Rebecca R Helm

Come join our community science program!! Including online monthly nerd jams meetings open to the public.

Please share far and wide, and welcome our new community coordinator @colinjanthony.bsky.social! 🧪🌊

I just flew on United and a middle seat in the middle row cost >$250. It shocked me that anyone would charge that much for the worst seat on a plane. Now it makes sense.

Come join our community science program!! Including online monthly nerd jams meetings open to the public.

Please share far and wide, and welcome our new community coordinator @colinjanthony.bsky.social! 🧪🌊

Also @jarodkanderson.bsky.social !

They are the best 🥰

Thanks!

Smithsonian removes Trump from impeachment exhibit in American History Museum A temporary placard, on display since 2021, described the president's historic impeachments. Officials said the exhibit was restored to an earlier version following a review of legacy content.

Under pressure from the White House, the Smithsonian has removed Trump from the impeachment exhibit at the History Museum.

The exhibit now says that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal,” referring to Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton.

The exhibit now looks the way it did in 2008.

Does anyone have a link to the article please?

“My entire being shakes and trembles out of fear of the Day of Judgment,” Amital added, “for as it is known, for the sin of chillul hashem [desecration of God], even Yom Kippur does not atone.”

A family of mature and very wiry collared parachute mushrooms grow from a blackened bit of decayed stick, held between two fingers in a green summer forest. All photos by me

Here are some nice mushrooms

The forklift this very happy man 😀 is driving is an ATX-3000 Sidewinder omnidirectional lift truck. It utilizes 'Mecanum wheels', a series of rubber rollers oriented at 45° angles.

The net results of this system is that the vehicle doesn't need steering: it can move in any direction by....

Nearly 4,000 NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program The employees who have chosen to leave the agency amount to about 20% of NASA's workforce.

4,000 NASA workers are leaving through deferred resignation. "The cuts amount to an estimated 20% of NASA's workforce" www.npr.org/2025/07/26/n...

I’m a marine biologist in film. I wear red beanie hats, live on a luxury sailboat, and am studying how to communicating with whales.

I’m so broken. I saw this and went zoo polar bear, dog, plant, maybe a root? Is it one of those weird parasitic plants with the knobby roots? And then, and only then, did my brain think turtle

So… what you’re saying is, it’ll be cheaper to pay human developers than us an AI?

How interesting….

let me write my jellyfish book GIANT FRILLY LIPS you cowards

A purple jellyfish with a blue background, image from wikipedia

Image of pink jelly with blue background and cauliflower like mouth. Image by jonlape on iNaturalist, modified by @RebeccaRHelm with the text "this cauliflower is one giant bundle of a million microscopic mouths.

Image of pink jellyfish on blue background. By jonlape from iNaturalist

The cauliflower jelly is so named because it has a million microscopic mouths tucked inside giant frilly lips that, collectively, look like a cauliflower. It uses this madness of mouths to filter microscopic food from the water. It also has a knobby top, but it's function is a scientific mystery.

🌊❄️🧪 🇦🇶 Please share:

We have learned that the National Science Foundation is moving ahead with plans to decommission the U.S. Research Vessel/Ice Breaker Nathaniel B. Palmer this October.

If you care about Antarctic research, please read on (1/n)

hahahaha

I lived in Providence for 6 years and was so upset when I drove into DC and picked up the "DMV" radio station 😅

Are you also based in the DMV????

A DC white morph of a gray squirrel eating a nut by a tree

A DC black morph of a gray squirrel sitting on concrete

DC black and white squirrels are so neat!

Comic. The Most-Observed Animal and Plant in Each State on iNaturalist. (Not the most common species in the state, just the one people have reported the most times.) [labeled map of the US] WA: Mallard/Western Sword Fern. OR: Mule Deer/Western Ponderosa Pine. CA: Western Fence Lizard/California Poppy. HI: Green Sea Turtle/‘Ōhi’a Lehua. ID: Mallard/Big Sagebrush. NV: Common Side-Blotched Lizard/Creosote Bush. MT: White-Tailed Deer/Common Yarrow. WY: American Bison/Sticky Geranium. UT: Mule Deer/Utah Juniper. AZ: Ornate Tree Lizard/Saguaro. CO: Mule Deer/Great Mullein. NM: Mule Deer/Creosote Bush. AK: Moose/Fireweed. ND: American Bison/Prairie Rose. SD: American Bison/Hoary Vervain. NE: American Robin/Common Milkweed. KS: Ornate Box Turtle/Amur Honeysuckle. OK: Pond Slider/Eastern Redcedar. TX: Northern Cardinal/Pinladies. MN, WI, IL: Common Eastern Bumble Bee/Common Milkweed. IA, MI: White-Tailed Deer/Common Milkweed. MO: Brown-Belted Bumble Bee/Amur Honeysuckle. AR: Three-toed Box Turtle/Chinese Privet. LA: Green Anole/Baldcypress. IN: American Robin/Amur Honeysuckle. OH: Eastern Pondhawk/Virginia Springbeauty. KY: Common Box Turtle/Amur Honeysuckle. TN: American Robin/Christmas Fern. MS: Northern Cardinal/Pale Pitcher Plant. AL: Gulf Fritillary/American Sweetgum. GA: Green Anole/American Sweetgum. FL: Brown Anole/White Beggarticks. NY: Eastern Gray Squirrel/White Snakeroot. PA: White-Tailed Deer/Garlic Mustard. WV: White-Tailed Deer/Great Rhododendron. VA: White-Tailed Deer/Eastern Poison Ivy. MD: White-Tailed Deer/Wineberry. DE: Fowler’s Toad/American Pokeweed. NC: Eastern Gray Squirrel/Christmas Fern. SC: Northern Cardinal/American Sweetgum. NJ: Spotted Lanternfly/Common Mugwort. VT: Common Eastern Bumble Bee/Eastern White Pine. NH: White-Tailed Deer/Eastern White Pine. MA: Common Eastern Bumble Bee/Eastern White Pine. CT: Common Eastern Bumble Bee/Striped Wintergreen. RI: American Herring Gull. ME: American Herring Gull/Canadian Bunchberry.

iNaturalist Animals and Plants

xkcd.com/3118/

I love this! May we, in the little District of Columbia, hang out too, please? 🥺

We may not have representation in the government, but we're repping on iNat 🎉

Butterfly wings and grizzly bear jaws
are both successful pathways to survival.

There is no single, best way to thrive.

Same and same.

The article claimed that there are often not enough people to staff the phones, but if that's the case, why aren't we fixing THAT problem on a human level?

Maybe some good will come of this by highlighting the very real problems this tech is trying to solve.

Many layers to this, etc.

But.

I'm so tired of feeling like a sentient meat popsicle, lost in a sea of human-like machines. Everything is being optimized for disconnection. Impersonal interaction. Is it too much to ask that, at our worst moments, we show up for each other?

🐙 This Octopus shifts from deep to active rest while "dreaming" for #MicroscopyMonday. REM‑like sleep (color bursts and twitches) filmed in real time by Horst Obenhaus @octoscience.bsky.social‬, currently a 2025 Whitman Fellow at @mblscience.bsky.social. #NESM

#Octopus #Neuro #SleepScience #MBL

Love it!

Ok 🥲

The Real Science Experiments That Inspired Frankenstein With the Halloween season mere months away, the time has come to start thinking about what frightening reads to line up for ourselves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; o...

The Real Science Experiments That Inspired Frankenstein www.openculture.com/2025/07/the-...