#Postdoctoral Fellow

[tenth-sentence]

Hsu had come from Chekiang University in China in 1948 to take a Ph.D at the University of Texas; now a postdoctoral fellow in human cytology at the medical branch of the university in Galveston, he was looking at cell nuclei in preparations of fetal spleen tissue.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

#book quote #in the name of eugenics #daniel j kevles #nonfiction #tao-chiuh hsu #tao chiuh hsu #chekiang university #china #40s #1940s #20th century #phd #doctorate #postdoc #postdoctoral fellow #university of texas #cytology #galveston #cells #cell nucleus #nuclei #fetal tissue #spleen

[sagunpaudel]

Postdoctoral Opportunity in Public Health/Global Health

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health’s vision is better health for all. We produce, summarize and communicate knowledge for the public health sector and healthcare services. Our main activities are emergency preparedness, knowledge and infrastructure. Infrastructure comprises registries, health surveys, biobanks and laboratory services. The Institute is a government organization under the…

View On WordPress

#Norwegian Institute of Public Health #Opportunities #Postdoctoral Fellow #Public Health Opportunities

[wachinyeya]

A historically and culturally significant lake in California's San Joaquin Valley that first disappeared in 1898 has returned after last year's atmospheric rivers flooded the region.

Tulare Lake, known as Pa'ashi — or "big water" — to the local Tachi Yokut Tribe, was "once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River," per Earth.com.

Vivian Underhill, who published a paper on Tulare Lake as a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeastern University, noted it was mostly sustained by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains and was 100 miles long and 30 miles wide at its peak.

The lake served as a key resource for Indigenous Peoples and wildlife and was once robust enough to allow steamships to transport agricultural goods throughout the state.

However, government officials persecuted and displaced the indigenous communities in the late 1800s to convert the area for farming through draining and irrigation.

"They really wanted to get [land] into private hands so that indigenous land claims — that were ongoing at that time — would be rendered moot by the time they went through the courts," Underhill told the Northeastern Global News. "It was a deeply settler colonial project."

While Pa'ashi periodically reappeared during the 1930s, '60s, and '80s, the barrage of atmospheric rivers California experienced in 2023 revived the lake despite the region receiving just 4 inches of rain annually. According to Underhill, Tulare Lake is now the same size as Lake Tahoe, which is 22 miles long and 12 miles wide.

Its resurgence has led to the return of humid breezes at least 10 degrees cooler than average and native species, including fish, amphibians, and birds. Lake Tulare was once a stopping point for migratory birds traveling a route known as the Pacific Flyway.

"Something that continues to amaze me is — [the birds] know how to find the lake again," Underhill told the Northeastern Global News. "It's like they're always looking for it."

The Tachi Yokuts have also returned to Pa'ashi's shores, once again practicing their ceremonies and planting tule reeds and native sage.

#submission #!!! #good news #lakes #Tulare Lake #Pa'ashi #big water #water #water is life #revitalization #anti colonialism #decolonization #nature #Tachi Yokut #indigenous peoples

[mindblowingscience]

What if there was plastic-like material that could absorb excess nutrients from water and be used as a fertilizer when it decomposes? That product—a "bioplastic" material—has been created by University of Saskatchewan (USask) chemistry professor Dr. Lee Wilson and his research team, as detailed in a paper recently published in RSC Sustainability. The research team includes Ph.D. candidate Bernd G. K. Steiger, BSc student Nam Bui and postdoctoral fellow trainee Bolanle M. Babalola. "We've made a bioplastic material that functions as an absorbent and it takes phosphate out of water, where elevated levels of phosphate in surface water is a huge global water security issue," he said. "You can harvest those pellets and distribute them as an agricultural fertilizer."

Continue Reading.

#Science #Bioplastics #Chemistry #Tech #stem

[mysticstronomy]

HOW OLD IS PHOENIX A* BLACK HOLE??

Blog#380

Saturday, March 2nd, 2024.

Welcome back,

Black holes are the most massive objects that we know of in the Universe. Not stellar mass black holes, not supermassive black holes (SMBHs,) but ultra-massive black holes (UMBHs.) UMBHs sit in the center of galaxies like SMBHs, but they have more than five billion solar masses, an astonishingly large amount of mass. The largest black hole we know of is Phoenix A, a UMBH with up to 100 billion solar masses.

How can something grow so massive?

UMBHs are rare and elusive, and their origins are unclear. A team of astrophysicists working on the question used a simulation to help uncover the formation of these massive objects. They traced UMBH’s origins back to the Universe’s ‘Cosmic Noon‘ around 10 to 11 billion years ago.

Their paper is “Ultramassive Black Holes Formed by Triple Quasar Mergers at z = 2,” and it’s published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The lead author is Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian.

