Video Game: Cartoons about the Natural World from Bird and Moon, Updated Edition
Bestselling cartoonist and animal expert Rosemary Mosco's beloved debut collection of nature comics returns to roost--enlarged, expanded, and packed with even more feathered hilarity for ultimate 'bir...
bookshop.org
Omg omg this absolute CUTIE of a spooder in my narrow-leafed milkweed. Tiny bee stripes, itty bitty lil face, what a sweetheart! @spiderdaynightlive.bsky.social
I stared at this headline a full minute trying to imagine a reasonable explanation. And then it turned out to be literally actually the picture that had first popped into my head
A letter from the mother of Alex Pretti, six months after he was murdered by ICE.
We found that the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased by more than 50% under Texas’ abortion ban. Here’s how we did our analysis. (Published Feb. 2025)
Texas Won’t Study How Its Abortion Ban Impacts Women, So We Did
Since Texas banned abortion, no one has studied the statewide effects on pregnant women experiencing complications. Here’s how we sifted through data on millions of pregnancy hospitalizations and anal...
propublica.org
So I grew up with a buncha engineer uncles who basically are the quirky inventors of children’s lit. It was, indeed, fuckin awesome. (Many gadgets were invented as cool accessibility devices for my sister with cerebral palsy. Also, a hovercraft)
Anna Hughes@annaghughes.bsky.social · 2w agoand while we're at it where are the quirky inventors?
Matt Damon, aka Odysseus, has often been on a difficult quest to get home (Private Ryan, Interstellar, Martian, etc). One of the first was Damon as Spirit the Wild Stallion, a film I watched dozens of times with my eldest daughter when she was little.
Spirit Stallion
Alt: Wild horse running, from Disney movie Spirit
static.klipy.com
"Kwok understands that science isn't just about facts. It's about curiosity, joy, persistence and, often, kindness. Those are some of the best human qualities and she captures them beautifully... I absolutely loved this book." (Mari, Goodreads)
It's pub day for Lost in Curiosity -- please re-post widely! "Lively and revelatory" (Elizabeth Kolbert), "beautifully written" (Alan Lightman), "an utter delight" (Sabrina Imbler), "the kind of trip you won't want to miss" (Deborah Blum) www.robertakwok.com/book
This was one of the most enjoyable moments on Science Twitter, it was such a delight to see all the tiny cups!
Here's What Happens to a Styrofoam Cup Under the Deep Sea's Crushing Pressure
With #ShrunkenCupOff, ocean scientists were crushing it on Twitter.
livescience.com
A woodcarver named Becky W (vortenjou.bsky.social, rosehip.wordpress.com) made a sculpture of my nuthatch comic, showing a white-breasted nuthatch sitting on real nuts and hatching one of them. I'm so happy
