#t: reconstructing more science

[vgtrackbracket]

Video Game Track Bracket Round 3

Reconstructing More Science from Portal 2

vs.

War Without Reason from Ultrakill

Propaganda under the cut. If you want your propaganda reblogged and added to future polls, please tag it as propaganda or otherwise indicate this!

War Without Reason:

Best alsrm sequence in any videogame ever

[bumpkinspice0]

Office Hours

Logan Howlett/ Wolverine x Mutant!FemReader

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 3.8k

Summary: A few months into working back at the mansion and Logan still can't keep his hands off you. A/N: This is vaguely tied to my other Logan fic "No One Knows…" but not at all required reading. All you need to really know is reader is a returning X-Man that can control Earth/ rocks and is codenamed Dozer (Short for Bulldozer) Warnings: S M U T, medium plot??? but mostly just porn, established relationship, under desk blowjobs, office sex, light dom/ sub, a single spank possessive Logan (Someone needs to put me down)

AO3 if you prefer to read there

Logan Masterlist

_______

The morning light pours in through the windows of your bedroom. Logan holds you close against him in bed while you, less than enthusiastically, try to squirm out of his grasp.

A few months back into your old life at X-mansion and you can confidently say it was the best decision you’d ever made in a long, long time. All the kids returned to a brand new environmental science teacher and a newly reconstructed mansion that somehow looked almost exactly the same— give or take a few changes to the gardens.

You’d missed this, you missed being part of the X team, whether it was as an X-Man or just a teacher. For the first time in a long time, you felt like you were making a real tangible difference in people's lives. 

Yes, you desperately wanted to return to your roots and start over— but he was also a nice perk to all the chaos. 

Your relationship with Logan was just as new as your employment in Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. He reeled you in like a fish on a hook. Whatever the two of you had, it was nice. You think it had been a long time since he had something like this too. Someone to care for. Someone to please. 

Neither of you could keep your hands off each other. 

It was too early for ‘I love you’s’ or to declare something like moving in together, but he already spent most nights in your room as it was. If he didn’t spend the night he’d find you in the early morning just to hear you moan his name. That boy was determined never to let you sleep— not that you’re really complaining.

You’d never had a lover like Logan. Someone so… starved. He craved your touch, rambled on about your scent, and held you on the edge for what felt like hours. It was all new and some parts of it, admittedly, a little weird, but fuck was it exciting. 

You’d started a new life for yourself, more or less. Started over, more accurately. And he was there to soften all the blows. You hope you did the same for him. 

You can’t believe you thought he ever had ulterior motives about you when you came back. Once you found out you both had more similar pasts than you’d realized, you were sure the only thing he'd want was information from you. How glad you were to be wrong. 

Victims of the same cruelty but you were both different. You still had your memories. Your identity. He didn't. 

You vowed to help find out who he was, and that seemed to mean more to him than anything— but it was a slow process. Old information and long abandoned facilities. Still, you had each other through all of this and that helped the pain, just a little. Facing your demons together. 

Right now, however, Logan was your only tangible demon. He still had you trapped in bed and late for class. 

“Just a quickie,” he purrs, nibbling at your ear.  

“I have a class to teach in 20 minutes. You should have gotten here earlier,” You muster up any strength you have against him, “And it’s never quick with you.”

“Or you just don’t want it to be quick,” His mouth finds your bare shoulder, already marked with week's worth of love bites from him. You can’t deny the trill of excitement it sends through you.

This fucking man. 

You want to. Lord in heaven, you really, really want to. Sometimes this being a responsible mentor thing got in the way.

“Logan…” You push lightly against his chest. It’s not much of a protest, really. None of your weak-willed squirming was.

“Okay… okay,” His grip around your waist finally loosens and you reluctantly get out of bed. He gives your ass a playful spank as you do. 

“You’re insatiable, you know that?” You scold him with a smile as you dig through your dresser for anything that was clean. 

“Got a good reason to be,” He grins, resting his arms behind his head and stretching out over the bed. You can’t help the blush that creeps into your cheeks. Logan never missed an opportunity to compliment you. 

You, a little reluctantly, pull on a pair of jeans and one of his white shirts. Slowly but surely all your laundry was getting intermingled to the point of no return. That and you know he always liked when you wore something of his. You don’t think any of your own tee-shirts were clean anyway.

Yeah, it’s probably time to do laundry. 

You top it off with a loose black cardigan to seem somewhat teacherly. You gather your folders with today’s syllabus. You had three classes today. Logan usually had two— if you could you really call PE and survival basics a class. The kids usually just roped him and Kurt into playing flag football with them. It was adorable in its own Logany way.

“I’ll see you out there, Professor Logan,” you give him a peck on the forehead before shimming on your shoes. 

“God, don’t ever call me that again.” He chuckles, covering his face with his forearm.

“Would you prefer daddy?”

His hand immediately drops, “Don’t tempt me, darlin’.”

You’re at the door now, giving yourself one last moment to admire the perfect man sprawled out in your bed.

“Don’t sleep in too late,” you open the door. 

“See you out there, toots.”

______

There are only a few more warm days left in fall and you refuse to let them go to waste. You always liked holding classes outside anyway. This was Environmental Science after all. As an earthmover, it always felt natural. Feeling the actual ground under your feet made everything easier to teach in a way. 

You’re teaching the different types of erosion this week. The class is gathered on the grass on the edge of the pond as you hover different rocks around them. Examples of river-smoothed stones, bed clay, and a few from the Grand Canyon you’d brought in from your personal collection. 

You’d never thought of yourself as the best teacher but the kids seemed to at least enjoy the theatricality. You knew dirt. You knew the earth, and that seemed to be enough.

You hear the PE class run out onto the other side of the lawn, Logan dutifully following behind them. You don’t even need to look to feel his eyes on you. You're not sure if you're irritated by the distraction or think it’s a little cute he wants to be near you.

Well, if he’s going to distract you and your class, you might as well distract him. The kids had started a game of frisbee golf, something his full attention didn’t need to be on anyway.  Logan always joked he was just a glorified babysitter. You take off your cardigan when you feel a small gust of wind. His head immediately snaps your direction when you do. 

He’d told you before he liked the mix of your scents. The more animalistic part of him liked it anyway. He always seemed ashamed of it, despite your insistence you didn’t care. You could never truly understand, sure, but that didn’t change your feelings for him. Besides, you didn’t mind feeding the animal every once in a while. 

You’d reached the end of your class period and quickly dismissed your students, reminding them of the homework as they scurried back into the mansion. You remain outside, cleaning up the small mess your lesson had made. 

You still feel Logan’s eyes on you. You can’t help the excitement his gaze stirs in you. Logan did something to you no other man had ever done— he made you feel desirable in ways you’d never experienced. 

It was an incredible turn-on, to say the least.

You feel your panties slowly start to wetten. You see a shift in his posture in the distance. You smile, bending over to pick up the loose papers you’d left on a nearby bench. You pause there far longer than you needed to— just a small tease but you know it’s something that’ll drive you crazy. He always said he liked you in these jeans the most.

You feel his eyes burning into your back the entire walk to the mansion. You can’t help but smile.

______

You're leaning against the front of your desk, looking over tomorrow's lesson, when you hear his signature booming steps hurrying down the hallway. It’d been an hour since your last class ended. He enters the office, closing the door behind him immediately. 

“Professor Logan,” You greet him teasingly, leaning back against the desk. 

He says nothing as he stalks towards you with heavy steps, crashing his mouth into yours. You pull him in as he inserts his body between your legs. His mouth is hungry against yours— desperate even. His lips trail down to your jaw.

“You think you’re cute, huh? Prancing around in my clothes, showing off your ass, gettin’—”

“I’m very cute,” you giggle as he nips at you.

He growls, pulling you up to lead you back to the desk chair. He liked it when you sat on his lap. It was both of your lunch breaks. You’d always spend them together, though usually not in your shared office.

Charles required everyone to have office hours, even Logan. He fought it every step of the way until he finally relented to just sharing yours. He was almost never here. He didn’t have a reason to be— well unless you were there. His desk sits across from yours just as bare as the day it was put in. Yours, on the other hand, was quickly cluttering as the school year went on.

“Still worked up from this morning,” Logan admits as he nips at your lip, “Need you, sweet thing.”

Absolutely insatiable.

“Poor boy,” You tease, your hands slowly trailing down to his obnoxious belt buckle. “I’ll take care of you.”

You always liked to tease him more than you’d care to admit. He’d get so worked up over the smallest things. You were always happy to indulge him… every fucking time. 

You sink down to your knees, pulling his jeans with you. His cock bulges out against his boxers, already hard and waiting. You palm at him, giving him a rough squeeze through the fabric. He hums in approval. God, he always felt so good.

There’s almost a sigh of relief when you pull him free. You give him a few rough strokes before your tongue follows, trailing up from his base and swirling around his tip, pre cum already leaking free. His rough hands grip your hair as you lavish his cock with your tongue. 

You pause at the tip, placing a single feather light kiss before taking him completely into your mouth. He chokes out a strangled moan, doing his best to stay quiet. Luckily, the walls of the mansion were thick. 

The grip in your hair tightens as you find a rhythm. 

“T-that's it,” his voice is shaky, dripping with pleasure, “Just like that. Good girl.”

He always praised you. Whether giving or receiving, he always made sure you felt seen. 

A part of this excited you so much. It was scandalous, having him splayed out like this at your work desk, doing your best to suppress the moans that brew in your throat from the thrill of it all. You loved making him fall apart. This was just as much for him as it was for you. You were both having fun. Both acting like giddy, horny, little teenagers. 

His grip in your hair shifts, and you feel him tense under you. He can’t be close already? Before you have time to ask what’s going on you’re being shoved underneath your own desk. You want to scream what the absolute fuck?! before you hear the office door being clicked open.

“Logan?” It's Scott’s voice. 

“What?” Logan bites out, leaning over the front of the desk to conceale you completely. Thank god Charles always insisted on these massive solid oak desks.

“I’m just— You’re sitting at Dozer’s desk,” Scott stammers out. 

“Had something I needed,” he quickly lied. 

You’re cramped into a wooden box basically, one of the walls being made out of thick muscled legs with a heavy cock still hanging between them. You were playing a game with Logan, might as well make it more interesting. 

