#SCIENCE

[kafkasapartment]

Gartered Trogon (Trogon caligatus), also known as the northern violaceous trogon: from Mexico throughout Central America and into northern South America, including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru & Venezuela. Takes a mix of fruits and a variety of insects.

[the-wolf-and-moon]

UGC 12591, Portal To Another World

[herpsandbirds]

[typhlonectes]

Ancient Shell-Less Turtle Species Identified From 228-Million-Year-Old Triassic Era Fossil

Eorhynchochelys

(2018)

Scientists have discovered remains of a rare kind of turtle, one that lived over 228 million years ago in the Triassic era and had no shell – the most common feature of present-day turtles. The nearly complete skeleton of the ancient turtle was found by researchers from China's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in the Asian country’s Guizhou province. The animal had a toothless beak and Frisbee-shaped body just like present-day turtles, but there were no signs of growing bones that form the shell. Modern turtles use the feature to enclose their vital organs, including the head in some cases, and protect themselves "This creature was over six feet long, it had a strange disc-like body and a long tail, and the anterior part of its jaws developed into this strange beak," Olivier Rieppel, one of the researchers involved in the work, said in a statement. "It probably lived in shallow water and dug in the mud for food." As no such turtle has been described in the books of science, the animal has been classified as a completely new species. It has been named Eorhynchochelys sinensis, which means the ‘Dawn turtle with a beak from China’...

Read more: Ancient Shell-Less Turtle Species Identified From 228-Million-Year-Old Triassic Era Fossil | IBTimes

[mayajadeart]

Fucking, thank god for grad students. Grad students are truly the GOAT of science. A lot of scientific research is limited by what kinds of research can produce results that might be profitable for businesses, including the journals that publish that research in the first place. But grad students? They're not trying to make money for anyone, they're trying to prove themselves as scientists before entering the professional world. The only thing a master's or doctorate thesis is supposed to do is prove to your university that you have mastered your craft and are capable of producing research that meets the standards of the scientific community. The only job that a graduate student has when producing that thesis is to do good research that has never been done before. They're just about the only scientists whose sole prerogative is to look where no one else has looked to answer questions that no one else has, possibly because no one else has even asked them yet, and to compile their results, whatever they are, for the pure sake of knowledge itself.

I'm not a scientist, I'm just someone who does scientific research in my free time because I'm deranged enough to think it's genuinely fun, and because a lot of the art I do is scientifically informed. But because I'm doing this research for art rather than a more "practical" application, a lot of the times the reasons why I want to know something are completely different from the reasons why these topics are actually studied. I don't want to know how to create synthetic equivalents of Feline Facial Pheromone F3, whose function we already know, in order to reduce stress and prevent undesirable behavior in pet cats in new homes and vet clinics, I want an analysis of the components that make up Feline Facial Pheromones F1 and F5, whose functions we don't know, in order to start building hypotheses about what those functions might be, so that I can figure out how catgirls would perceive these pheromones and theorize how they might talk about them in their native languages. But nobody's gonna pay me to do that, are they?

And let me tell you, sometimes the only people who seem interested in the kinds of bizarre and esoteric questions that an artist like me will have are grad students publishing theses. I still haven't found anyone trying to figure out what FFP F1 or F5 are used for, but I have found:

A full, comprehensive description of the complete phonology and grammar of the Lushootseed language and its dialects, spoken by several Coast Salish tribes of the Puget Sound region, published by Ted Kye in 2023 for his doctoral thesis at the University of Washington. Lushootseed is the source of many words from the region, including hugely important place names like Snoqualmie, Muckleshoot, Puyallup, Snohomish, Sammamish, Duwamish, Mukilteo, Shilshole, and of course, Seattle, but the language itself is extinct, with its last native speaker, Vi Hilbert, dying in 2008. There are, however, efforts to revive the language, and that would be significantly more difficult without Ted Kye's work. I think we can all see why this kind of thing is valuable.