“We found that one possible formation channel for ultra-massive black holes is from the extreme merger of massive galaxies that are most likely to happen in the epoch of the ‘cosmic noon,'” said Ni.

UMBHs are extremely rare. Creating them in scientific simulations requires a massive, complex simulation. This is where Astrid comes in. It’s a large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulator that runs on the Frontera supercomputer at the University of Texas, Austin. Astrid’s large-scale simulations can track things like dark matter, temperature, metallicity, and neutral hydrogen.

Simulations like Astrid are ranked by the number of particles their simulations contain, and Astrid is at the top of that list.

“The science goal of Astrid is to study galaxy formation, the coalescence of supermassive black holes, and re-ionization over the cosmic history,” said lead author Ni in a press release. (Ni is a co-developer of Astrid.) A powerful tool like Astrid needs a powerful supercomputer. Luckily, UT Austin has the most powerful academic supercomputer in the USA.

“Frontera is the only system that we performed Astrid from day one. It’s a pure Frontera-based simulation,” she explained.

Astronomers know that galaxies grow large through mergers, and it’s likely that SMBHs grow more massive at the same time. But UMBHs are even more massive and much rarer. How do they form?

The team’s work with Astrid delivered an answer.

“What we found are three ultra-massive black holes that assembled their mass during the cosmic noon, the time 11 billion years ago when star formation, active galactic nuclei (AGN), and supermassive black holes, in general, reach their peak activity,” Ni said.

Originally published on www.universetoday.com

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, March 6th, 2024)

"A GALAXY THAT HAS NO STARS??"

#astronomy #outer space #alternate universe #astrophysics #universe #spacecraft #white universe #space #parallel universe #astrophotography

[docgold13]

Batman: The Animated Series - Paper Cut-Out Portraits and Profiles

Harleen Quinzel

Once a talented albeit unscrupulous psychiatrist, Doctor Harleen Frances Quinzel came to work at Arham Asylum for her postdoctoral internship. Therein she met The Joker and in her youthful ambition believed that she could successfully treat the so-called clown prince of crime. At first it seemed as though Dr. Quinzel was making excellent progress with The Joker.  And yet it turned out that The Joker was slowly and successfully indoctrinating the young woman into his own twisted outlook on the world.  Employing a string of lies and false accounts, The Joker was able to make Quinzel see him as the victim.  Before she knew it, Quinzel was hopelessly and nearly irrevocably entranced by the villain. 

Fashioning herself a harlequin outfit along with a variety of thematic weapons, Quinzel broke The Joker out of Arkham and thus began a colorful career as Harley Quinn, the Joker’s partner in crime.  In her delusional state, Harley never saw The Joker as actually hurting anyone; he was merely bringing mirth and mayhem into their otherwise dull lives.  Similarly, Harley was unable to appreciate the abusive nature of her relationship with The Joker, how he mistreated her and took her for granted.  It was only through her loving relationship with fellow villainess, Poison Ivy, that Harley enjoyed a respite from the toxic thrall of The Joker.  

The wonderful Arleen Sorkin provided the voice for Quinzel, with the character first appearing in the seventh episode of the first season of Batman: The Animated Series, ‘Joker’s Favor.’       

#batman the animated series #Batman #Harley Quinn #Harleen Quinzel #Arleen Sorkin #cut-out #paper art #DC Comics

[cellarspider]

Good lord I take a week off of tumblr and now there’s a lot of you

Hello to everyone who’s just followed me in the past week! Most of you have come from a long ramble of mine on interdisciplinary learning, medieval head trauma, and Gallus’ well-wishings on my recent graduation (https://www.tumblr.com/gallusrostromegalus/727017193756327936), thank you to Gallus for that. Thank you to those of you who’ve commented with kind words as well. Specific shout-outs, links to relevant rambles, and questions are below, in the section “Link Roundup and Shoutouts”.

Yes, this is a post with sections. This is how we roll here.

Introduction to Spider

For those who don’t know, I’m Spider! I’ve just gotten my PhD in Mammalian Genetics, having gotten a Masters in Informatics and a Bachelors in Medieval Studies before that. I’ll quite happily ramble about any of them, with the following caveats: an undergraduate degree means I know the basics, but they may be increasingly out of date. And advanced degrees are increasingly specialized in their scope as you go along—you gain the skills to more easily understand things from related specialties, but you only become truly, deeply knowledgeable on very specific topics. However, these topics are not always limited to the field of study generally expected by the degree-granting institution! My focus ended up being significantly divergent from everyone else’s, which resulted in an interesting challenge of communicating my project to others at the institute.

The field I dove into for my PhD was systems genetics. Rather than studying individual genes and how they function, my work examined the wider view: think the difference between a local weather forecast versus modeling the global climate. Both synthesize vast amounts of information, just on different scales and levels of detail.