“Have you seen her?” Scott asks, “I needed—”

“No.” Logan only grits out, “She’s probably down in the—”

He cuts himself off the moment your hand grasps his cock again. You can’t help but smile when you run your tongue back up the velvet length. He can’t move his arms because that would expose you. He can’t move his legs because there’s not enough room with you between them. He’s stuck here while you torture him in the sweetest way possible. You don’t miss the way his cock jumps when you take him back into your mouth. 

“She’s where Logan?” Scott, blissfully unaware, prompts him.

“I don’t— I don’t fucking know,” You swear you can almost feel him shaking with the effort to keep his voice steady, “Why don’t you go fucking look for her then, huh?”

There isn’t as much room to move your head as you’d like, so you let your tongue and hands do most of the work. 

“Well, can I just get on her computer?” You hear Scott take a step closer. Oh no, “I just need a—”

“Piss off, Summers!” He practically growls it out. “You need her then go fucking find her.”

You hear Scott scoff as he takes a step back. To be fair, this was completely in character for the two of them. It was doubtful Scott suspected anything. You reach up and give Logan’s balls a gentle fondle while you worship his tip with your tongue as silently as you can.

Finally, you hear Scott retreat to the hallway. 

“I don’t know why she’s with you, Logan. I really don’t.” He spits before slamming the door behind him. 

Logan doesn’t waste a second once the door is closed again, pushing the chair back and grabbing your face roughly. His cock falls from your mouth with a wanton gasp. You must look like a mess but can’t bring yourself to care.

He just holds you there for a moment, your mouth just inches away from his cock. His eyes have glossed over with lust. He loved this, you know he fucking loved this because you did too. 

“You’re trouble,” he says, pulling you both to standing, “You’re so much fucking trouble.”

He turns you around and bends you over the desk immediately, a few pencil cups shaking with the force. He yanks down your jeans a little rougher than you’d like but you still kick them off the rest of the way. Your underwear still remained in place. He kicks your legs wider and trails a hand up your back, pressing his palm down between your shoulders. His other hand drips between your legs, a finger rubbing over your clothed pussy.

“Fucking soaked through already?” he purrs. “You get wet sucking my cock, baby?”

��Yes.” It practically comes out as a plea. Well, it’s only fair he’s toying with you now. Your legs are almost shaking in anticipation. 

You squirm as he starts to rub the damp fabric directly over your clit. His hand on your back presses you down harder, pinning you in place. He’s doing what you did to him— in his own way. Trapped at his mercy. 

He pushes your underwear to the side, two fingers running through your slick folds a few times before delving in. You bite your lip to suppress a moan, barely successful in silencing yourself. He curls his fingers, back and forth as he works his hand up and down. Anyone could walk in that door at any moment. Logan would stop if he heard anyone coming again—right?

“You know what you do to me?” His voice is ragged, almost pained, “Fuck, do you have any idea?”

His pace is speeding up and your restraint is slipping, but there’s nothing you can do to get out of this. And, fuck you don’t want him to stop either. You’re completely his right now. 

You finally let out a wail when rips his hand out of your cunt and slaps it across your ass. His touch stays there, gripping the stinging skin, sharp pain quickly melting to the pleasure that was racking your whole body. He takes his other hand off your back. You don’t move, your stomach stirring in anticipation.

It feels better than it should when his hard, massive cock runs over your soaked pussy. He’d dialed up all of your nerves to eleven. You involuntarily ach back into him like a fucking bitch in heat.

“Oh Christ, why are you with me…” he lines himself up, “That’s what Summers said, right? He doesn’t know why you’re with me?”

“Logan—” You attempt to speak up before the air in your lungs vanishes when he thrusts inside of you in one jarring motion. He stays there a good moment, grinding his hips into your ass, gathering himself. God, he was so fucking deep. He draws out and slams back in again. You hear the desk creaking in protest this time, several items falling off. 

He leans over you, hot tongue trailing up your spine before nuzzling his face in next to your ear. 

“I know why,” He starts to roll his hips against yours. His imposing body and magic dick were taking over every sense you had. God, you wish you could scream. “It’s because you know no one else can fuck you like I can. Can take care of you like I can.”

He nips at your ear as he finds a pace, tiny low grunts escaping in rhythm with his hips. This was just as much about dominating you as it was about being as close to you as humanly possible. Mixing your scents and desires together until the line is blurred between the two. Yes, Logan fucked you unlike anyone else had, and your certain better than anyone else ever could, but he also loved you harder than you ever knew possible. 

Loyal to a fault. It’s instincts, he always said. You always hated when he compared himself to an animal, but in a lot of ways it's just part of who he was. He seemed past trying to deny it and embrace it in his own way. Let the beast free, so to speak. 

“Tell me,” He growls into your ear, “Tell me who makes you feel this good.”

You struggled to form the single-word answer, but it eventually came out, whined and shaky. 

“Y-y-you,” you swear you’re drooling, “O-only you, b-baby. O-only—” You trail off, likely losing all brain function to the intoxicating filth of it all. 

“That’s right. T-that’s right,” he chants a few times like he’s fucking praising himself for it, “Only me. You’re all mine. I’m all yours.”

You’re not sure if it’s a gasp of surprise or pain that escapes you when he lifts you both. He holds you against him, still fucking you while you’re both standing. You’re forced to stand on your tiptoes, your hands grasping onto the forearm around your chest for any sense of balance. You weighed nothing to him. He’s still fucking you senseless. He’s holding you both up and still fucking you senseless.

You swear you go blind when his other hand snakes down to your clit. 

“Shoulda stayed in bed this morning,” His stubble rubs against your cheek, “Wouldn’t have to fuck you like this if we— shit— if we had time this morning.”

“L–Logan, I–I—” You start to warn him but can’t manage to get it all out. Nevertheless, you’re sure he knows. He always knows when you’re close. You feel it, the mounting pressure at your core. Sweet, precious relief. 

“I know, baby. I know.” 

It hits you like a train, hard and almost completely by surprise. The hand around your chest immediately comes up to clamp around your mouth. You scream against his palm while he keeps fucking you through your orgasm, practically using you like a goddamn sex toy at this point. 

He mutters out a string of curses while he attempts to maintain his equilibrium— and eventually fails. He collapses back into the chair behind him, dragging you with him. He almost slips out. Almost. He holds you close against his chest, hips completely still against your ass as he pulses rope after rope into you.

“Good girl, good girl,” you hear him muttering into your neck like a prayer. 

Your haggard moans into his hand eventually fade into one long heavy sigh, finally allowing yourself to relax against him. You feel his body unwind as well, his previously firm hand over your mouth coming to stroke your cheek. His lips lull around your neck, placing sloppy kiss after sloppy kiss wherever he could reach. He was always so gentle after sex. Those hands that were so rough just a moment ago gently glide over your skin. You always find comfort in their heft. 

“Do you think anyone heard us?” you finally ask, leaning your head back against his. 

“Fuck ‘em if they did,” he nuzzles himself right under your jaw. Close— he always had to be so close. 

“Charles is gonna fire us if he ever finds out,” you bring your hands up to your face, rubbing into your eyes just a little too hard.

“You can’t fire an X-Man.”

“Teachers, Logan, we’re teachers.” Ah good, the mortification was settling in just in time to ruin the moment. Fabulous. 

“Stop it,” you swear you can hear the smile in his voice. 

“He’s gonna read our minds and see what absolute animals we are and he’s gonna fire us.” The irony that you're saying this out loud while Logan is still fully inside you in your shared office is not lost on you. You feel his chest bouncing against your back, chuckling lightly at your dismay of your surely oncoming termination. You can’t help but laugh along with him, just a little. 

You eventually untangle your bodies and fish your pants off the floor. Maybe you had time for a shower before your next class. Christ, you need one. Logan wasn’t the only mutant with advanced senses in the school and the last thing you need is teenagers starting a rumor mill about two teachers fucking in their office. Still, when you look back at Logan you know you’d do it all over again regardless.

Whatever this was with him, whatever you’d started, you know you can’t stop it. The thought should terrify you, but for once you’re not afraid.

You reach out and grab his hand, “Wanna grab lunch?”

“Thought you’d never ask, darlin’.”

[saffusthings]

second chances

mob boss! lando norris x reader

part seventeen: dream a little dream of me

word count: 1.6k

warnings: tooth-rotting fluff

sixteen | seventeen | eighteen

The second date should’ve felt more awkward. It didn’t.

Alex had picked a science museum of all places—not exactly romantic on paper, but the look on his face when he pointed out the replica Mars rover was too earnest to judge. He had this habit where his whole face would light up like a lightbulb the moment before he got excited about something, and Y/N had already learned to clock it like a warning siren.

“So, technically,” he was saying, hands jammed in his jacket pockets as they strolled past a massive display on deep-sea robotics, “the algorithms used for this submersible’s sensor mapping were adapted from AI software developed for self-driving cars.”

“Technically,” she echoed, teasing, “you should probably just work here.”

He looked sideways at her with a crooked grin. “I applied when I was sixteen. They didn’t take me.”

“They’re clearly still recovering from that mistake.”

He tried to play it off cool, but she caught the slight flush of his ears.

She liked him more than she expected to. Not in the way you decide to like someone—more like how you step outside one day and realize the air smells like rain and suddenly, you’re soft and open and all the windows are down. He was like that: unexpected and quiet and warm around the edges.

They made their way through the rest of the exhibits in no particular order, weaving between dwindling crowds of families and groups of students on field trips, neither of them in a hurry. He let her take her time at the forensic anthropology section, where she ran her fingers along the raised edges of a reconstructed skull, and she let him lose himself in the physics wing, where he explained, with ridiculous enthusiasm, why the double pendulum was so cool. It was there that the nickname Professor Albon was born.

At some point, he took her hand. It wasn’t a big deal. He just did it naturally, without hesitation, like it had already been a habit, and for a moment, that simple touch made her feel warm all over.

They ended the night sitting cross-legged on the floor of the museum café, long after it closed, surrounded by vending machine snacks and a half-solved crossword puzzle she’d found in her bag. The overhead lights buzzed faintly, casting a dim glow over the abandoned chairs and tables, but neither of them seemed eager to move. They laughed about everything and nothing, the kind of laughing that came from being tired but happy, the kind that made her lean into his shoulder without thinking.

"Okay," Alex said, tapping the eraser end of his pencil against the page. "Eight-letter word for ‘illuminates or clarifies’?"

As she took a moment to think it over, Alex watched in his periphery as she counted off the letters of her word on her fingers. "’Explains’ fits," she mused, popping a purple skittle into her mouth.

