VivienM

@vivienm.bsky.social

Journalist. Nature journals and blog, pieces also in New Scientist, The Economist, Science, Lancet. Science, tech; arts and culture on occasion. Ex-MIT KSJ fellow; sr producer at arte. Articles, podcasts, videos. https://www.vivienmarx.com Signal: vam.60

0 mm... Driest July on record at Kew (SW London) since 1800! 💧🔥 1800 also recorded no measurable rainfall, but July 2026 was the hottest month on record, which results in a combination very impressive for the area! 😲 Please note that the local records go back to 1697! ⏱️ 📈 Via @metjam.co.uk

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Even as the band has changed and reinvented itself, the Grateful Dead's fanbase has proven to be uniquely and consistently renewable — a cosmic inheritance passed down from one generation to the next, welcoming younger Deadheads with open arms. n.pr/4fFshZY

How Deadheads became rock and roll's greatest renewable resource

Even as the band has changed and reinvented itself, the Grateful Dead's fanbase has proven to be uniquely and consistently renewable — a cosmic inheritance passed down from one generation to the next, welcoming younger Deadheads with open arms.

n.pr

Very early in the pandemic, I spent 2 terrible weeks in isolation, unable to breathe or walk across the room. Waiting my temp. to spike. Worrying about my kids. Fighting against dying. In the middle of this covid revisionist, anti-vax bullshit, it was worth saying what that felt like:

Poem titled "Gnawed." The text of the poem reads:

Gnawed

Kalends of April, 2020

I can feel the rat,
dark and angry,
buried
in the furrows of my chest,
trying hard to pull apart
the fiber of my breathing.
Twisting. Writhing.
Clawing
with a feral-hearted hatred
at the bonds that sinew
soul to skin.
I cannot walk across the room without
the rasping of its teeth
along the inside of my ribs,
or speak without it screaming
in the shallows of my breath.
I can only lie beyond
the borders of my life,
checking the thermometer
a hundred times a day
as all the while
I am being
eaten
from the inside out.

	– John Wyatt Greenlee

Exactly this. RFK Jr meant the conspiracy theory kooks peddling ivermectin & hydroxychloroquine. He lied when he said these kooks cured “thousands” of people, and he lied when he said ICUs were empty during the pandemic, and he lied when said RSV & Lyme were caused by gain of function research.

Mike Masnick@masnick.com · 3d ago

Because RFK Jr. doesn't mean actual frontline doctors. He means the conspiracy theory propaganda org. "America's Frontline Doctors" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America...

I am looking for PhD students and postdocs to join my lab at the University of Pittsburgh in Fall 2027. Anyone excited about urban evolution, hummingbirds, & community engagement, please reach out! And/or find me at #AOS2026 this week! More info here: www.valentina-alaasam.com

Most-recent common ancestor of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease was about 60,000 years ago, well before there were people in the Americas. I don't think the chipmunks were doing gain-of-function experiments. Figure 3 from Walter et al. (2017): doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Phylogeny (i.e., inferred evolutionary tree) of the spirochete bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

Dated phylogeny of B. burgdorferi in North America. MCC tree of
the best-fitting model inferred with BEAST (relaxed log-normal molecular clock model; Bayesian skyline population size). Tips are coloured by sampling region. Evidence of ancient midwestern ancestry (the oldest internal node in each clade with support for ancestral location in the midwest) is labelled ‘MW’. Branch lengths are in years bp. Blue bars at each interior node represent 95% credible intervals of estimated node age. Branches are labelled with posterior probability values (not shown for shallow nodes for clarity).
Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 3d ago

RFK told Dana Bash that Lyme disease “almost certainly” came from gain of function research. Which is utterly false. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...

I’m astonished by the ability of my fellow humans to forget the events we all just lived through. Folks remember the masks and the remote school. The million US dead are rarely mentioned. Folks, we lived through a plague.

I absolutely hated the world in 2020 where schools and nurseries were closed (christ, i was stuck at home with postpartum depression, a newborn and a 2yo) but I dont accept to be told by antivaxxers that experts that made those decisions did it with a light heart or for any reason but public safety.

🎉Some great news Congress appropriated $600M for Gavi, the organization that funds vaccines for half the world’s kids But the anti-vaxx activist RFK Jr froze the money—which would have caused an estimated 600,000 child deaths The State Dept will now over-ride RFK Jr & give Gavi the money 👏 1/2

From the abstract: “promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions”

Physgal ⚛️@physgal.bsky.social · last wk.

Fascinating paper on the progression of women in academia. 👩🏻‍🔬 ⚛️ 🧪 #AcademicSky docs.iza.org/dp18477.pdf?... Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

When women do obtain tenure, the effects extend well beyond their own careers. Beyond the direct promotion of the qualifying candidate, departments experience on average one additional female promotion over the subsequent fifteen years, a substantial expansion of the female PhD pipeline, and improved retention and career progression among female doctoral graduates. These effects are concentrated in departments where women are underrepresented, but not entirely absent, suggesting that a minimal female presence is a precondition for trickle-down effects to materialize, whether through mutual support, departmental influence, or other channels that require women not to be entirely isolated.

Short-sighted, stupid cuts to the UKRI budget include shutting down Jodrell Bank, the icon of British astronomy. (Many other cuts too, including 20% to our brand new @vrubinobs.bsky.social). Interesting politically to shut down a major facility in...um..Manchester 🔭 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands

Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.

bbc.co.uk