Many people love studying the tiny details around individual genes, because they can dig down into the mechanisms that make the gene work, how it might break and cause disease, and maybe how to fix those diseases. My love is for the global view of things, which gives you the ability to characterize general statements about how genes are regulated and modified. It’s a field that’s very hard to study without good data that’s complicated to acquire, so it’s a very exciting subject to work on! I’m looking forward to carrying that on into a postdoctoral study, in which I’ll work with a new lab and learn the dreaded skill of grant writing. I’ll be starting this month!

…As Gallus mentioned, my time until then is very much devoted to Baldur’s Gate 3. Happily for me, the new research group I’ll be joining has also been going nuts for Baldur’s Gate 3, so I’ll have a lot to talk about with my coworkers once I’m back to the lab.

In my free time, I’m happy to ramble upon request about the subjects I love, including but not limited to my fields of academic study, my constructed language hobby, scientific ethics and its portrayal in media, creepy-crawlies (always appropriately tagged for people’s phobias), and Baldur’s Gate 3.

…Lots of Baldur’s Gate 3. (I’ve only just reached the Lost Light Inn, please no spoilers!)

Link Roundup and Shoutouts

For those who are interested to see my ramble about why European medical texts in the medieval period tended to be terrible, it’s available here: https://www.tumblr.com/cellarspider/680342023316930560/hi-please-rant-about-medieval-european-medical

Thank you to all those who dug up the name of the academic text I’d forgotten! Its title, in all its wordy glory, is Injuries of the skull and brain, as described in the myths, legends, and folk-tales of the various peoples of the world, with some comments on the significance and reliability of this information in evaluating contemporary concepts as to their nature and lethality by Cyril B. Courville, 1967. It’s a fantastic book, and good lord that title just does not stop

Thank you to fellow spiders @one-spider-from-mars and @vaspider for their comments. We are many. We are mighty.

Thank you to @belovedbright for the fantastic story of the death of Conchobar mac Nessa via brain trauma inflicted by a brain https://www.tumblr.com/belovedbright/727132485919604736

To @doomhamster's question on whether egg whites were used in the medieval treatment of burns: I don’t know! Unfortunately I can’t access the translation of the medical manual I referred to back then (https://worldcat.org/title/1123716578), and the only version I can find online at the moment is in 14th century French (https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Sloane_MS_1977). Egg whites do appear 33 times in the translation, according to the limited ability I have to search the text, and they show up throughout the book.

#spider rambles far too much #good lord there's a lot of you #hello everyone #I guess this is my intro post now

[mariacallous]

A 32-year-old man in Pennsylvania posted a video on YouTube this week where he picked up a clear plastic bag containing the severed head of his father and held it in front of the camera.

“This is the head of Mike Mohn, a federal employee of over 20 years, and my father,” Justin Mohn said in the now-deleted video reviewed by WIRED. “He is now in hell for eternity as a traitor to his country.”

Over the course of the next 14 minutes, he ranted about a myriad of far-right talking points and conspiracies including Black Lives Matter, taxes, the LGBTQ community, and the Biden administration. He also urged viewers to kill all federal employees and seize federal offices, while railing against “far-left woke mobs.” He claimed to be the head of an American militia network known as Mohn’s Militia. “I am now officially the acting president of America under martial law,” he said.

But there was one issue that he focused on more than any other: migrants along the southern US border.

“The federal government of America has declared war on the American citizens and the American states,” the man says. “America will be less protected when the fifth column of illegal immigrants strikes Americans on our own soil.”

He also made demands that the US close its borders to immigrants and for “the mass deportation of the millions of illegal immigrants who have entered the country under the Biden regime, which has put Americans in direct harm.”

Over the past few weeks, right-wing rhetoric around a so-called migrant invasion reached new heights as the standoff between Texas governor Greg Abbott and President Joe Biden’s administration over the removal of razor wire on the Texas-Mexico border has continued. A convoy of far-right extremists is driving to the border and Republican politicians around the country have come out in support of Abbott.

Multiple researchers tell WIRED that the events and rhetoric surrounding the Texas-Mexico border could be linked to the violent video Mohn posted this week. This border controversy and the incendiary rhetoric surrounding it appeared to be something that deeply angered Mohn, highlighted by his YouTube video and the rest of his extensive online footprint of books, pamphlets, music and social media posts, many of which are steeped in far-right conspiracies. In a 2020 essay entitled “America’s Coming Bloody Revolution,” Mohn claims a violent revolution against the government is not only necessary but will succeed.

“For individuals in this conspiratorial mindset who have been subjected to countless hours of extremist narratives and grievances, every new flashpoint—from the Texas border crisis to the Israel/Hamas war to Taylor Swift—is evidence that their worldview is the reality,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, tells WIRED. “This act of violence represents the threat posed by mainstreaming hateful and dehumanizing rhetoric.”