"Hmm." He scribbled it in. "Not bad. Maybe I should keep you around."

"Yeah, yeah," she nudged his knee with hers, grinning. "You just like me for my crossword skills."

"Wrong. I like you for your crossword skills and your terrible puns."

“My puns are great, thank you very much.” She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

He liked her brain. She liked how funny he was. They made a good pair—two academically overworked people who laughed at obscure engineering memes and played footsie under café tables without meaning to. When they said goodbye that night, he kissed her like he was trying not to smile through it. Like maybe this could really be something.

It felt easy.

And in the days that followed, it stayed easy. He texted her every night.

alex: Made the Mars rover jealous. Can’t stop thinking about you.

Y/N: did you just say that unironically. because I might have to stop seeing you on principle.

alex: Too late, I’ve already added you to my will. You get the Lego Technic collection.

Y/N: wait nvm i’m back in

They made time. Even when they both shouldn’t have.

He’d bring her coffee before her class–something with cinnamon and oat milk in it. He’d scrawl dumb physics jokes on the lid just to make her roll her eyes. She started keeping his schedule in her head without meaning to. She knew which nights he had his advanced systems class and which ones he spent buried in the lab. He’d text her when his simulations crashed at 3AM. She’d send him memes about courtroom drama tropes in return.

He had an engineer’s sense of humor—dry, sneaky, often deeply specific. It took a while to catch on, but once she did, it felt like discovering hidden easter eggs in his sentences.

“You know,” he’d murmur as they lay back in the grass near campus, watching clouds roll over like they weren’t chilly out here in the autumn breeze, “you statistically reduce your lifespan by two minutes every time you eat instant ramen.”

“Cool. So I’ll be dying a noble, sodium-rich death then.”

He turned his head toward her, smiling with closed eyes. “Hmm, a martyr.”

“A hero.”

“Buried with your books and MSG packets.”

She shoved his shoulder. He let her.

On Thursdays, she’d sit outside his lab, cross-legged on the cold tile floor with flashcards in her lap, quizzing him on his presentation slides about failure analysis and impact resistance.

“Okay, explain to me like I’m five—what is a stress-strain curve and why should I care?”

“Because,” he’d say, crouching in front of her with a smirk, “it tells you how close something is to breaking.”

“And that’s relevant to your research…?”

He gave her a confused look, until it turned sheepish as he scratched the back of his neck. “I’m… not entirely sure about that bit, actually.”

She started looking forward to the moments in between—the walks across campus, the shared bag of chips while sitting on the hood of her car, the ridiculous voice memos he sent when he was overtired and delirious.

They kissed in stairwells and library corners and once,perhaps ill-advisedly, on a park bench in the middle of a thunderstorm. The rain had soaked through their clothes, cold and unrelenting, but he had just looked at her and said, "I think we should be stupid about this," right before he leaned in. It was impulsive and dramatic and made her laugh until she had to cover her mouth, their faces inches apart. Her hair was soaked, his glasses fogged up, and they almost dropped his backpack in a puddle, but the moment stuck—sharp and golden and untouchable.

They talked about future dates like there’d be dozens of them—bookstores they wanted to browse together, a tiny Thai place he swore by, a stargazing night he promised would be “scientifically optimized for romance” depending on the cloud cover. She rolled her eyes at that one, but her heart still fluttered.

They were still in the sweet spot—the space between maybe and more, where everything felt bright and possible. 

It wasn’t perfect – but it was promising.

The third date was dinner—some hole-in-the-wall Thai place with flickering neon signage and laminated menus stained with old curry thumbprints. He’d gotten lost on the way and sent a flurry of frantic texts.

alex :) : I passed the restaurant. Twice. There’s a cat staring at me through a laundromat window. I think it’s judging me.

Y/N: be strong. you can beat the cat.

alex :) : Negative, Sargeant. It’s very confident.

He’d arrived breathless, slightly damp from a drizzle, and holding a single packet of Skittles “for your efforts,” he’d said solemnly. She called him an idiot. He looked delighted.

That night, they talked about things that didn’t matter—TV shows neither of them had finished, foods they pretended to like for the aesthetic, the sheer horror of Alex’s undergraduate group project from hell (“We had a guy who thought duct tape was a structural solution”). 

And then, slowly, they talked about the things that did matter.

Like how she used to want to be a journalist when she was little, because she thought it meant you got to ask as many questions as you wanted and never had to apologize.

Or how he still wasn’t sure what kind of engineer he wanted to be—just that he wanted to make things that didn’t break when people needed them most.

“You know,” he said, nudging his glass in slow circles across the table, “you’re not what I expected.”

Y/N looked up. “Is that a good thing or, like, a 'you’re secretly a serial killer' kind of a thing?”

He smiled. “It’s a good thing. Really, really good.”

By the fourth week, they had a rhythm. It wasn’t just dates anymore—it was Hey, want to walk home together? and I saved you the last chocolate chip muffin, but only because I like you more than I like muffins. But barely.

It was him reaching for her hand without thinking, her resting her head against his shoulder on the bus when she was too tired to hold it up.

It was a shared Spotify playlist for when studying is ur 13th reason.

It was early Saturday morning sun filtering into her apartment while they quietly read their own books, his socked foot nudging hers on the side of the couch almost every ten minutes.

It was good.

But between the sleepy smiles and the shared muffins and the texts that kept getting longer instead of shorter, the truth was that they both had dreams. Big ones. All-consuming ones.

And no matter how much you wanted something—or someone—there were only so many hours in the day.

a/n: one of my more favorite chapters! an unfortunate lack of lando though :/ what did you think of it?

[literaryvein-reblogs]

I want to write a fanfic that of a transfem headcanon, but it's hard to show how the person struggles with gender dysphoria & envy towards his cis female gfs beyond being jealous of how they look.

Writing Notes: Gender Dysphoria in Transfeminine People

DEFINITIONS

GENDER DYSPHORIA: A concept designated in the DSM-5-TR as clinically significant distress or impairment related to gender incongruence, which may include desire to change primary and/or secondary sex characteristics. Not all transgender or gender diverse people experience gender dysphoria.

GENDER PRONOUN: The pronoun a person chooses to use for themselves.

Examples. Gender pronouns can look like and are not limited to:

he/him/his (masculine pronouns)

she/her/hers (feminine pronouns)

they/them/theirs (neutral pronouns)

ze/zir/zirs (neutral pronouns)

ze/hir/hirs (neutral pronouns)

It is important to ask people what their pronouns are. If you have questions, politely ask the person if they feel comfortable giving examples of how to use those pronouns.

TRANSFEMININE: (also trans-feminine or trans feminine, sometimes abbreviated to transfem or transfemme) A gender identity. It is typically used by people who are assigned male at birth (AMAB) but identify more with a feminine gender expression than a masculine one. To be transfemme means that you identify with femininity, but you don't necessarily identify as a woman.

When a person expresses femininity outwardly, there is no one correct way to do this.

TRANSGENDER: An umbrella term describing individuals whose gender identity does not align in a traditional sense with the gender they were assigned at birth. It may also be used to refer to a person whose gender identity is binary and not traditionally associated with that assigned at birth.

While transgender is generally a good term to use, not everyone whose appearance or behavior is gender-nonconforming will identify as a transgender person. The ways that transgender people are talked about in popular culture, academia and science are constantly changing, particularly as individuals’ awareness, knowledge and openness about transgender people and their experiences grow.

People who are transgender may pursue multiple domains of gender affirmation, including:

social affirmation (e.g., changing one’s name and pronouns),

legal affirmation (e.g., changing gender markers on one’s government-issued documents),

medical affirmation (e.g., pubertal suppression or gender-affirming hormones), and/or

surgical affirmation (e.g., vaginoplasty, facial feminization surgery, breast augmentation, masculine chest reconstruction, etc.).

Of note, not all people who are transgender will desire all domains of gender affirmation, as these are highly personal and individual decisions.

GENDER AFFIRMING CARE

Some transfeminine people get gender affirming care, but some do not. It depends on what a person feels is right or helpful for them.

If a person does seek gender affirming care, the options may vary depending on their age. To begin with, they may include:

Social transitioning: This involves changes in behavior, from an individual and from others, to acknowledge and affirm that person’s gender. It could include telling family members about their gender, changing pronouns, trying a new name, or dressing differently.

Mental health support: Counselling may help a person cope with feelings of gender dysphoria, which is distress from a person’s identity not matching the sex assigned at birth. Counselors may also help a person tell others they are trans.

Voice therapy: This involves vocal training to help a person match their voice with their gender identity.

Appearance changes: This could include hair removal, padding the hips or bust, or tucking the genitals.

These interventions are reversible, and for some people, they feel happy with these options alone. Others may want to pursue medical transitioning, which can include:

Puberty blockers: This involves taking hormones to pause the changes in the body that would otherwise take place during puberty. A 2020 study shows these medications can significantly decrease the risk of suicidal ideation in trans people at risk of suicidal thoughts.

Cross-sex hormones: After undergoing hormone therapy, people may take cross-sex hormones. In transfeminine people, these medications may cause breast development.

Surgery: This may be an option during adulthood. It involves surgically modifying the body, such as reducing an Adam’s apple, breast augmentation, or procedures to feminize the face or hips. Some people may also choose surgery to remove male genitalia and create a vagina or clitoris.

A specialist can recommend the most appropriate gender affirming treatment for each person’s situation.

Gender-affirming care is highly individualized and focuses on the needs of each individual by including psychoeducation about gender and sexuality (appropriate to age and developmental level), parental and family support, social interventions, and gender-affirming medical interventions.

GENDER DYSPHORIA

Gender incongruence: A marked and persistent experience of incompatibility between a person's gender identity and the gender expected based on sex at birth.

Gender dysphoria: Discomfort or distress related to an incongruence between an individual's gender identity and the gender assigned at birth.

Gender incongruence & gender dysphoria symptoms in adults:

Most people with gender incongruence or gender dysphoria begin having symptoms or feeling different in early childhood, but some do not acknowledge these feelings until adulthood.

Some transgender people make choices at first that are consistent with their birth sex, such as doing a job that is typically associated with that sex or marrying a person with the gender expected by their society, as a way to escape or deny their feelings of wanting to be the other sex.

Some men may cross-dress first and not acknowledge their identification with the other sex until later in life.

Once people accept these feelings, many transition to their preferred gender, with or without hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery.

