Recent searches

No recent searches

Search options

Not available on lingo.lol.
lingo.lol is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A place for linguists, philologists, and other lovers of languages.

Administered by:

Server stats:

53
active users

lingo.lol: AboutProfiles directoryPrivacy policy

Mastodon: AboutGet the appKeyboard shortcutsView source codev4.4.3

#SciComm

29 posts26 participants6 posts today
Danish Akhtar

If we multiply Zero (0) with Infinity (∞), then we can't determine the result. This is one of the 7 indeterminate forms in mathematics. I think this can be expressed philosophically as "When an Immovable Object meets an Unstoppable Force, the result is Cannot be Determined."

#mastodon#math#science
The Inquisitive Biologist

This week at the library: No new books; instead, I took two huge piles of books to #DinoConUK and got them ALL signed (thanks @TetZoo and @markwitton for humouring me rocking up with a stack of your books). Overall, an excellent convention on which I will have more to say soon.

And yes, that is the just-published rerelease of Dougal Dixon's The New Dinosaurs from Breakdown Press! Keep your eyes peeled for a review in the near future.

#Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon #Dinosaurs #Palaeontology #Paleontology @princetonupress

Danish Akhtar

Every time you look at the stars in the sky, you are actually looking into the past because light from those stars takes many years to reach your eyes. You are, in fact, looking at the older images of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. Isn't it fascinating?

#Mastodon #science #physics #universe #stars #sun #moon #facts #knowledge #cosmos #space #sky #night #astronomy #research #scicomm #insights #fediverse #opinion #discover #explore
#WritingCommunity #writing #quote #SilentSunday

Sci_Burst

The life of these two #scicomm showgirls also includes… publishing papers! ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Outside the pod studio, we’ve dropped three new papers so far this year:

🌟 @theEllamo as co-author on a paper about #inclusive scicomm (as part of the CPAS Inclusive Science Communication Collective)

🌟 @1sabelR as corresponding author on a paper about technological transitions in 19th-century #Australia

🌟 @1sabelR as corresponding author on another paper about multi-methods in #cybernetics & #archaeology

Danish Akhtar

Do you know how Big Infinity (∞) is? Divide the Entire Observable Universe into an equal Number of Planck's Cube Space. Now put a digit in each of those Planck's Cube Spaces. Use all of these individual spaces to get an Extremely Huge Number. That huge 'Number' will still NOT be Infinity. 🤯

#mastodon #math #science #physics #infinity #infinite #knowledge #cosmos #space #astronomy #scicomm #universe #Planck #number #∞ #writing #opinion #research #insights #fediverse #explore #discover #digit

GrrlScientist ⧖ Ⓥ :verified:

New-To-Science Poison Dart Frog Named to Honor Afro-Colombian Music

"This newly discovered poison frog may represent a evolutionary step on the pathway towards developing brilliant warning coloration associated with other poison dart frogs."

#SciComm by @GrrlScientist

#frog #herpetology #NewSpecies #Colombia #Music #evolution #ecology medium.com/grrlscientist/new-t

Continued thread
Daniel MacPhee 🔬🧬🧫🇨🇦

Also known for this article: The importance of stupidity in scientific research
#Science #Scicomm
journals.biologists.com/jcs/ar

The Company of BiologistsThe importance of stupidity in scientific researchI recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
GrrlScientist ⧖ Ⓥ 🇺🇦

Super Enzyme Regulates Testosterone Levels In Male Ruffs

"A single gene in the shorebird species known as ruffs controls the blood concentrations of testosterone in males, and this in turn affects their appearances and behavior"

#SciComm by @GrrlScientist

#testosterone #Androgens #hormones #MolecularBiology #Enzymes #shorebirds #birds #ornithology #GeneExpression #aggression medium.com/grrlscientist/super

*
Dr Emma Rehn

Introducing Deep Time Detectives! 🔎

Deep Time Detectives is an educational resource developed by CABAH on Australia's deep history, featuring a series of animated videos.

I drew a collection of original illustrations and animated elements for these videos

Happy #NationalScienceWeek !

emmarehn.com/portfolio/deep-ti

And check out the full resources here: epicaustralia.org.au/resource/

#educationalresource#SciComm#education
*
Tanguy Fardet

Today I learned, from @NationalGeographic that potatoes probably came from a hybridization event with tomatoes!

nationalgeographic.com/science

Besides the "fun fact", this is quite important for researchers to try to recreate potatoes that are more resilient: one of the researchers from the study is described as "on a mission to develop a new hybrid potato, one that has fewer bad mutations and can also be grown from seeds, as opposed to modern potatoes, which cannot." (today you grow a potato from an elder one)

Edit: I was made aware that this last part is actually incorrect as, though potatoes are self-incompatible, one can get potato seeds from two distinct individuals.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#B

www.nationalgeographic.com · Scientists finally know where potatoes come from—and the answer is very weirdBy Bethany Brookshire
#agriculture#tomato#tomatoes
TrendingLive feeds
About