“I listened to his diatribe about 20 times to write it all out and there is zero doubt in my mind that he was influenced by the recent events involving Texas,” Caroline Orr, a behavioral scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who tracks extremism online, wrote on X. “This was expected and there will be others.”

Investigators have not mentioned a motive for the alleged decapitation, but Mohn was formally charged early Wednesday morning with first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, and possession of an instrument of crime with intent. Police said in a statement posted to Facebook that they were alerted to the incident when Mohn’s mother called 911 and said she had come home to find her husband’s decapitated body on the floor of their bathroom. Mohn was arrested 100 miles away on Tuesday evening when he was discovered armed and wandering around a Pennsylvania National Guard training center at Fort Indiantown Gap, AP reported.

Multiple experts believe that extremism and conspiracy theories could still be at the root of what happened. “Some have been quick to write Mohn off as mentally unwell and while this may be accurate, this incident illustrates the threat of anti-government extremism and conspiracy theories, which have become all too common since the 2020 election,” Katherine Kenealy, the head of threat analysis at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, tells WIRED. “He was so steeped in anti-government beliefs that he not only viewed his father as a ‘traitor’ because of his purported job, but selected him as a target because of it.”

Following the alleged murder, far-right figures immediately began boosting conspiracies about the beheading being a false flag in favor of the Democrats—something that has virtually become a reflex action among far-right figures following major news.

One of the main narratives shared was a claim that the Democrats were behind the incident as a way of boosting support for the Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity bill currently making its way through Congress. One of those pushing this narrative was Laura Loomer, a close ally of former president Donald Trump.

“Justin Mohn sure looks like the perfect Democrat Patsy for the sake of demonizing people who call out the invasion on the border, and for the sake of getting support to ban militia,” Loomer wrote on X, adding: “Just another ‘coincidence.’”

“False flag and ‘psyop’ conspiracy theories have rapidly spread online since the incident,” Kenealy tells WIRED. “These narratives detract from the severity of the incident and attempt to minimize the threat posed by anti-government ideologies.”

But despite a long history of Mohn expressing his disturbing views on platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, as well as publishing music on YouTube, Spotify, and Deezer, experts say that it would have been virtually impossible to identify him as a threat before his alleged beheading of this father this week.

“It’s more or less impossible to track this stuff in advance most of the time,” Orr tells WIRED. “We can make an educated guess about what will happen when politicians are putting out inflammatory rhetoric that has incited violence previously, but it’s extremely hard to identify who is going to be the one who responds to the ‘call.’”

As the convoy heads toward the border and rallies are organized in Eagle Pass, Texas, Republican lawmakers, including former president Donald Trump, continue to push violent rhetoric. These kinds of actions, experts say, could lead to potential violence.

“It's hard to determine when acts of violence like this will occur, but given the panic being spread about the border, it's highly likely that more will act on these narratives,” Samantha Kutner, an extremism researcher and CEO of counter-terrorism company GlitterPill, tells WIRED. “Not everyone who gets exposed to conspiratorial worldviews and beliefs and theories about the border wall engages in violence, but the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories does impact certain subsets of the population who are perhaps more vulnerable to that messaging than others.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

Silvopasture gives cows choice in where to be and what to eat, which Karolini Tenffen de Sousa, a postdoctoral fellow at Instituto de Zootecnia in Brazil who specializes in cattle behavior, says can improve their health. Cows can be in the shade when they want, drink water when they want, and graze when they want. “If they don’t experience stress their physiology will be good,” she said. According to a 2017 study from the Center for Agroforestry at the University of Missouri, silvopasture can also extend the grazing season, so that it starts earlier in spring and lasts longer in fall compared to open pasture. Forage also grows better in silvopastures during the hottest times of the summer compared to open pasture, the study found. “The silvopastures are gold during droughts,” Chedzoy said. “The plants don’t wither and burn up like they do in the shadeless pastures.” Chedzoy says the cows’ diet of grass, forage and hay that he harvests in the summer means he doesn’t need to supplement his feed with protein meal or additional roughage the way many farmers do. And having the cows spread out across the forest all year long – instead of being stuck in a barn during the winter – means their waste doesn’t pollute the local watershed. And silvopasture allows for many layers of biodiversity compared to grasslands. They support a wider variety of bird species, more pollinators, bigger and more diverse mammals, and a much wider variety of plant life with more varied root systems. But it also requires careful management and daily rotation, as livestock can damage trees by trampling roots. This wear and tear can go unnoticed for years, and once the damage is visible, it can be too late to save those valuable trees. While research is still in early stages, Project Drawdown, a leading organization promoting climate solutions, has heralded silvopasture as an agricultural solution to the climate crisis due to hopes it can increase carbon sequestration through plants pulling carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, sinking it into soils, and holding it in their own biomass. Alix Contosta, a research assistant professor at University of New Hampshire who focuses on the relationship between land use and climate, says that her research has shown that carbon and nitrous oxide emissions were lower in silvopastures compared to areas that were clear cut or in treeless pasture, meaning cattle on silvopasture has lower emissions. In addition, most silvopastures, like Chedzoy’s, don’t require emissions-intensive fertilizers or feed that has to be grown and shipped to the farm, further reducing the impact on the climate.