Others experience problems, such as anxiety, depression, and suicidal behavior. The stress of not being accepted by society and/or by family may cause or contribute to these problems.

Diagnosis. Doctors diagnose gender dysphoria when people (children or adults) do all of the following:

Feel that their anatomic sex does not match their gender identity and have felt that way for 6 months or longer

Feel greatly distressed or cannot function normally because of this feeling

To be diagnosed with gender dysphoria based on standard psychiatric criteria, adolescents and adults must also have 2 or more of the following symptoms:

A marked incongruence between one's experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)

A strong desire to be rid of their sex characteristics and, for young adolescents, to prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics (those that occur during puberty)

A strong desire for the sex characteristics that match their gender identity

A strong desire to be another gender

A strong desire to live or be treated as another gender

A strong belief that they feel and react like another gender

OTHER STRUGGLES EXPERIENCED

Transgender people often face serious discrimination and mistreatment at work, school, and in their families and communities.

For example, transgender people are more likely to:

Be fired or denied a job

Face harassment and bullying at school

Become homeless or live in extreme poverty

Be evicted or denied housing or access to a shelter

Be denied access to critical medical care

Be incarcerated or targeted by law enforcement

Face abuse and violence

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Here are some writing notes you can use as reference. "Symptoms" of gender dysphoria include some struggles that transfeminine people experience. Choose which ones (a mix of both internal and external experiences would be good) are appropriate for your specific character. Highlight the incongruence, dysphoria, and envy through internal monologue, dialogue, and their actions/choices throughout the story.

Additionally, "research demonstrates that gender-affirming care—a medical and psychosocial health care designed to affirm individuals' gender identities—greatly improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse, transgender, and nonbinary children and adolescents."* You can show this struggle in your character if they have a desire to seek such gender affirmations, but for certain reasons, aren't able to access the necessary interventions/options.

If possible, it would also be valuable to ask and listen to transfeminine people about their experience to better inform your work. Here's one research consisting of a series of focus groups on experiences, challenges and hopes of transgender and nonbinary U.S. adults.

Lastly, here's a previous post that includes an overview of The Transgender Emergence Model & The Stage Model on Transgender Identity Development, which you could consider as another guide in developing your character. (There are other models that you can also consider.)

You can go through the sources linked above for more details I wasn't able to include here. Hope this helps with your writing!

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Webb's autopsy of planet swallowed by star yields surprise

Observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb's observations show the planet's orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was engulfed in full.

"Because this is such a novel event, we didn't quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction," said Ryan Lau, lead author of the new paper and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab (National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) in Tucson, Arizona. "With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own."

Two instruments aboard Webb conducted the post-mortem of the scene—Webb's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). The researchers were able to come to their conclusion using a two-pronged investigative approach.

Constraining the how

The star at the center of this scene is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years away from Earth.

The brightening event, formally called ZTF SLRN-2020, was originally spotted as a flash of optical light using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. Data from NASA's NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) showed the star actually brightened in the infrared a year before the optical light flash, hinting at the presence of dust.

This initial 2023 investigation led researchers to believe that the star was more sun-like, and had been in the process of aging into a red giant over hundreds of thousands of years, slowly expanding as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.

However, Webb's MIRI told a different story. With powerful sensitivity and spatial resolution, Webb was able to precisely measure the hidden emission from the star and its immediate surroundings, which lie in a very crowded region of space. The researchers found the star was not as bright as it should have been if it had evolved into a red giant, indicating there was no swelling to engulf the planet as once thought.

Reconstructing the scene

Researchers suggest that, at one point, the planet was about Jupiter-sized, but orbited quite close to the star, even closer than Mercury's orbit around our sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer and closer to the star, leading to the catastrophic consequence.

"The planet eventually started to graze the star's atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment," said team member Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The planet, as it's falling in, started to sort of smear around the star."

In its final splashdown, the planet would have blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star. As it expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year.

Inspecting the leftovers

While the researchers did expect an expanding cloud of cooler dust around the star, a look with the powerful NIRSpec revealed a hot circumstellar disk of molecular gas closer in. Furthermore, Webb's high spectral resolution was able to detect certain molecules in this accretion disk, including carbon monoxide.

"With such a transformative telescope like Webb, it was hard for me to have any expectations of what we'd find in the immediate surroundings of the star," said Colette Salyk of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, an exoplanet researcher and co-author on the new paper.

"I will say, I could not have expected seeing what has the characteristics of a planet-forming region, even though planets are not forming here, in the aftermath of an engulfment."

The ability to characterize this gas opens more questions for researchers about what actually happened once the planet was fully swallowed by the star.

"This is truly the precipice of studying these events. This is the only one we've observed in action, and this is the best detection of the aftermath after things have settled back down," Lau said. "We hope this is just the start of our sample."

These observations, taken under Guaranteed Time Observation program 1240, which was specifically designed to investigate a family of mysterious, sudden, infrared brightening events, were among the first Target of Opportunity programs performed by Webb.

These types of study are reserved for events, like supernova explosions, that are expected to occur, but researchers don't exactly know when or where. NASA's space telescopes are part of a growing, international network that stands ready to witness these fleeting changes, to help us understand how the universe works.

Researchers expect to add to their sample and identify future events like this using the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will survey large areas of the sky repeatedly to look for changes over time.

TOP IMAGE: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI)

LOWER IMAGE: Schematic illustration of the preengulfment and postengulfment interpretation of ZTF SLRN-2020. Credit: The Astrophysical Journal (2025). DOI 10.3847/1538-4357/adb429

[carionto]

Predator mode

Big Thrasher was not a happy camper after his first encounter with Humanity. There is a certain exponential curve to simple ballistic weapons, whereas shields, which start off way above, progress on a geometric line. E in = E out (mostly, some charge is lost in conversion) vs E=MC^2. He learned that the hard way when three of his toughest cruisers were reduced to space dust by, as he later learned to his horror, a mid-sized transport ship using Human standard issue rail cannons.

Someone smart would move on and avoid Humanity. Big Thrasher isn't a complete idiot, but he is a prideful and narcissistic pirate captain. Thus his ability to make sensible decisions is handicapped severely. Now he has made a most dubious one indeed:

Infiltrate a Human science station and steal all their secrets and use them to get sweet, juicy, delicious revenge!

Finding one was disturbingly easy, there's so many of them. Like, at least one for each star system within eighty light years from Sol, one for each planet within thirty, and then it just gets ridiculous within Sol itself. Oddly enough, despite their size, typically there are no more than ten people aboard, almost all Human, only a few are joint Coalition.

Thinking long and hard (something Big Thrasher is not a fan of) he decided on his target - a lone station on the very outskirts of publicly known Human activity and furthest away from any major Coalition systems.

When his reconstructed fleet arrived behind the local gas giant, the station was sitting in mid orbit of the inner rock planet and was broadcasting something strange on open channels - a melodic chant of sorts:

"..live on a Yellow Submarine! A Yellow Submarine! A Yellow Submari.."

whatever that meant. No matter, Big Thrasher's fleet was moving in on the target, stealth drives on, weapons ready, numbers on their side, element of surprise - the perfect ambush.

...

Where did the station go?

Before Big Thrasher could register neural activity to try and answer that, it appeared. Behind them. And a small explosion happened moments earlier where it used to be, but the main concern was the station firing its stabilizer thrusters to rotate it at incredible speeds, then a long blade slicing one of his ships in two. Then it disappeared again. And another small explosion.

Once more, it suddenly reappeared behind another one of his ships and did the same thing, but this time used its thrusters to quickly move towards the vessel and impale it on a massive spike. Disappear. Small explosion in its place.

Three. Four. Five. They're losing ships by the second. A literal space station sized target and they can't keep track of it, let alone land a single hit. How is it teleporting? What are those explosions?

WHY IS A SPACE STATION ENGAGING HIS PIRATE SPACE SHIP FLEET IN MELEE COMBAT!

WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK TO DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE!?!

WHY IS IT WINNING!?!??!

Big Thrasher once again order an emergency retreat, what remained of his fleet scattered to randomly selected quick hyperjump coordinates, and would regroup in a few weeks time.

_______________________

Aboard the experimental development station Tree of Grating Whispers the crew of seven were hastily putting out fires and trying not to throw up from all the gee forces they just endured, kinetic dampeners be damned.

A few hours later, all in their environmental suits, as the life support system was dead, they convened for an after-action report:

"Right, so, good news and bad news. Good news - short range teleporter works perfectly. Bad news - each unit doesn't teleport with us and just explodes, further data has been unrecoverable so far.

Good news - rapid action thruster and kinetic combat mode works. Bad news - can't have biologicals onboard and even moderately durable systems break after a few swings.

Overall, I'd say this has been a success (unanimous nodding). Let's get to working out the kinks and we'll have a presentable version for the military. We'll also have to thank those pirates for not masking their engine heat trails, this was a great field trial guys, real proud of everyone!"

The chief says, while high on painkillers (and so is the rest of the crew), as another part of the station self-immolates.

[tobiasdrake]

I wonder, is it possible to look at the way Raditz, Nappa, and Vegeta fight (maybe Bardock's team, too, if you think Toriyama had enough involvement in those animated projects) to reconstruct any general principles of Saiyan martial arts training?

I talked a bit about Raditz and Nappa here as well as going into a particular Saiyan technique I find interesting here.

It is interesting to note that both Nappa and Vegeta are proficient in that technique to varying degrees, while Raditz is not. Raditz is completely basic as a fighter, having not even trained out his tail weakness when Nappa and Vegeta have.

Though it's not clear if this implies that the elites as a whole receive better instruction than the low-class Saiyans, or if Nappa's simply reaped the benefits of following Vegeta around more closely than Raditz, and doing whatever he does.

Though they do have some distinctive arts, such as the previously discussed remote detonation technique. That both Nappa and Vegeta are familiar with it implies a bit of standardization. In fact, Vegeta knows all the top-tier Saiyan arts.

He can even rattle off the science behind Oozaru transformations. He's kind of a nerd. That's an interesting note to keep in mind when thinking about his relationship to Bulma.

(He's also vain about his beauty, fun fact.)

Dude was putting off the Oozaru transformation because it's ugly so he didn't wanna.

By Vegeta's admission, the fake moon technique is one of the most advanced techniques in Saiyan martial arts. And. Uh. Yeah. Yeah, compressing the planet's atmosphere with a continuous ki sphere in order to create a finely tuned reflection of sunlight that produces a certain kind of radiation....

