Okay, I was just going to reblog this without commentary, but I can't keep this to myself. I'm a PhD student in environmental science and this is my fucking highway.

The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of-- feel free to point out if there's an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.

Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.

Just in case anyone thought that climate change was a "recent fad" in research.

Cellulite is a female secondary sex characteristic and should be celebrated as a rite of womanhood, not despised or eradicated.

it’s really a secondary sex characteristic?! 

It is. It has to do with the way our bodies network fat. Female bodies create sort of a mesh network to support fat (female bodies are MUCH more hardy in times of stress) and it can present as delightfully lumpy. More than 90% of women have visible cellulite, but all women store fat in this manner.

why did no one tell me this?!

You know why :/

Spread this. I only just started to see mine and I started to freak out a bit. More people should/need to know about this

Here’s an illustration of the aforementioned difference in fat storage.

Men’s lattice pattern collagen threads holds subcutaneous fat in a way that, when the skin expands because of the fat storage, it expands evenly. Women’s “pockets” expand unevenly when we accumulate fat, creating that orange peel effect. Our storage pattern means we can healthily store more fat than men. Like a woman with 25% body fat is average, a man with 25% body fat is chubby. Because of that, like OP said, women are hardier in times of stress or famine. It’s also one of the reasons why our bodies can survive pregnancy, which is a massive energy demand on our system.

And there’s absolutely NO “treatment” for cellulite that will work. They are all bullshit designed to separate you from your hard-earned cash. It’s a secondary sex characteristic, it’s perfectly normal and it’s not going away no matter what you do. Like I’m very lean myself and I work out 5~6 times a week, and I still have cellulite. Someone giving a woman shit for having cellulite is akin to giving her shit for having skin. It’s just a mixture of misogyny and corporate greed.

Love your lumpy skin, ladies. It means you are a badass surviving machine shaped by millenia of evolution.

I did not know this, and I pride myself on knowing shit like this.

Neil deGrasse Tyson throwing shade in “Sisters of the Sun”

The number of men who hired women, used women, and then took credit for the work and discoveries THEY made is rampant throughout history and disgusting.

It's very easy to say that magic doesn't exist, but ultimately computers work by channeling lightning through a series of crystals, so who's really to say.

"It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works."

Terry Pratchett, 'The Wee Free Men'

With NASA announcing their streaming service NASA+ and also announcing it’s going to be free and also ad free, I’d just like to appreciate the lengths they go to make scientific knowledge and exploration as available as they possibly can.

There's more info at this link. Gosh I'm excited about this.

It still frustrates me that Tumblr and folks my age view Bill Nye as like.. a progressive man of science. The thing is that Bill Nye shouldn’t have any credibility outside his field of engineering. He’s not a biologist, he’s not an astronomer, he’s just received a Bachelors in engineering. He has received honorary Doctorates, but some people receive hundreds of these and they really amount to micro-recognitions on a campus-by-campus basis. 

If you want to actually learn about the frontier of this stuff, hit the library. A scholarly database through a university is even better. 

But the mere sound of this one television personality honorary doctor with a BA in engineering taught me about biology should be plenty enough for folks to realize the problems here. But they won’t because he’s a childhood element and he says stuff that they want to here and that is more powerful than the desire to actually be as informed as possible.

Do you understand that he’s probably spent his entire career furthering his education and that a degree doesn’t really keep someone from being qualified to speak? Especially as a professional communicator, he probably has hundreds of people that he consults for stuff that he might not be an expert in? And that he’s motivated to educate himself on everything he says BECAUSE he’s a media representative for scientists and if he says something wrong he has literally millions of scientists who will correct or critique him?

Like did you know that pretty much everything he talks about is covered in the intro courses of whatever he is talking about? And that anytime he needs to go more in depth he usually leaves that to the actual experts? And that his job is to being an introductory concept to the masses to make them more scientifically literate and educated? His job is to get people interested in whatever topic he’s talking about so that they can actually go and do their own research and ask actual experts?

THIS.

As a science teacher whose job often involves trying to explain complicated concepts like climate change, human evolution, and dinosaur phylogeny to kids as young as 6, I can attest with some authority that the ability to take a complex scientific concept and distill it down so that it’s a) accessible to young audiences/laypeople, b) still accurate, and c) engaging as hell – that is a SKILL. And one that does not necessarily come as part of a PhD.

if you dont understand why i listen to the friendly man who specialises in accessible mass teaching, then i fully expect you to finance for me the 15 years of university youre demanding i do instead.

Also it is a little bit hilarious that OP focuses so much biology, which suggest they are referring to the newest bit of Bill Nye being affirmative about sex/gender not being the binary that is taught in high school sex ed - which is actually the scientific reality of biology, if you’re looking at the hundreds if not thousands of intersex variations in humans (hormonal, chromosomal, physical, etc)… like an actual biologist doesn’t have a leg to stand on arguing “sex is binary.”