#agroforestry #silvopasture #meat #farming #agriculture

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Researchers develop eggshell 'bioplastic' pellet as sustainable alternative to plastic

What if there was plastic-like material that could absorb excess nutrients from water and be used as a fertilizer when it decomposes? That product—a "bioplastic" material—has been created by University of Saskatchewan (USask) chemistry professor Dr. Lee Wilson and his research team, as detailed in a paper recently published in RSC Sustainability. The research team includes Ph.D. candidate Bernd G. K. Steiger, BSc student Nam Bui and postdoctoral fellow trainee Bolanle M. Babalola. "We've made a bioplastic material that functions as an absorbent and it takes phosphate out of water, where elevated levels of phosphate in surface water is a huge global water security issue," he said. "You can harvest those pellets and distribute them as an agricultural fertilizer." Wilson, a member of the Global Institute for Water Security (GIWS), and his research laboratory team, focus on developing forms of "bioplastic"—a material that looks like plastic but is made of biological materials (or biomaterials) that are designed to decompose.

Read more.

#Materials Science #Science #Biomaterials #Plastics #Polymers #Chitosan #Bioplastics #University of Saskatchewan

[brooklynmuseum]

Only two weeks ‘til Africa Fashion! 

Soon, you’ll be able to see for yourself the multidimensional facets of fashion, creativity, and culture on display in this exhibition which features work by mid-twentieth-century designers as well as works by a new generation of designers, collectives, and fashion photographers working in Africa today.

Share in the celebration of opening weekend with Reni Folawiyo, Kehinde Wiley, and Lola Ogunnaike who will lead us through a conversation on Africa’s Influence during Brooklyn Talks on June 22 at 7 pm. Attendees will have after-hours access to the exhibition.

Get your tickets to #AfricaFashionBkM and #BkMTalks:

🎟 https://bit.ly/3Chk6hZ

Africa Fashion is created by the V&A—touring the world. The lead sponsor is Bank of America with major support provided by ALÁRA. Special thanks to OkayAfrica / Okayplayer and Nataal, media sponsors for this exhibition.

Our presentation is organized by Ernestine White-Mifetu, Sills Foundation Curator of African Art, and Annissa Malvoisin, Bard Graduate Center / Brooklyn Museum Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts of Africa, with Catherine Futter, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture, and Rhea Stark, Curatorial Assistant, Arts of Africa, Asia, and the Islamic World, Brooklyn Museum.

#Brooklyn Museum #AfricaFashionBkM #Africa #fashion #design #art #exhibition #New York City #brooklyn #museum #nyc #photography #culture #BKMAfricanarts⁣

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

ASU scientists help resolve 'missing methane' problem of giant exoplanet

In the quest to understand the enigmatic nature of a warm gas-giant exoplanet, Arizona State University researchers have played a pivotal role in uncovering its secrets.

WASP-107b has puzzled astronomers for some time, but recent findings, aided by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, have shed new light on its unusual characteristics.

A remarkable revelation in the exploration of WASP-107b is the unforeseen scarcity of methane, or CH4, in its atmosphere. This intriguing discovery, hinting at a significantly hotter interior and a more massive core than previously hypothesized, has been a focal point of the research conducted by Luis Welbanks, a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU and lead author on a paper published today in Nature.

The high temperature is believed to be a consequence of tidal heating induced by the planet's slightly noncircular orbit.

“Based on its radius, mass, age and assumed internal temperature, we thought WASP-107b had a very small, rocky core surrounded by a huge mass of hydrogen and helium,” Welbanks said. “But it was hard to understand how such a small core could sweep up so much gas and then stop short of growing fully into a Jupiter-mass planet.”

Welbanks and the team's analysis, in conjunction with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, has led to a deeper understanding of WASP-107b's composition and dynamics. Contrary to earlier assumptions, the planet's inflated atmosphere does not result from extreme formation scenarios but rather from internal heat and tidal forces.

WASP-107b, a Neptune-like exoplanet discovered in 2017, has been identified as a pivotal subject for the study of low-density exoplanets. Its unique characteristics, offering valuable insights into planetary evolution and atmospheric dynamics, have been unraveled through advanced spectroscopic techniques by the researchers. The wealth of information about the molecules present in WASP-107b's atmosphere, including the simultaneous detection of carbon-, oxygen-, nitrogen- and sulfur-bearing molecules for the first time in a transiting exoplanet, further underscores its scientific value. 