Yeah, that sounds complex as fuck. No wonder only nerds super-elites like Vegeta can do it.

The Oozaru is the primary mechanism by which Saiyans destroy worlds.

With that in mind, it makes sense that the ultimate and most complex Saiyan martial art is the ability to manually induce this transformation. The most devastating thing a Saiyan can ever do in a fistfight is find a way to become the Oozaru despite environmental limitations.

Their battle plan revolves so heavily around this transformation, they've even developed battle armor that stretches to accommodate the vast increase in size. Everything they do as hand-to-hand fighters is a fallback for when the Oozaru is not available.

As he notes above, Vegeta specifically chose a full-moon night to attack Earth on in order to let him and Nappa access their full power - Though Nappa died before the moon came out. And also Piccolo blew up the moon after Nappa and Raditz entered their spaceflight stasis sleep, so that was a non-starter.

Raditz wasn't intending to fight when he came to Earth; He was just here to pick up his brother and things spiraled out of hand from there. So he didn't have the luxury of the full moon or the technical skill to compress atmosphere and compensate.

What this means is that a large portion of Saiyan battle strategy has never really been depicted. The only properly trained Saiyan warrior in Oozaru state we've ever seen was Vegeta here.

And he's fighting a Goku who already burned out his body from a Kaio-ken x4 he couldn't contain, so the competition is next to zero. Goku lands some solid hits on Vegeta because... Well, he's Counter-Fighter Goku. He's the master at breaking down his foe and making the most of whatever he's got.

Motherfucker you've been on death's door for the last five minutes how dare

Goku is obnoxious to have to fight. Truly.

But because the only proper fight we ever with a fully-trained Oozaru is against the like 5% Goku has left in his tank, we never get to see the Oozaru properly tested. Whatever its full capabilities truly are, that remains known only to them and the races they've destroyed.

As for Bardock, Toriyama had little involvement beyond assisting with character design, as is typical of his involvement with the anime specials. Though it's interesting to note that he loved the Bardock special. Toriyama rarely even bothered to watch the anime of his own work, but he had high praise to sing of Bardock.

"I really like the story of Bardock, Goku’s father. It’s quite dramatic, and the kind of story 'I absolutely wouldn’t draw' if it were me. It was like watching a different kind of Dragon Ball in a good way, so I thought it was nice."

Bardock captivated Toriyama for being a take on Dragon Ball he, himself, wouldn't have been able to make. Which. Made it funny. Years later in Dragon Ball Minus. When he tried to make it. And arguably proved himself right. But I digress.

Toriyama liked Bardock so much, he even canonized the special for the manga.

Toriyama fucking loved this special. This rarely happened. The only other time a character created for the anime ended up appearing in the manga, it was to canonize the concept of the Kaios being a set of Four Heavenly Kings rather than the one guy.

Papaya is a fruit and fruits work for Frieza. What are you not telling us, South Kaio? I'm on to you.

And then, decades later, the bestest boy of Dragon Ball Super.

Love him so much.

[unclefard]

Imagine going back to the Nemegt swamps some seventy million years ago. You’re excited to see your favorite dinosaur, the magnificent, shaggy Deinocheirus. For some reason you picked a large duck as your favorite, as opposed to something cool like Triceratops. Anyways, you hear a light cracking, likely of twigs and dead leaves. The shrubbery behind you shakes. The muddy water, knee deep, that you’ve been wading through ripples. An enormous, billed snout emerges from the trees, speckled green with bits of the owner’s salad lunch. Two small eyes stare blankly and stupidly in opposite directions. The whole head comes into view. It snorts, twisting sideways to get a better look at you. The youngling swamp trees tremble as the entirety of the enormous body lumbers into view with loud, lazy splashes.

You gasp and take a step backwards. You’re not fazed by its size and power, you know Deinocheirus loves you as you love it. Rather, you’re shocked, for your shaggy avian idol is completely in the nude!

It’s greyish, with mud caked to its hands and feet. Heavily wrinkled, especially around the stomach and neck. Scattered, short feathers, more like hairs, pepper the mottled body. Bits of dead skin slough from its flanks. It stinks of rotting leaves and dung. You scream. This isn’t what you expected. Prehistoric Planet lied to you. Deinocheirus looks like a balding middle-aged man!

#

For four million years, all the dinosaur people were so smug telling poor innocent children that their epic murder lizards were actually just giant, ugly birds. They were all soooo happy to put feathers on our beloved evil emaciated reptiles. But now the tables have turned. Not so happy are you now, bird people? Science may have feathered the lizards, but it also plucked the birds!

#

There is an interesting thing about the idea of Deinocheirus only having light feathering, scattered and dense only in a few places like elephant hair. It came from a lineage in which feathers were likely omnipresent. With many large dinosaurs that were naked and scaly, their relatives and ancestors were also naked and scaly, even down to smaller sizes, as seen in ceratopsians. Feathers were less dominant in dinosaurs than hair in mammals. Many lineages of giant dinosaurs had reptilian skin as the norm. Deinocheirus however is a weird outlier, a member of a lineage of dino ostriches that grew massive and bulky. It’s kinda like if a line of ratites just decided to become the ecological equivalent of elephants. It was nude, though it probably did not have the impressive scalation seen in the hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, etc. Rather, being a weird outlier in a family of lushly feathered creatures, it was likely just naked and wrinkly, like an elephant, or some shaved bear or something.

As for it being naked, it weighed six tons, was more than likely warm-blooded, and lived in a tropical swamp. I heard somewhere dinosaurs’ air sacs would have helped keep them cool (better oxygen circulation=enhanced cooling efficiency), but I feel like it would have only helped so much when you’re built like an obese goose scaled up to the size of an elephant. As for the pygostyle, Beipiaosaurus had one too as well as integument traces, and as far as we know it was just kind of hairy. Personally, I think a giant fan of well-developed flight feathers on the tail just looks kind of dumb too.

Deinocheirus probably had loose, scattered feathers like elephants and rhinos have hair, or it may have had a light but even coat of feathers, like cows. Hard to see in this render because I was having trouble with the hair sims, but I did give it longer, droopy feathers on the tail and slightly longer ones on the back/shoulders.

However, the ultra-shaggy reconstructions are probably just as far from the real animal as the emaciated, lipless movie monster is from the real Tyrannosaurus. It looks better with thick feathers than it does as shaved duck, yes, but movie monster Velociraptors look cooler than the real ones too.

[cypressure]

Have you got any recommendations for dinosaur nonfiction books?

Your art makes me so happy 🥺

hey thank you, i appreciate your saying so (and also giving me the opportunity to talk about dinosaur books)! under the cut for length--

starting off with an overview before getting down to specific topics, my first recommendation is Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved by Darren Naish & Paul Barrett. this was first published in 2017, but the third edition was just released with plenty of updates to reflect new discoveries and hypotheses. it's very thorough and accessible, and takes you through all the major clades of dinosaurs and everything we know about their evolution and ecology. this is definitely the best starting point for getting up-to-date with dinosaur science.

the end-Cretaceous extinction has been getting lots of popular attention lately (thanks to DePalma and the Tanis site I suspect), so if you'd like to learn more on this subject, I love The Last Day of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black, also from 2022. this is the scariest dinosaur book i've ever read--she paints an incredibly vivid and horrifying picture of the aftermath of the meteor impact, and of how the animals which survived the event managed to live on.

if you want to read about how exactly we know all these things about dinosaurs, I just recently picked up Dave Hone's How Fast Did T. rex Run? (titled The Future of Dinosaurs in the UK i think), published in 2022. he delves into what we know from the fossil record and how paleontologists work to figure these things out, as well as what we don't know yet and what we probably will never know, and the difference between those two. i suggest it for learning about paleontology as a scientific process, and it's a very interesting read.

so far, all of these books have been about dinosaurs as a whole; if you are looking for popular publications about specific groups, there are not as many options unfortunately (for some reason there isn't a huge audience for 200-page books about obscure thyreophorans. sighs disappointedly). most of what we get is about the large, more familiar clades; you will see books on tyrannosaurs, and there's a few field guide-style books about Mesozoic birds (which tend to be very beautifully illustrated but kind of technical; see below for titles). my pick for clade-specific books is The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants, by Mark Hallett and Matthew Wedel, from 2016. this one goes into serious detail about every conceivable aspect of sauropod paleobiology, which as you can imagine is a huge and fascinating topic, and all the artwork is gorgeous. caveat: it being 8 years old means there's some science in there which will be outdated by now, but as far as i can remember it's still worth checking out.

and finally, as a paleoartist, i have to mention paleoart books! if you're interested in the science behind the choices paleoartists make when reconstructing extinct animals, especially for your own practice, i cannot recommend enough Mark Witton's The Paleoartist's Handbook, from 2018. he thoroughly explains how to interpret fossil evidence and paleontological research from an artist's perspective, and covers about everything from soft tissues to composing a scene. this is one of less than a handful of books on this particular topic, and it's definitely the most in-depth.

with any scientific subject you have to be careful with older books; this is especially true with paleontology since the discipline has accelerated so much over the past few decades and shows no signs of slowing down. i would even hesitate to recommend anything published more than 10 years ago, since new discoveries and technology have made so many questions and hypotheses moot (and in turn created new and more interesting ones)! the only exception to this is a recommendation for historical significance: Robert Bakker's 1986 The Dinosaur Heresies is essential to understanding what modern paleontologists call the Dinosaur Renaissance, or how our perception of dinosaurs changed from lizardlike evolutionary dead-ends into the active, successful bird ancestors we see in reconstructions now. this book kickstarted that change, and it's easy to see how: it's a very engaging read, Bakker argues his points very effectively, plus there are cute dinosaur cartoons. (i also love a lot of older works for their personal significance, but gushing about formative dinosaur books is something for another post.)

finally, thanks to the wonders of the internet, books are not the only way to learn about current dinosaur science! the best way is always by reading paleontology papers, where scientists directly describe and illustrate new discoveries or hypotheses. however, i know jumping straight into the technical literature may be overwhelming: fortunately a lot of paleontologists have social media, blogs, and/or podcasts where they write about their work and new developments in the field. the heyday of science blogs is kind of past, but there are still a few very good ones out there: this list on Feedly has a good selection to browse. being just self-published material, all of these don't have the benefits of peer review that papers and books do, so always be willing to take things with a grain of salt and do your own research.

of course this is a non-exhaustive list, especially limiting myself to both works recently published and which i have actually read. i've certainly forgotten or missed out on many new paleontology books (Dean Lomax's Locked in Time is one of these which i still haven't gotten ahold of yet, but which im very excited to get to); i welcome any additional recommendations or thoughts from the rest of paleoblr!

i hope this was helpful and i wish you luck in your reading :)

[crippleprophet]

hey, i don't want to put you out or anything, i was just wondering if like off the top of your head if you knew any disability studies articles/books/whatever that center (or even just feature) tic/involuntary movement disorders?

so the answer to this was pretty much no but i spent a bit of time poking around and turned up this 2023 undergraduate honors thesis (link) by a student with tourette’s which seems like a solid starting point for going down the citation rabbit hole!

that piece is “The Embodied Performance of Tics and Tourette Syndrome in the Academic Environment” by Benjamin Allen; i’m only ~1/4th through rn but they argue for a continuum of ticcing + criticize the diagnostic system so i’m comfortable reccing it on that front! the (non-medical) tic-related works cited there are:

Buckser, Andrew. “Before Your Very Eyes: Illness, Agency, and the Management of Tourette Syndrome.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2, 2008, pp. 167-192.