But the minute a tv personality says science is against your bigoted worldview, out come the “he only has a BA, this man knows nothing, stop liking him.” LOL

hey OP did you know that the original Bill Nye the Science Guy television run was done in conjunction with the literal freaking NSF, and I’ll even link you to the Wiki page because although any scientist worth their salt should know just how hard it is to collaborate with the NSF, i have my doubts about your own qualifications.

Some men just want to watch the world learn.

They’re like the Avengers of learning. 

“I have an army.”

“We have Bob Ross.”

“That’s my secret, Mr. Rogers. There’s always a little bush.”

“His first name is ‘Mister’”

“I’ve got science in my ledger” 

The sardonic, reductionist headline here could be "Scientists finally figured out why you get more colds in winter: bEcAuSe iT's CoLd!"—but the actual science involved here is both interesting, and potentially very relevant to everyday life and especially the immunocompromised:

Want to avoid catching or spreading respiratory viruses like CoVid-19, RSV, influenza, or a common cold? Mask up, please, but also bundle up! Wrap up in a scarf, wear a balaclava, and just generally keep your face warm. There's no single magic solution, but that's not a reason to do nothing. Rather, it's a reason to take several simple precautions that help avoid the spread of disease and protect those around you. (I can't tell you how much "this isn't 100% effective so I shouldn't do it at all" frustrates me.)

Oh, and #knitblr? This is your time to shine.

This is tragic news because it means my mother was RIGHT

WEAR A SCARF

How many women can you guess? Do you remember/know what each one of them did/discovered?

Once you make your guess, head over to All Science, All the Time to see if you were right:http://ow.ly/pXjrG

source

Oh wow, that’s AN AWESOME LIST OF WHITE WOMEN SCIENTISTS! But how could you forget:

Asima Chatterjee: The awesome Indian woman who help discover drugs we use to treat cancer, malaria, and epilepsy! OR Chien-Shiung Wu: THE FIRST LADY OF PHYSICS?!  OR WHADDABOUT Ellen Ochoa: The first Latina in SPACE! AND the First Latina Director of the Johnson Space Center. Oo, and don’t forget!! Flossie Wong-Staal: The woman that successfully map HIV and pave the way to prove that HIV causes AIDS.  GURL! Mae Jemison: First Black woman IN SPACE!!! And worked the first flight into space after the Challenger Accident. But don’t stop! Patricia Bath: The First Black woman doctor awarded a patent for a medical device: a laser that removes cataracts! (Fancy that!) AND THE BOSSEST! Shirley Ann Jackson: The first Black woman to earn a PhD from MIT in nuclear physics.

Hot damn! Women of Color in Science!!! 

reblogging solely for the criticisms and shade.

I’m fucking cackling

Listen everyone just cause your in a scientific field doesn’t make you smart enough to not make mistakes in the field

Fun fact, this may actually account for many of the “imaginings” we have of extinct animals.

I had a molecular biology professor who referred it to “vacuum packing” where many extinct animals are rendered slimmer or muscular than they may have been, since things like body fat and fur are not preserved during fossilization. So our view of animals like dinosaurs may be entirely inaccurate.

There’s actually a book, All Yesterdays, in which the artist, CM Koseman, draws modern animals as we might have interpreted them to look if we found them extinct the same way do dinosaurs.

Fun examples include:

The manatee

An elephant

Swans

And literally the picture of the hippo

Another funny thing to add to this…because of how fossils are formed, it’s possible we don’t know what type of dinosaurs were different species or the same species.  If we compare the skeletons to modern animals, snake skeletons often look pretty much the same so if all snakes were extinct we may believe they were all one species of animal instead of hundreds.  Meanwhile, all dog breeds are considered the same species Canis lupus familiaris (technically domestic dogs are a subspecies of Canus lupus, the Grey Wolf, but you get what I mean) despite their skeletons being drastically different from each other (compare a pug skull to a great dane and to a poodle…they’ll look different).

So, if all snakes were mistaken for being only a small handful of species and modern dogs could be mistaken for a BUNCH of unique different species…think about how that knowledge can reflect onto our current understanding of extinct animals.

Trees, like animals, can also experience albinism, though it is extremely rare.

the reason it’s rare is because without chlorophyll, the plant can’t get energy, and dies shortly after sprouting unless it has some other source of food. so if you see a plant as big as the one in the picture that doesn’t have any green in its leaves, it’s getting its nutrition from the roots of a neighboring plant of the same species, feeding on the sugars created by the other plant’s photosynthesis.

albino plants are basically vampires.

For a long time, scientists thought they were parasites, and couldn’t figure out why the bigger plants didn’t release chemicals to kill them.

Turns out, the lil’ ghost redwoods benefit their hosts by filtering toxins and acting as a sort of backup immune system.