"The Webb data tells us that planets like WASP-107b didn't have to form in some odd way with a super small core and a huge gassy envelope," said Mike Line, associate professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU. "Instead, we can take something more like Neptune, with a lot of rock and not as much gas, just dial up the temperature, and poof it up to look the way it does."

Overall, the groundbreaking research on WASP-107b underscores the importance of collaborative efforts in advancing our understanding of exoplanets. The research team's contribution, in conjunction with the support of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, has been instrumental in this endeavor.

#science #space #astronomy #physics #news #astrophysics

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Abigail Klein Leichman

Radio waves emitted from the hydrogen gas that filled the universe millions of years ago may contain clues about the cosmic “dark ages” before the formation of the first stars.

This study was led by Prof. Rennan Barkana’s research group, including the postdoctoral fellow Rajesh Mondal. Their novel conclusions have been published in Nature Astronomy.

The researchers explain that while every car has an antenna that detects radio waves, the specific waves from the early universe are blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere. They can only be studied from space, particularly the moon, which offers a stable environment, free of any interference from an atmosphere or from radio communications.

They say that putting a telescope on the moon isn’t an impossible dream, given that the United States, Europe, China and India are engaged in an international space race to return to the moon with space probes and, eventually, astronauts. Their research may intrigue one of these countries to try detecting radio waves from the cosmic dark ages.

Barkana explained: “NASA’s new James Webb space telescope discovered recently distant galaxies whose light we receive from the cosmic dawn, around 300 million years after the Big Bang. Our new research studies an even earlier and more mysterious era: the cosmic dark ages, only 50 million years after the Big Bang.”

Barkana said that conditions in the early universe were quite different from today and that using radio observations to determine the density and temperature of hydrogen gas at various times can reveal what is still to be discovered.

Furthermore, a radio telescope consisting of an array of antennas could accurately determine the amount of hydrogen and of helium in the universe. Hydrogen is the original form of ordinary matter in the universe, from which stars, planets, and eventually life began.

#radio waves #rennan barkana #professor rennan barkana #the universe

[monomythic]

THIS IS THE LONELIEST JOB IN THE WORLD : TO BE AN ACCOUNTANT OF THE HEART.

DOMINIC LEPOULT SERVEILLE ( JACOB ANDERSON ) is a THIRTY year-old POSTDOC FELLOW / PROFESSOR in OXFORD, GREAT BRITAIN. They were brought under Richard’s care when they were only NINE. They are known as THE SCHOLAR because they are PERCEPTIVE but also ALOOF. Let’s see what choice they make regarding the fate of Woodrow House.

BASIC INFORMATION

Full Name: dr. dominic lepoult serveille, ba, mphil, dphil

Nickname(s): nic. please don't call him dom.

Date of Birth: october 3

Age: thirty

Occupation: postdoctorate researcher / junior fellow at oxford university

Current Residence: oxford, united kingdom

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

Hair: black

Eyes: brown

Height: 5'11" / 178 cm

Notable Features: right pinky is slightly crooked; nic broke it falling out of a tree as a child and it didn't quite heal straight.

PERSONALITY & BEHAVIOR:

Strengths: perceptive, empathetic, principled, patient

Weaknesses: aloof, noncommittal, flighty, critical

Quirks: speaks with his hands when impassioned, otherwise quite still. doesn't use filler words—will just straight up pause in the middle of talking. writes all his lists on post-it notes. this has never come back to bite him, literally ever. deadpan sense of humor. more sentimental than you might think.

Vices: fruity gummies, with a particular weakness for sour worms. caffeine addict. a friend took him to get manicures once and he's been hooked ever since.

INTEREST & HOBBIES:

Interests: runs through fixations like the seasons—some notable ones include the mythology era, the coffee era, the cooking era that was actually mostly just a german knives era, and the yoga era. ask him what he's into lately.

Hobbies: reading's the obvious one, but also enjoys baseball. has been following soccer since moving to the uk.

Special Skills/Talents: near-eidetic memory. printer whisperer. rolls a mean joint, though few are privy to this information.

BECOMING A WARD

[ CW : MENTAL ILLNESS (POSTPARTUM PSYCHOSIS), SUICIDE, ALCOHOL USE, ALLEGED FRATRICIDE, PARENTAL DEATH ] the serveille family is (was) notorious for two things: their wealth, and their curse. the former is what brought them into richard woodrow’s circle, while the latter is what brought dominic into richard’s care. the wealth is a story you’ve heard time and time again: a successful family business that became a family dynasty. what began as the serveille family general store has grown into a national franchise chain—though the family is no longer involved with running the day-to-day operations of the business, they still maintain significant stock interests. realistically, the curse is just a series of undiagnosed mental illness, though dominic’s family does have a preternaturally poor track record of boat deaths on his mother’s side. in an ironic twist of events, his mother died of mental illness (killing herself after making an attempt at drowning a newborn dominic in the tub in an episode of postpartum psychosis), while his father died after he fell overboard off a yacht. rumors abound that his brother, the last person to see him, pushed him, but these were never substantiated. in the scuffle after his father’s death, dominic was shuffled around between relatives, each of whom wanted him for the inheritance. richard was ultimately contacted as a neutral, “objective” party (with no skin in the game, so to speak) that could handle dominic until the inheritance matters were settled. nobody quite expected that dominic would be insistent on staying with richard after everything was sorted out . . . but that’s a story for another day.