Buckser, Andrew. “The Empty Gesture: Tourette Syndrome and the Semantic Dimension of Illness.” Ethnology, vol. 45, no. 4, 2006, pp. 255- 24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20456601.

Curtis-Wendlandt, Lisa. “Time and the Tic Disorder Triad.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, vol 27, no. 2, 2020, pp. 183-199.

Curtis-Wendlandt, Lisa, and Jack Reynolds. “Why Tourette syndrome research needs philosophical phenomenology.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 20, no. 4, 2021, pp. 573-600.

Miller, James. “The Voice in Tourette Syndrome.” New Literary History, vol. 32 no. 3, 2001, pp. 519-536. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2001.0039.

Trubody, Ben. “Ticced off: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of The Experience of Tourette’s Syndrome.” Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, vol. 25, no. 2, 2014.

i also searched a handful of disability studies journals for a variety of keywords (movement disorder, tic, tourette’s, involuntary movement, chorea, huntington’s) but didn’t turn up much unfortunately, so all but the first of this next list include someone with tics and/or involuntary movements rather than being about moving involuntarily.

haven’t read these so i can’t speak to the politics / quality (although i’ll make a post if i’m able to read more) but here’s what seemed potentially relevant! also if anything is paywalled please don’t give T&F your money lol, try SciHub or if you can’t find something i can ask around for somebody with institutional access!

Cultural Differences in Reactions to Tics and Tic Severity (2021)

Using virtual reality to implement disability studies’ advocacy principles: uncovering the perspectives of people with disability (2023)

I had every right to be there: discriminatory acts towards young people with disabilities on public transport (2020)

From comedy targets to comedy-makers: disability and comedy in live performance (2015)

From the Case Files: Reconstructing a history of involuntary sterilisation (2010)

i also want to mention “Movements of the Uncontrollable Body Part Two” by Bronwyn Valentine (2019), a creative writing piece about her experiences of embodiment + ableism with spina bifida that i first read pretty soon after it was published & went looking for after developing my movement disorder a year ago because it was so impactful. @fndportal also has some incredibly vital work.

also if you haven’t already read Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Staring: Why We Look, it’s not specifically about involuntary movements but definitely a core text for theorizing any visibilized disability.

i hope some of that is helpful!! if anybody checks any of these out i’d love to hear your thoughts/critiques! all the best to you & i hope these offer some resonance with + understanding of your experiences 💓💓

[materialsscienceandengineering]

New 3D reconstruction method aids analysis of property-defining defects

An international research collaboration, including a group from Cornell Engineering, has applied a new X-ray-based reconstruction technique to observe, for the first time, topological defects in a nanoscale self-assembly-based cubic network structure of a polymer-metal composite material imaged over a relatively large sample volume. In the future, this technique and new materials insights could be applied to the study of other mesoscale structures exhibiting this class of defects—which are known to underpin many known physical phenomena and can spawn new or enhanced material properties—in self-assembled materials, both natural and synthetic. "It's a new polymer, a new structure and a new technique that allowed for unprecedented sample volumes to be reconstructed," said Ulrich Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "That's really the key: If you have 70,000 unit cells of a material, instead of only tens of unit cells, you can really start to look carefully at the defect structure—what type of defects and how often these defects occur?"

Read more.

[vgtrackbracket]

Video Game Track Bracket Round 2

Reconstructing More Science from Portal 2

vs.

Theme of Mega Man Battle Network from Mega Man Battle Network

Propaganda under the cut. If you want your propaganda reblogged and added to future polls, please tag it as propaganda or otherwise indicate this!

Theme of Mega Man Battle Network:

everytime i hear this track it makes me smile :) it perfectly carries the feeling of the battle network series in my humble opinion. also it slaps

[thesquidkid]

Who says science isn't exciting?

4x08 Missing my baby

I know that it has been a while since I last updated my science meta, life happened and I wasn't really in the mood to write. I also did a thesis in between, so I suppose I now have proper experience in writing a scientific paper.

Disclaimer: I am still not a biologist and it's been quite some time since I last watched the show, so please feel free to correct me if you see anything inaccurate. I also really like talking about science so if anything is unclear I will happily explain it in more details.

The first mention of science is Liz talking to Maria in the Wild Pony:

Liz: "There has to be a scientific explanation for how Alex is reaching out to you."

She then proceeds to explain her scientific theory:

"At first, I thought this was a resurgence of your powers, like a vision of Alex manifesting itself. But your brain scans match up with your last checkup, post-cure, which means this is not a vision. Alex is alive. And he's figuring out a way to communicate with you. We've seen versions of this before. You did it in the coma. Max talked to Rosa in the pod."

I should probably go ahead and say that this falls in the realm of science-fiction. Well, mostly. In reality, people in a coma can `communicate' with the outside world. More or less. Studies have shown that when talking to people in a vegetative state, asking them to perform certain tasks, the brain reacts in the same way it would for someone that is not in vegetative state. For example, when doctors asked a few yes-no questions to a patient in vegetative state, they found out that he knew where he was, what kind of program he enjoyed on TV, etc [x]. This was done by monitoring the brain activity of the patient and looking at the pattern in his brain activity.

This kind of research [x] allowed scientists to conclude that some comatose patients were conscious.

Going back to our lovely little alien show, we can argue that Maria communicating with Liz while in her coma is scientifically possible. However, Alex being in another dimension and communicating through with Maria is fiction.

(As a side note, Liz mentions a few time in that scene that it's all science, except it's not.)

Next, Liz and Shivani are doing science in Shivani's lab:

Liz: "The regenerative enzymes in the blood sample we brought back from New York... Isn't healing the diseased cells in our subject." Liz: "The fluid stimulates the proteins momentarily, but it isn't potent enough to sustain their viability."

As defined in my meta for 1x08 [x, x], an enzyme is a protein that accelerates a chemical reaction. Here, regenerative enzymes refers to enzymes that have the ability to regenerate their cofactors.

A cofactor (in biology) is a non-proteinic chemical compound that is required for enzymes to act as catalyst (i.e. to accelerate a chemical reaction) [x].

Now, from what I read on the internet, enzymes are used in cellular apoptosis, which is a programmed cell death (happening naturally in our body, I talked about it more in my meta for 2x02 [x]), and the regenerative aspect of enzymes comes into play with regards to their cofactors. Furthermore, I have found a few sources about regenerating dead cells (namely after injuries) that mention enzymes as `executioner' rather than reconstructive. In other words, it appears that enzymes (regenerative or not) are present when it comes to killing cells, but not resuscitating them [x, x].

So, really, it's not that surprising that Liz's enzymes aren't healing the deceased cells...

The next bit of science happening in Shivani's lab is purely fictive as it revolves around the cracked pod that Shivani has:

Shivani: "The viscous liquid we developed was formulated using the fluid from within [the pod]. It contains restorative properties identical to the ones that you've been researching." Liz: "In gene-sequencing your work, I found micromolecular inconsistencies, and this crack explains why. Oxygen is changing the fluid's chemical composition. In order to continue testing, we need a pod that's in working condition."

As Michael points out in 2x03, the pods keep the person inside in stasis by regenerating the cells at the rate they decay. He also says "this current will speed up the regeneration". So, by regenerating the cells at the rate they decay, the pod would also (slowly) regenerate the cells that are already dead. Namely, it would regenerate the dead cells at the rate that the alive cells are decaying, since the pod wouldn't select which cells to regenerate, and which to not.

Personally, I am not a big fan of the pods being the answer the everything, namely here providing a regenerative cure, especially when we saw Liz figure it all out using science before, and since her research is about vascular regeneration.

The part on oxygen altering the fluid's chemical composition is accurate to what we saw before, with Noah's pod. Hence, this would fall into the realm of science within the fiction, since at least the results are consistent.

We then see Rosa and Maria trying to communicate with Alex at the Wild Pony. This is once again clearly fiction, but they use science words that I thus will look into. We start with (another) mention of frequencies:

Rosa: "I can hear the frequency of Alex's DNA in the hair, but... nowhere else."

At first, the mention of frequencies in the show was very nice and (mostly) accurate. Then, it became too much (as @angrycowboy pointed out about 4x13)

DNA does have frequency, and it particular it generates a wave that propagates in the direction of the magnetic field vector [x]. Magnetic field vector refers to the direction and the dimension of the magnetic field. These magnetic waves are what allow the cells to communicate with each other.

It is also possible to detect the frequency of DNA, namely it is around 20 GHz. Note that 20 GHz falls into the domain of super high electromagnetic frequency, which is the same frequency range as satellite communication and microwave ovens. Suppose Rosa can hear the frequency of Alex's DNA in his hair. This would mean that she is able to hear satellite communication happening nearby, and considering there is a military base not too far away (I don't know anything about actual Roswell geography, but the show does mention the base a few times), she would be able to pick up on those conversations. Useful espionnage tool.

Rosa does mention something about Isobel teaching her how to listen:

Rosa: "Isobel taught me that in order to silence all the noise, you have to find a place inside yourself where you feel safe and calm."

And in real life, radios can tune to a particular frequency (hence how you only hear a single radio channel and not everything at once). However, a radio is also able to detect other frequencies, hence how you can switch channel. The reason why you do not hear the other radio channels when you switch on your radio is that radio emitters in a region have an agreement to distinguish each frequency. This means that the frequency of each channel has to be sufficiently distinct.