They’re vampires, and they’re commensal, symbiotic mutualists!

this is super cool! I had no idea

This is among the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Gallus rostromegalus

When I was in high school, I was the part-time henchperson of a Mad Scientist.

I’m not exaggerating about “Mad Scientist”.  “Riley” (Name changed for his family’s privacy) was a former Medical Doctor, as well as an artist, microbiologist, pilot (as in, designed and flew his own experimental aircraft), magician, computer programmer and musical composer, and had an outbuilding attached to his house where he kept things like his hand-made 3D printer, electron microscope and drone-dirigible assembly devices.

Riley had ALS and was eventually wheelchair-bound, so by 2006 I was being called in on the odd school night or weekend to go out around FoCo and the surrounding mountains. “I need a younger set of legs and someone with no fear of heights” He’d say.  Being that I was a very boring child that had no interest in sex or drugs and always called when I was going to be late, and that Riley was a trusted family friend, My parents trusted me to go out at like 9PM  and come home at 2AM on a Tuesday.  

…To do things like scale locked fire escapes and climb around on rooftops that we DEFINITELY did not have permission to be on to do things like install speakers and bluetooth broadcasting devices at strategic points around Old Town so that if you download the right app onto your phone (I’ve got it backed up somewhere, I’ll post it when I find it) , you can walk around town and be exposed to the ghostly, extremely shady side of FoCo history for his 2007 Halloween project.

We did get caught by the cops but I was 17, short and white as goddamn mayonnaise so when the cops asked me what I was doing “It’s for a community art project!” actually worked.

My favorite Mad Science Project was in 2009, Gallus rostromegalus.

I was home from college for summer, and Riley had been messing around with Rotational Physics and had managed to make Giant (24’ x 18’) extremely realistic Chicken eggs, weighted and everything so that if you picked one up, it would feel like there was a heavy yolk wobbling around inside.  They’re amusing all on their own, but after leaving them in the slash pile from spring cleaning, Riley realized they had POTENTIAL.

So we went around getting permission from a few businesses and the art museum, and I spent a few nights making plausible enormous chicken feathers in Riley’s lab out of grass, acrylic glaze and some other odds and ends laying around, and filling up the back of my mom’s van with as much of the backyard slash pile as fit in there, then drove out in the middle of the night to set up giant nests for the eggs, strewn with feathers and surrounded by Traffic cones and orange construction mesh and signs from the entirely fictitious “Department Of Fish And Wildfowl, Specious Relocation Division”

(an incomplete nest on the steps of Fort Collins Museum of Art)

(signage, responsibly warning people to stay away in case of giant chickens)

Riley even made QR codes that linked back to an obviously false Wiki- if you scrolled to the bottom, the page was covered in feathers and after five minutes it would start to make chicken noises.

People. Went. INSANE.

Crowds turned up to take selfies with the nests and Riley tracked down literally dozens of tagged photos captioned “IS THIS REAL????”.  

Someone wrote a very worried and not terribly facetious-sounding letter to the editor concerned that Giant Chickens were roaming around FoCo, something that big could hurt someone!  There was an entirely-serious-sounding counter-letter that we Humans have clearly invaded this majestic creature’s natural habitat, where are they SUPPOSED to make their nests, huh?   

Multiple people called the police to report having seen the elusive Gallus rostromegalus up in the hills or skulking around downtown. Reports claimed it was anywhere form five to twelve feet tall, with dramatic plumage and an eerie, yodeling sort of call.

A few nights after installing each nest, we went back, collected the eggs, and left broken ‘eggshells’ and extra down feather around each of the nests. One of the nests was put up at the local Garden Center and I remember one of the assistant managers coming outside just after we finished the ‘hatching’ and shrieking “OH GOD I THOUGHT THOSE WERE FAKE THEY’LL GET TO THE TOMATOES SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!”  That woman would later become my manager when I worked there for a summer, though she never made the connection between me and The Chickens.

Riley passed away in 2015 after a good and well-lived life, and was kind enough to leave me The Eggs in his will.

It was a truly splendid bit of ruckus, and I miss him terribly, and I very much treasure the memories.  And the Eggs, which I am absolutely going to inflict on some unsuspecting neighbors at some point, in his honor.

(If you’ve enjoyed this story, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or Paypal so I can support myself telling stories, thank you!)

I am so fucking thrilled.

seriously, fuck the false dichotomy between Science and The Arts. as if capital-S Science isn’t an art that requires creativity, perseverance, patience, and skilled observation. as if The Arts don’t require rigor, discipline, practice, and attention to detail. as if both aren’t cultural structures that stand on foundations of sexist, racist, capitalist hierarchy. as if they both can’t be used for purposes of enrichment and revolution. i am so fucking over this idea of presenting science and art as opposites, when they have so much more in common than people think.

UM!!!!!!! UM!!!! this is a beautiful post!!!! and I feel it with every part of my soul!