LIFE AS A WARD

dominic became a ward quite young and was particularly reserved at the beginning of his time at woodrow house, hyperaware of his status as a serveille and (what he believed to be) the contingency of his stay as a ward. even after becoming more secure in his continued status in richard's care, he remained just a touch too self-aware, i think. dominic is the sort of person to equate proximity as proxy, particularly when it comes to things like love and companionship, and sees life more as something to be observed than lived. dominic demonstrates love (and people and experiences and the world as he sees it) by attempting to understand it. this makes him empathetic and levelheaded (usually). this also makes him detached and clinical (often). this often places him a step removed from the rest of the world (certainly the rest of woodrow house), particularly because nic is not the sort of person to seek answers by asking⁠; he is driven by the act of discovery as much as its fruits. there’s so much you can glean from the world by looking, you know; the world is full of so many beautiful details people miss because of how caught up they are in their personal melodramas. among the wards, i imagine him to be the person with answers to every question—i also imagine him to value this greatly. i could see some of the other wards thinking that dominic believed himself to be better than the others because of it (or because of his wealth, or because of his proximity to richard, or because he never really got in trouble. pick ya fave.). re: richard woodrow iii — richard favored dominic, and dominic liked the attention. if you wanted to be uncharitable, you could call dominic sycophantic, and i don’t think you’d be entirely wrong. richard would often treat dominic more like a student than a ward, for better or for worse, and nic never really pushed for anything more. their talks were almost always academic, and functioned more like office hours than any sort of parental interaction. for him, it was a comfortable, uncomplicated dynamic; he likes to imagine it was similar for richard, as well. it perhaps speaks to his privilege that he doesn’t really get other wards with more complicated relationships with richard. richard is literally just the guy who took them in. anything beyond that was something you weren’t entitled to, but something to be cultivated, instead.

AESTHETIC

professor stereotype lol. his hair is always a little messy, no matter how diligently he styles it. style-wise, takes quite a few notes from the late, great richard woodrow iii; nic's wardrobe is primarily ralph laruen sweaters / the more casual end of the brand. whether this is an unconscious emulation of richard or a sense of laziness vis a vis discovering his personal style or a genuine enjoyment of the brand and its aesthetic is one of the few questions dominic finds himself uninterested in pursuing.

EDUCATION & EXTRACURRICULARS

studied at woodrow house until secondary school, at which point nic attended private school, mostly at richard's behest. played on the baseball team as a shortstop/second baseman. was also in the chess club. dominic was somewhat obsessive about researching programs; though he had some reservations about moving to another continent for undergrad, he ultimately felt that oxford's program was the most closely tailored to the research he wanted to do. probably had to be talked into it a bit by one of the other wards. he stayed on for his doctorate because in part because of the opportunities the school afforded him, but also in part because he's collected a lot of junk in his flat, and the idea of moving really does not appeal to him.

THEIR LIFE NOW

dominic has always thrived in academia, but in some ways it's enabled the worst of his habits. he's always told himself that he likes to live as a watcher, that it lends himself a certain objectivity about the world. but an albatross carries weight, even if you're the one to place it on your shoulders. currently, he's completing research—on the psychology of grief and beliefs about death, ironically—and teaching undergrads. just ok as a lecturer, but his tutorials are strangely popular. the fact that he's handsome is a coincidence, surely. the last time dominic visited the house was four years, six months, and fifteen days ago⁠—not that nic’s been counting, or anything. it had been at richard’s behest⁠—some foundation event that he wanted dominic to speak at. the distance isn't all that surprising. dominic was never the most sentimental of the wards, nor the most demonstrative with his affections. he has a tendency to get lost in his research, to eschew the literal for the hypothetical. and don’t get me wrong; he did care. does care. he cares very deeply, in fact, dominic keeps meticulous track of all the loves in his life, past and present and future⁠—for dominic, to be known is to be loved. but to be an accountant of the heart is lonely, it’s been said. to keep score is not necessarily to participate, and dominic, for all his intelligence, has never really understood that life and love are participatory acts as much as they are observable phenomena. he does recognize them as finite resources, however, which is why his research is so important to him. we only get so much time on earth, at the end of the day. there's a joke here about richard's death. but we can save that for later.