DNA is different for everyone, hence it's frequency differs. Since Alex, Maria, Rosa, and any one else who came to the Wild Pony are not twins, Rosa would be able to distinguish Alex from the other DNA frequencies.

However, there are three things I find strange. First, I am assuming Alex was at the Pony before disappearing, so there should be traces of his DNA left, hence Rosa would hear somewhere else. Secondly, the choice of detecting DNA at the Wild Pony is weird, in my opinion, since there are many more frequencies that Rosa has to tune out, as it is presented to be a popular bar.

Thirdly, as much as DNA can be extracted from hair, there is no guarantee that DNA is always available in a hair sample. Namely, the DNA is present at the root of the hair [x]. Without the root of the hair, the procedure to get DNA is much more complex. So, for the sake of the argument, I am assuming that Rosa has the root of Alex's hair.

But, even having the root of the hair, typical DNA testing that is done in forensics requires an electron microscope (which uses a beam of electron as a light source, and thus has a better resolution than a typical light microscope [x]), since it is the only way to visualise the small bits of DNA. The second test is through mitochondrial DNA, but such a test will not distinguish between siblings, as they share the same mitochondrial DNA profile [x]. DNA testing from hair also requires more than 1 hair to have an accurate test [x].

To conclude on the topic of hair DNA and frequency, despite DNA having a frequency, and hair having DNA, I doubt the accuracy of Rosa's test, since too little DNA is present in a single strand of hair.

The next bit of science is also said by Rosa:

Rosa: "Energy rises from the ground into your feet, and since consciousness is a tangible form of energy connecting us to all matter, astrophysicists believe that... meditation could open you up to speaking over universes, even dimensions."

I am not going to touch on this topic, other than say that Rosa probably meant astrologists and not astrophysicists. Astrology is the field of divinatory practices, recognised as a pseudo-science (it used to be a science until a more scientific theory came along), while astrophysics is the study of astronomical objects using physics and chemistry. Meditation falls into the category of astrology, not astronomy.

The next two pieces of science (the last ones for this episode) are all between Liz and Shivani, during different scenes.

Shivani: "Why atomize the fluid into a mist?" Liz: "I made slight genetic modifications to accelerate enzyme inhibitors for swift cell regeneration. Molecules, they travel faster in a gaseous state than in liquid form." Shivani: "If this cure eradicates the alien virus, could it be repurposed to fight off human illness?" Liz: "Like a universal vaccine? Interspecies scaling at this level would be a huge leap."

So. Liz's first sentence is already hurting my brain.

An enzyme inhibitor is a molecule that attaches itself to an enzyme and stops its activity [x].

Since enzymes are used in process of cell death, inhibiting its activity would then slow this process. In fact, inhibitors can be used to start the process of cell regeneration (in some circumstances, although I am not sure I understood what those circumstances were precisely) [x]. So, if Liz accelerates the inhibitors, it could lead to an acceleration of the regeneration process (or at least, make it begin faster).

It is true that molecules travel faster as gas than liquid. In fact, molecules are always moving, but in a solid they are moving so slow that it can be considered static. In a liquid, the molecules glide past each other, and hence are faster in movement than in a sold. In a gas the molecules are further apart from each other, and move faster [x].

Shivani then asks if a vaccine to cure all human illnesses is possible. Liz is right with her response, that interspecies vaccines are tricky to work with.

We first need to note that interspecies contamination is possible (coronaviruses are example of this). However, interspecies vaccination is not as simple; consider the infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) in poultry, for which different vaccines have to be created for the different species of poultry. Even species which are similar (poultry for instance) would reach very differently to the same vaccine, and would not be offered the same protection [x]. So, despite humans and oasians being similar, a vaccine that would protect both is also unlikely.

Furthermore, a universal vaccine in the sense of a single vaccine that would protect against everything in scientifically improbably. The point of a vaccine is to inject into the human body a small dose of a virus to teach the body how to defend itself against it. Therefore, a universal vaccine would have to consist of a small dose of every virus known to mankind, which would very likely kill the patient. Imagine having your body fight against all the viruses ever.

So what Shivani is suggesting is rather improbable.

The final bit of science is later in the episode, still in Shivani's lab:

Shivani: "What if we altered the protein receptors to perform some, not all, of their functions? If we folded the principle alpha helices and stabilized the covalent bonds between the amino acids..."

(I won't go into the rest of that scene, since it's mostly about ethics)

If I am being honest, the sentence "altered the protein receptors to perform some, not all, of their functions" confuses me. So I am ignoring it for the sake of my mental health (also because I don't understand what the `their' is referring to).

The next bit of science that Shivani mentions is "principle alpha helices".

An alpha helix is a sequence of amino acids in a protein that are twisted in a helix shape [x]. This structure is the most common type of secondary structure in proteins.

In everything that I've read online about alpha helices, there isn't really a notion of principle alpha helix. So, I don't really know why this is specified by Shivani here (probably to make the sentence sound science-y...).

Folding in chemistry is the process by which a molecule assumes its shape. Protein folding refers to the shape that is assumed by a specific sequence of amino acids in a protein [x].

So, from what I understand, folding the protein would give it its alpha helix structure, but folding the alpha helix structure doesn't really mean anything...

A covalent bond is a chemical bond that involved sharing electrons to form electron pairs between atoms [x].

The different structures in a protein are attached via covalent bonds [x], so indeed, there are covalent bonds between some amino acids (the ones that are found in two different structures). Alpha helices are considered to be the stabler structure of a protein, but their stability, from what I've read, is not quite due to the covalent bonds. So, again, despite the different elements of the sentence making sense, they are quite confusing and lack proper meaning when being put together.

Liz and Shivani share another scene together in Shivani's lab, at the end of the episode where Liz breathes the mist. However, this scene does not contain much science in it, so I'm stopping my analysis here.

[judgestarling]

How to Ignore More than a Century Worth of Scientific Literature and Make Headline-Grabbing Claims on One of the Deadliest and Exhaustively Studied Pandemics in History Based on Flawed Data and Questionable Analysis

The 1918 influenza pandemic, also erroneously referred to as the “Spanish flu,” has affected up to one billion people—half the world’s population at the time—and has killed an estimated 20–30 million people in the Western World and God-only-knows-how-many people in other countries. Previous and subsequent influenza pandemics usually hit infants and the elderly the hardest. The 1918 influenza pandemic was a weird one because of the atypically high mortality among young adults. The peak mortality rate during the fall wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Canada and the USA was 28 years. The death of young adults lowered the average life expectancy in the United States by more than 10 years. Numerous studies have confirmed these findings.

A typical picture illustrating the haunting age peculiarity of this pandemic is shown below.

Even in poor, medically underserved communities, it was the young healthy adults that perished leaving many very young orphans behind.

In the early 2000s scientists started looking for samples of the 1918 virus. They reasoned that their best chance was to find it inside an influenza victim buried in permafrost. Brevig Mission in Alaska had 89 inhabitants in 1918 of which 87 died of influenza. It was a good bet that some sequenceable genetic material could be recovered from the graves of these flu victims. Indeed, genomic RNA of the 1918 virus was recovered from frozen lung tissues of an Alaskan influenza victim who was buried in permafrost in November of 1918.

In 2005, scientists used reverse genetics to generate an influenza virus bearing all eight genome segments of the 1918 virus to study its properties. The deadly 1918 virus has thus been resurrected!

The reconstructed virus turned out to be as deadly as the original one with a 100% mortality in mice. Another conclusion of this “resurrection” study was that the virus kills by overreaction of the body’s immune system, which explained the weird age distribution of deaths due to the "Spanish Flu." The strong adaptive immune systems of young adults ravaged their body, whereas the underdeveloped immune systems of young children and the weakened immune system of old people resulted fewer deaths. It was inflammation that killed people, not the viral infection directly or secondary infections. These studies seemed like the end of the 1918 influenza story.

Imagine my surprise, then, when at the end of 2023, I started noticing that the 1918 influenza pandemic is in the news again. “Killer 1918 flu didn't pick on the healthy, after all,” declared Science (the same Science that “killed” Junk DNA a decade earlier). “History Says the 1918 Flu Killed the Young and Healthy. These Bones Say Otherwise,” quipped WIRED. And US News and World Reports headlined the findings as “Contrary to Popular Belief, 1918 Flu Did Not Target the Healthy Young.”

The origin of these headlines was a 2023 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science entitled “Frailty and Survival in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic” by Amanda Wissler, currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and Sharon DeWitte, Professor of Anthropology at University of Colorado in Boulder. The paper was largely based largely on Wissler’s PhD dissertation at Arizona State University under the supervision of Professor Jane Buikstra.

One would have thought that a study that purports to discard more than a hundred years of observations, refute dozens of analyses, refute the conclusions in about 18,000 peer-reviewed articles, and generate headlines in serious news media would require a great amount of unimpeachable data and an analysis that is—if not infallible—close to infallible. If you thought that, you will be sorely disappointed.

Let us start with the Materials and Methods section. The study is based on a bone sample from the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection which contains skeletons of people who died in Cleveland, Ohio between 1910 and 1939. The skeletons belong to people whose bodies were not claimed within 36 hours of death (i.e., the poor, the homeless, the socially isolated, the incarcerated, the institutionalized as “mentally defectives,” and those whose relatives couldn’t possibly collect their loved ones’ bodies within a day and a half. Black and indigenous people most probably made the bulk of this collection. Wissler and DeWitte euphemistically called their sample as consisting of “individuals of low socioeconomic status,” who mostly “died in almshouses or public hospitals.” Is this sample representative of the population in Cleveland between 1910 and 1939? I very much doubt it. And don’t even start me on the ethical crimes committed to assemble this collection. Of course, the bodies in this collection were legally obtained following an Ohio legislation that permitted people whose bodies were not claimed within 36 hours of death to be “donated” for scientific study, but was the collection ethically assembled? I think not! The ethics of this collection reminds me of a joke my dad used to tell. “A religious Jewish woman goes to the Rabbi in a panic. ‘Rabbi, the chicken I cooked for Shabbat dinner fell into a soiled baby's diaper. Is it still kosher?’ she asks. The Rabbi replies, ‘It's kosher, of course, but I would I eat it?’” But, I digress.

