MU-Peter Shimon 🀄

Handaxe and pyrite fragments from palaeosol.

Heat shattered handaxes from Barnham.

Earliest evidence of making fire 🏺🧪
Rob Davis, @chrisbstringer.bsky.social et al
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Evidence of fire-making on a 400,000-year-old buried landsurface at Barnham (UK), where heated sediments and fire-cracked flint handaxes were found alongside two fragments of iron pyrite.

Portrait of Mary Anning

‘Mary Anning’:
Swiss Animation Unearths the Childhood Backstory of a Legendary Fossil Pioneer in Annecy Playing Feature 🧪
variety.com/2025/film/gl...

“Mary Anning” made its world premiere at the Annecy Animation Festival

Proximal cause: Congress
Ultimate cause: The people who elected them.

As a Congressman, James Garfield had stated at the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1876:

Yes. A lot more...
Courage is contagious.

Bender: "Yup. We're boned."

"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Phylogenetic relationships of the bacterial flagellar stators and their non-flagellar homologs.

🎵 Round, round, get around, I get around...
- The Beach Boys

How life first got moving:
Nature's motor from billions of years ago

Evolution and structural diversity of the MotAB stator:
Insights into the origins of bacterial flagellar motility 🧪
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

A bee buzzes by a hybrid magenta-and-yellow snapdragon. © Daria Shipilina / ISTA

Colorful Snapdragons in the Valleys of the Pyrenees Offer a Rare Window Into How Evolution Happens

Genealogical Analysis of Replicate Flower Colour Hybrid Zones in Antirrhinum 🧪
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Paints a vibrant picture of how these plants exchange genetic information.

The position of telonemids and prometheids in the tree of eukaryotes

Phylogenetic position and mitochondrial genome evolution of “orphan” eukaryotic lineages 🧪
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Results further simplify and illuminate the evolutionary relationships between eukaryotes.

Highly represented Borg protein subfamilies.

🤖 Resistance is futile...

Convergent evolution of viral-like Borg archaeal extrachromosomal elements and giant eukaryotic viruses 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If Borgs are giant archaeal viruses they would fill the gap in the tri(um)virate of giant viruses of all three domains of life.

Generation and selection of engineered DNA damage sensors specific for γH2AX.

Stunning real-time images of DNA damage and repair

Engineered chromatin readers track damaged chromatin dynamics in live cells and animals 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A novel protein probe with broad application potential for DNA damage research.

Shark stepping on a LEGO

;-)

Aggregated three-dimensional py–GC–MS data for samples in each of our nine categories: modern animals; modern plants (non-photosynthetic); modern plants (photosynthetic); fossil microbes (photosynthetic); fossil coal, wood, oil shale; fossil animals; modern fungi; carbonaceous meteorites; and synthetic samples. These graphs display peak intensities (vertical scale, normalized to the highest peak intensity in each category) for 3,240 elution time bins or “scans” (right-hand scale) and their mass spectra over 150 m/z bins (left-hand scale).

A machine-learning-enhanced approach to chemical analysis is drastically expanding the chemical record of life on Earth.

Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis–GC–MS and supervised machine learning🧪
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

SI in a flow reactor: a proposed experiment for studying SI inspired by the fitness value of information, from Ref. [72]. (a) The system consists of a population of simple replicators, such as the photocatalytic molecular replicators synthesized by Liu et al. [83]. (b) The replicators are placed in a flow reactor and subjected to fluctuating environments which favor different replicators, e.g., weak (green) light or strong (orange) light. The population is also allowed to reequilibrate during inactive periods (no growth). (c) Productivity (replicator production per time) depends on environmental statistics as well as internal parameters, such as exchange reactions and reequilibration timescale λ. At intermediate timescales, the system's memory may provide a source of side information, increasing productivity in proportion to the mutual information between successive environments [72].

Life is just matter with meaning

Physics of Life:
Exploring Information as a Distinctive Feature of Living Systems🧪
journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems.

Rich vs Wealthy

Rich is overrated... I'd rather be wealthy.

A wealthy man is one whose children run into his arms,
even when his hands are empty.
(Paraphrased from Mark Bradford)

Diagram summarizing the study's findings, showing how shear forces in the magma flowing through the volcanic conduit can control how and when gas bubbles form. Roche et al. 2025/Science/ETH Zürich

🔆 Good morning!

I like to brew my coffee like a volcano...
Hot and bubbling.

The physics of coffee bubbles and volcanic eruptions are surprisingly similar.

Shear-induced bubble nucleation in magmas 🧪
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

IDK... I could be a snob AND still like spam.

"A Pox on Fools"
An important and timely book.

My Cousin Vinnie

That's a hilarious scene, of many in that movie...
And, I still pronounce it "yutes".

Putin with mini Trump

Predictable... but yes, still exhausting.

Drop a lawyer

Brownie, you're doing a hack of a job.

Being a disaster doesn't make one a SME or able to manage one.
And in comparison, this Phillips guy makes Michael Brown look down right competent.

Friedrich Nietzsche on the Ubermensch: "Our way upward, from species to the super-species" The Ubermensch: A crab

I blame Nietzsche.

Tempting to edit that title...

"The Revolting GOP Women"

Thank you Republicans... I couldn't have screwed your country without you. -Putin

Billboard Dr Nick Riviera Tell me what, and I'll cut

Hi, everybody!

Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney

Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney.

Now that's some scary stuff!

"AYKM?"

- Dr. Noonien Soong

Well... then I guess the next round of drinks are on you.

Star Trek episodes you've watched more than six times with a gif.

That would be all of them.

Cheers!