#tumblr's gonna do crazy things to the graphic quality i can feel it smh #wrhq.intro #anyway. there's a universe where nic's living succession irl. glad we're not there!

[mindblowingscience]

Fast radio bursts (FRBs), fleeting blasts of energy from space, are a cosmic enigma. “Fast radio bursts are one of astronomy’s greatest mysteries,” says lead author Mohit Bhardwaj, a member of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst (CHIME/FRB) collaboration and a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. “These extremely powerful radio blasts can travel cosmological distances and emit more energy than the sun does in a thousand years, despite lasting only a few thousandths of a second. Even more intriguing is that, though they hit the Earth roughly every minute from all over the sky, their origin is still unknown.”

Continue Reading.

#Science #Space #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Stars #Fast Radio Bursts #FRBs

[beardedmrbean]

The Left: "I'm pro choice. It's her body her choice. No uterus no opinion.

Also the Left: "Justin Timberlake forcing Britney Spears to have an abortion was actually a good thing, because it shows us how wonderful abortion is because it can benefit men and help them stop their girlfriends from ruining his career with her pregnancy. Remember this fellas next time you vote."

(please do not attempt to read an opinion on the subject of abortion in my response here, it's not something I discuss publicly on here, because I don't want to be accused of pissing on the poor)

Wait what?

In excerpts of her upcoming memoir, shared by People, Britney Spears wrote that she became pregnant with Justin Timberlake’s baby and had an abortion because he wasn’t ready to become a father. 

“Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young,” Spears writes in her book, according to People. "If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father."

“To this day,” Spears continues, “it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life."

Spears’ statements underscore the benefits that male partners receive from having access to abortion care — an often overlooked aspect of reproductive health in light of Roe v. Wade’s downfall last year that, if ignored in society and politics alike, perpetuates the idea that abortion is solely a women’s issue.

“Abortion is a highly stigmatized form of healthcare, and women almost always bear the brunt of the stigma and shame around abortion,” said Bethany Everett, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah. “Yet, there are likely many people, including male partners, who don’t want to become parents or have another child, who also benefit from abortion access — benefits that are rarely recognized by the broader public or policy makers.”

Everett, who studies the social and political implications of reproductive health, said Spears' claim that Timberlake did not want to become a parent suggests he was aware that a child could “derail his career,” a reality that “men rarely publicly acknowledge” but is critical to recognize in a post-Roe world. 

......

Spears’ statements underscore the benefits that male partners receive from having access to abortion care — an often overlooked aspect of reproductive health in light of Roe v. Wade’s downfall last year that, if ignored in society and politics alike, perpetuates the idea that abortion is solely a women’s issue.

No uterus no opinion,

I suppose the rules change depending on if the guy is for or against the abortion because why wouldn't they.

...................

Andréa Becker, a medical sociologist and postdoctoral research fellow with the University of California San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program, said this example is “consistent with the literature,” in that “men don’t necessarily have to come forward and tell their abortion stories if they don’t want to, even though it would benefit them immensely.”

This pattern is due in part to a lack of research analyzing how access to abortion impacts male partners, a shortfall that Becker said “reinforces the way we talk about birth control, condom use and pregnancy avoidance as a woman’s responsibility and issue.”

**I usually see two to tango from the pro life side and man needs to control himself from the pro choice side so not sure where they get this from, they must know different people I guess**

“We just forget about the sperm involved in creating a pregnancy,” Becker said. 

As a result, stigmas associated with abortion disproportionately impact women.

“Men are rarely acknowledged as beneficiaries from abortion access so it is much easier for them to avoid the stigma and shame around abortion if they don’t think it’s something that impacts them personally,” Everett said. 

“When men don’t speak up, the burden of having to make decisions about unplanned pregnancies and access to abortion falls exclusively on women — and that’s an equity issue,” said Dr. Brian Nguyen, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. Nguyen runs a research group called the EMERGE Lab that conducts studies aimed at ensuring men recognize their responsibility in women’s reproductive health and gender equity.

While questions still abound about what role male partners should have in the abortion landscape, it’s important to recognize the general lack of knowledge about abortion in the U.S., particularly among some men, Becker said. Consequently, research shows many policy decisions now in place threaten the lives of women and girls who would benefit from abortion care, especially for people of color, migrants, people with disabilities, and those living on low incomes or in rural areas.

"Men do have a place in advocating for reproductive rights,” Everett said. “They can donate to abortion funds and reproductive health care organizations, and, importantly, with the consent of their partners, acknowledge how abortion access has benefited them.”

There it is, which strangely doesn't cover JT pressuring Brittney into having an abortion at all,

I hate double standards, unless they benefit me......(joke)

Make up your mind people, do men have a say or not?

#anonymous #this is so confusing