Wissler and DeWitte’s sample consisted of 369 individuals: 310 males (84%) and 59 females (16%). This fact immediately tells the reader that something is off; the sample is not representative of the general population.

Curiously, the Materials and Methods section also contains the following statement, “to maximize the sample size, both the 1918 flu and the control groups include individuals who died from influenza and pneumonia as well as other diseases such as tuberculosis and myocarditis.” (No data is provided as to how many individuals were included for the purpose of padding the sample size.) Finally, medical history for the individuals in the study is mostly not known. Thus, it is impossible to know whether “an individual suffered another disease during life unless it was listed as the cause of death or left diagnostic evidence on their skeleton.”

Finally, we have the problem of missing data. In the previous paragraph, we have seen one method of padding the data. Here comes another one. The last sentence of the Analytical Methods section states that missing skeletal data “were imputed using the ‘pmm’ function of the mice R package following previous recommendations.” Now, I need to tell the reader that I get hives and homicidal thoughts whenever I read the terms “imputed” or “imputation,” which nowadays essentially mean conjuring data out of thin air. Interestingly, “imputed” was originally a theological term meaning to falsely ascribe guilt to a person. The way data analysts use the word “imputed” started with economists in 1893 when a step in a multistep process was assigned a value by inference from the value of the process to which it contributes. More recently, the term “impute” was used by the Internal Revenue Service to assign interest to an investment when the interest rate is not known. The fact that imputation is used in scientific research to artificially increase the sample size is an inexcusable obscenity.

In the abstract of the article, it is stated that “frail or unhealthy individuals were more likely to die during the pandemic than those who were not frail.” Now, “frailty” is a nebulous and inexact term often defined as “an aging-related syndrome of physiological decline, characterized by marked vulnerability to adverse health outcomes.” https://www.uptodate.com/contents/frailty Thus, the authors used a skeletal proxy to identify frailty. The proxy was lesions on the shinbones (periostosis). Whether this proxy has anything to do with anything is unknown.

The choice of lesions on the shinbones reminds me on of the Streetlight effect or the Drunkard's search principle—both examples of an observational bias whereby one limits the variables used in a study to those that are easy to obtain regardless of whether the choice is actually relevant to the study question.

Let us now discuss the article’s statistical analyses, results, and conclusions. A good piece of advice that I once got from one of my mentors was “Before you subject your data to complicated analyses and reach extravagant conclusions, do yourself a favor and look at the data carefully and perform some simple analyses.” In this case, subjecting the data to complicated (and frankly confusing) Kaplan–Meier survival analysis, Cox proportional hazards analysis, and Schoenfeld test, one should look at the data and do some long division or at most some simple 2×2 contingency analyses.

The following data was extracted from Table 1 of Wissler and DeWitte (2023).

The first thing I noticed was that 67% of the skeletons in the sample belonged to "frail" people. Does this look like a representative sample of the population of Cleveland, Ohio in 1918? The second thing I noticed is that 69% of the control group have had lesions on their shinbones (either active or healed) versus 59% in the group that succumbed to flu. Thus, by the definition used by Wissler and DeWitte, the group of people that succumbed to influenza were 14–17% less “frail” than the group that survived. Of course, in my simple analysis I can use the skeletons exhibiting active or mixed lesions versus the rest of the skeletons (healed and no lesions). In this case, 25% of the control group turn out to be frail, versus 20% in those that succumbed to flu. This result seemed to support the thesis of Wissler and DeWitte, until you realize that the difference is not statistically significant (Fisher's exact test, P = 0.3074).

After reading this paper very carefully, I am left with one open question. It remains unclear to me how this paper managed to get published in PNAS and become a news sensation. Is this another example of the power of the press release?

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Last starlight for Gaia as it completes sky-scanning mission phase

The European Space Agency's Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than 3 trillion observations of about 2 billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionize the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighborhood.

Launched on 19 December 2013, Gaia's fuel tank is now approaching empty—it uses about a dozen grams of cold gas per day to keep it spinning with pinpoint precision. But this is far from the end of the mission. Technology tests are scheduled for the weeks ahead before Gaia is moved to its "retirement" orbit, and two massive data releases are tabled for around 2026 and the end of this decade, respectively.

"Today marks the end of science observations and we are celebrating this incredible mission that has exceeded all our expectations, lasting for almost twice its originally foreseen lifetime," says ESA Director of Science Carole Mundell.

"The treasure trove of data collected by Gaia has given us unique insights into the origin and evolution of our Milky Way galaxy, and has also transformed astrophysics and solar system science in ways that we are yet to fully appreciate. Gaia built on unique European excellence in astrometry and will leave a long-lasting legacy for future generations."

"After 11 years in space and surviving micrometeorite impacts and solar storms along the way, Gaia has finished collecting science data. Now all eyes turn towards the preparation of the next data releases," says Gaia Project Scientist Johannes Sahlmann.

"I am thrilled with the performance of this incredible mission, and excited about the discoveries that await us."

Gaia delivers best Milky Way map

Gaia has been charting the positions, distances, movements, brightness changes, composition and numerous other characteristics of stars by monitoring them with its three instruments many times over the course of the mission.

This has enabled Gaia to deliver on its primary goal of building the largest, most precise map of the Milky Way, showing us our home galaxy like no other mission has done before. As such, we now also have the best reconstructed view of how our galaxy might look to an outside observer. This new artist impression of the Milky Way incorporates Gaia data from a multitude of papers over the past decade.

"It contains major changes from previous models, because Gaia has changed our impression of the Milky Way. Even basic ideas have been revised, such as the rotation of our galaxy's central bar, the warp of the disk, the detailed structure of spiral arms, and interstellar dust near the sun," says Stefan Payne-Wardenaar, scientific visualizer for the Haus der Astronomie, Germany, and the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education.

"Still, the distant parts of the Milky Way remain educated guesses based on incomplete data. With further Gaia data releases our view of the Milky Way will become even more accurate."

Discovery machine of the decade

Gaia's repeated measurements of stellar distances, motions and characteristics are key to performing "galactic archaeology" on our Milky Way, revealing missing links in our galaxy's complex history to help us learn more about our origins. From detecting "ghosts" of other galaxies and multiple streams of ancient stars that merged with the Milky Way in its early history, to finding evidence for an ongoing collision with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy today, Gaia is rewriting the Milky Way's history and making predictions about its future.

In the process of scanning the stars in our own galaxy, Gaia has also spotted other objects, from asteroids in our solar system backyard to galaxies and quasars—the bright and active centers of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes—outside our Milky Way.

For example, Gaia has provided pinpoint precision orbits of more than 150,000 asteroids, and has such high-quality measurements as to uncover possible moons around hundreds of them. It has also created the largest three-dimensional map of about 1.3 million quasars, with the furthest shining bright when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old.

Gaia has also discovered a new breed of black hole, including one with a mass of nearly 33 times the mass of the sun, hiding in the constellation Aquila, less than 2,000 light-years from Earth—the first time a black hole of stellar origin this big has been spotted within the Milky Way.

"It is impressive that these discoveries are based only on the first few years of Gaia data, and many were made in the last year alone. Gaia has been the discovery machine of the decade, a trend that is set to continue," says Anthony Brown, Chair of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) and based at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

More ground-breaking science ahead

The Gaia scientific and engineering teams are already working full steam on the preparations for Gaia Data Release 4 (DR4), expected in 2026. The data volume and quality improves with every release and Gaia DR4, with an expected 500 TB of data products, is no exception. Furthermore, it will cover the mission's first 5.5 years, corresponding to the length of the originally foreseen duration of the mission.

"This is the Gaia release the community has been waiting for, and it's exciting to think this only covers half of the collected data," says Antonella Vallenari, Deputy Chair of DPAC based at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Astronomical Observatory of Padua, Italy. "Even though the mission has now stopped collecting data, it will be business as usual for us for many years to come as we make these incredible datasets ready for use."

Gaia Data Release 4 is set to expand its binary star catalogue, the largest such catalogue to date. Gaia has a unique ability to tease out the tiny motions of pairs of celestial objects orbiting close to each other, and has already spotted previously hidden companions around bright stars.

Incidentally, Gaia's last targeted observation, on 10 January, was of binary pair 61 Cygni. This iconic star attracted the attention of 19th-century astronomers to yield some of the first proper motion and parallax measurements, techniques used by Gaia on some two billion stars.

Gaia's exoplanet discoveries are also set to increase with the forthcoming datasets thanks to the longer timeframe of observations making it much easier to spot 'wobbling' stars gently tugged by orbiting planets.

"Over the next months we will continue to downlink every last drop of data from Gaia, and at the same time the processing teams will ramp up their preparations for the fifth and final major data release at the end of this decade, covering the full 10.5 years of mission data," says Rocio Guerra, Gaia Science Operations Team Leader based at ESA's European Space Astronomy Center (ESAC) near Madrid in Spain.

"This will conclude an incredible coordinated effort between hundreds of experts across the science operations center here at ESAC, the mission operations team flying Gaia from ESA's European Space Operations Center in Germany, and the huge consortium of data processing specialists, who have together ensured the smooth running of this beautiful mission for so long."

Gaia's retirement plan

While today marks the end of science observations, a short period of technology testing now begins. The tests have the potential to further improve the Gaia calibrations, learn more about the behavior of certain technology after 10 years in space, and even aid the design of future space missions.

After several weeks of testing, Gaia will leave its current orbit around Lagrange point 2, 1.5 million km from the Earth in the direction away from the sun, to be put into its final heliocentric orbit, far away from Earth's sphere of influence. The spacecraft will be passivated on 27 March 2025, to avoid any harm or interference with other spacecraft.

Wave farewell to Gaia

During the technology tests Gaia's orientation will be changed, meaning it will temporarily become several magnitudes brighter, making observations through small telescopes a lot easier (it won't be visible to the naked eye). A guide to locating Gaia has been set up here, and amateur astronomers are invited to share their observations.

"Gaia will treat us with this final gift as we bid farewell, shining among the stars ahead of its well-earned retirement," concludes Uwe Lammers, Gaia Mission Manager. "It's a moment to celebrate this transformative mission and thank all of the teams for more than a decade of hard work operating Gaia, planning its observations, and ensuring its precious data are returned smoothly to Earth."

TOP IMAGE: Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Milky Way impression by Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

CENTRE IMAGE: The best Milky Way map, by Gaia (artist impression). Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

LOWER IMAGE: This is a new artist’s impression of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar