Preexisting research into bugs circling lights was mainly to see what properties of the lights attracted the bugs, which is how we know that certain LED lights can prevent the bugs from flying towards it.

This study, however, showed that the bugs aren't trying to get to the light at all. The light triggers their dorsal reflex, causing them to recalibrate their sense of direction to keep the light at a fixed angle from their perspective. The bugs think they are going in a straight line, forever, and they never get to where they are going.

Serotine bats are the first mammals known to mate without penetration, new research suggests

:bat-pog:

We’ve all heard about antibiotic resistance, but is it also possible for bacteria to develop resistance to common disinfectants, like bleach, alcohol and soap?

I was reading this story and was sort of confused as to what was going on

Like I'm not even an expert but I coulda told you that nature already knows what to do with the leaves (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/to-rake-or-not-to-rake-expert-tips-for-eco-friendly-autumnal-lawn-care). This isn't just conservatives, who usually do the yard work themselves, but liberals too. Except the libs hire immigrants to do landscaping, rake the leaves, and then leave them in bags for trash guys to pick them up where they'll go to a landfill or be burned or whatever.

Most common exposure routes include insecticides, pesticides, cosmetics, press-finish fabrics, and pharmaceuticals.

Today is the 35th anniversary of Buran's first and only orbital flight. RIP.

Here is a direct link to the photos.

So, I've started working my first "real job" last month, and it's pretty decent. Good benefits, decent pay, strong union despite being tech, and for reasonable hours (6 per day). The problem is that I took this job mainly so I can continue grad school. Currently I'm finishing up my master's, so I'm managing to conciliate doing both OK since I don't need to be in uni premises for anything anymore, but I'm unsure about being able to do a PhD later.

I figure once I work for a few months and get to work remote for most of the week I can do 6 hours of office work plus 6 hours of research work, or alternatively 6 + 4 and compensate by doing some research on the weekends. However I've heard conflicting feedback about this plan. One of my roommates says this is a horrible idea and that I'll become the Joker after a couple months, while one of my coworkers said I should wait a bit to see if this job won't demand too much of me (still in training currently), but that he thinks it's doable. Both are currently doing/have done a PhD at the same uni I want to enroll in. Also is 6ish hours per day even enough for a PhD?

Additional info: Public latam uni, so no tuition but the government grants are nothing to write home about (before getting the job it was barely enough to get by, and that was with help from my folks). The advisor I'm aiming for can be demanding at times but is also really nice and is new faculty. The PhD is in compsci (ML/NLP) and I plan to continue exploring a niche I'm already familiar with. Work schedule is fairly flexible, save for the fucking meetings (agile delenda est). A lot of credits can be done by getting good publications instead of doing uni courses.

Edit: Thanks everyone! I kind of feared "obviously no you moron" would be the general consensus. I probably got too optimistic about getting to keep doing research immediately. I'll wait for things to settle down and reevaluate my options. There's some mechanisms at the job that are supposedly designed so you can continue education, but my impression is that those are mostly reserved for MBA types, infrequently offered and also really contested, but I should ask around some more to be sure. I also know some better sources of funding are available once you enroll, but seeing my friend applying for those and failing repeatedly discourages me from betting on it. Worst comes to worst I'll save up some money, try doing this for a bit and quit if it proves unsustainable. Again, thanks for the input!

It's not a one-off mistake, it seems systemic for some journals.

I think these 3 things are fascinating in a similar way. They all involve encoding some information or process in a way that could be replicated independent of the details of the underlying physical mechanisms. It really hammers home for me that life can be seen as a series of increasingly complex abstractions where the implementation details aren’t necessarily the defining factors. Some of that is probably because human intuition is messy and our taxonomies, though increasingly reliable, have started from a place of working backwards from that intuition.

Just had this thought stuck in my head and needed to write it out a bit.

Really neat USDA facility. It's the national backup bank which holds reserves for research, breeders, and conservation efforts. It has a 4-floor vault which stores animal/plant/microbe/insect samples- seeds, budwood, sperm, eggs. The vault is heavily reinforced to the point that it can withstand a train impact and is mostly kept at -18C and 25%~ relative humidity so that samples can be stored for decades or longer. Some samples are a neat pig, others are noxious weeds or corn with a specific target gene, others are entire ecosystems catalogued so that we can reseed them from scratch.

Some of the samples are stored bagged on racks. That section had thousands upon thousands of bags filled with seeds. Others are kept in large liquid nitrogen vats. I got photos of the insides of two, one with large canisters that are filled with individual seed collections and another with 6 species of sperm from who knows how many breeds/specimens represented. I confirmed that it's bee cum. The vats are loaded arbitrarily based on which has space available and they only last 20-30 years at a cost of $35k each.

They also have a neat clonal propagation room for when they're checking to make sure that samples are still viable. Apparently someone is growing out all of the bananas today. Like the national reserve of bananas.

Their infographic says they have 789k seed samples, 12k clones, 114k microbes, and 957k animal samples from 51k animals of 17 categories. Also the Smithsonian Institute's coral gene samples. That's outdated and apparently the collection is much larger now, growing by like 10k samples per month.

Fuck I want to work there.

headline edited because it's not a war on Hamas, it's an indiscriminate genocidal war on Palestinians

66 million years ago, a massive 17km wide asteroid impacted what is now the modern day Yucatan peninsula at 25km/s. The immediate collision was so violent that the resulting crater floor was briefly deeper than the Mariana Trench while the crater rim was briefly taller than Mt. Everest. In total, it killed off 75% of all animal and plant species on this planet, including the dinosaurs.

The linked video is a real time demonstration of the catastrophic events that would occur within the first hour after impact if a similar asteroid were to hit Earth today.