And, this second one is a bit more esoteric but hear me out:

The discovery that a popular ornamental aquarium fish might actually have been sequentially hermaphroditic this whole time, which was practically a footnote in a 2016 thesis by Lia Gomes and Silva Henriques from the University of Porto, in Portugal. The fish in question is the red-tailed shark, Epalzeorhynchos bicolor, which is not an actual shark, but a member of the carp family that just happens to look like a shark, and two very important things to note about it are that it is critically endangered in the wild, and in fact was thought to be totally extinct in the wild until one was found in 2014, and that they are also practically impossible to breed in captivity. The primary threat to the species is considered to be habitat destruction. The quite substantial supply of this species in the pet trade today all come from fish farms in Southeast Asia, which use hormones to induce reproduction in the species, through processes that are kept as trade secrets and are essentially unknown to the scientific community. So, we have literally no idea how this fish breeds, which means that hobbyists can't breed it themselves, and scientists don't know what conditions they even need in order to breed in the wild. This one paper, written by students in Portugal who attempted to induce gonadal maturation in the species using hormone injections, is perhaps one of the only clues we have on the path to saving this species, and it hints at a conclusion that could have HUGE implications for the husbandry, captive breeding, and survival in the wild of the red-tailed shark: all of the individuals that were dissected without having undergone hormone injections were immature females, and immature males only started appearing in groups that had been injected, suggesting that all individuals of the species might start out as females, and then at some point in their development, certain individuals, for unknown reasons, may develop into males instead, making them sequential hermaphrodites. This isn't unknown in fish (clownfish do something similar, except they all start out as males and become female when they achieve dominance in their social group), but it was completely unexpected in this species, and could go a long way in starting to explain the difficulties with breeding them and potentially be a step on the path to learning how to breed them in captivity, as well as saving them in the wild.

Unfortunately, in the latter case, I wasn't able to find any other published work by either of the listed authors, and no one else seems to have repeated the experiment. This is a real shame, because the results of the experiments, while very intriguing, weren't conclusive; they had a fairly low sample size, and would need to be confirmed by further research. But there's no indication of that research being done, and I might be the only one other than the university's board of reviewers who's even read the thing.

All this is to say, fish testicles are interesting and I'm begging someone to do more research on them, please.

[headspace-hotel]

trying to understand fungus sexes

it's not going well

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Honestly bizarre that tomatoes get all the flack for “not being a vegetable” because they're technically a fruit when:

A) There are a ton of fruits that get categorised as vegetables. Like this also applies to pumpkins, squashes and cucumbers.

B) The fucking mushrooms are standing there at the back of the crowd in this witch trial, trying to look inconspicuous because they somehow got into the vegetable club with no fucking controversy despite the fact that they're not even plants.

[copperbadge]

I don't normally post photos or talk about the protest actions I participate in, but I was at the Chicago Stand Up For Science rally on behalf of my job recently and this sign took me out at the knees.

[m0untaingiraffe]

The neverending slog of citations and searching for sources to back things up makes me Very Mad, so I am always in favour of more research

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

[kafkasapartment]

He is particularly critical of how economists treat environmental damage as “externalities”—costs not included in economic calculations—which leads to the undervaluation of nature’s essential services like clean air, water, and biodiversity. In much of the literature on this subject, water, air quality are part of the “commons” that we all consume and have a fundamental right to access since no human or other life can survive without them. That right to the fundamental physical commons supersedes any manmade economic systems.

[myjetpack]

my latest cartoon for New Scientist.

[the-wolf-and-moon]

Jupiter, Clouds of the Abyss

[herpsandbirds]

[the-wolf-and-moon]

NGC 3521, Stardust

[thrivingisthegoal]

STARTING TOMORROW

Scientists in weather and climate are live streaming for 100 hours to make their case to the American public.

They are live streaming, but engagement is necessary for it to work. SHARE THIS WITH PEOPLE, RECORD THE STREAM, POST CLIPS OF IT THAT ARE FUNNY, if you can tune in, PLEASE DO!

This is something that has to be heard by as many people as possible. Put it on in the background! See if you can get other people to watch it! Do whatever you can do support those who are trying to be supported! Anything and everything helps!

TUNE IN HERE

article I posted screenshots of here