Zane Bruce

In genetics:
'Trans-acting' = a gene exerts influence on another gene on a different chromosome.
'Expression' = when a gene produces an effect in the cell

They tagged two of the most common terms in genetic research for defunding because we put fascist tech-bros in charge of our science. 😠

I have a billion dollar movie idea:

Prequel to Jane Austen’s Persuasion, but it’s about Captain Frederick Wentworth’s naval career in the Napoleonic Wars

I just like the idea that way, way back, some early parrots just decided to go fast and kill things.

Yes, they are a basal branch of the parrot family. Murder Parrots!

Antarctic expedition collects evidence that ice sheet melted during previous warm period Sediment collected from deep beneath the Antarctic confirms what scientists feared.

Get in, Losers, we're heading for a Pliocene Interglacial:

www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

Un nuovo postillato di Galileo Galilei - Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze Scoperta in Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze una copia dell'Almagesto postillata da Galileo Galilei

A 1551 print of Ptolemy’s Almagest annotated by Galileo Galilei has been newly discovered in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze! 🌙🔭🪐 #HistSci

Much younger ~700ma Stromatolites from the Brachina Gorge in South Australia, Flinders Ranges.

Macroscale stromatolite with rain weathering, Flinders Ranges.

Cross section through a stromatolite hummock, Flinders Ranges, South Australia.

These are the much younger Flinders Ranges examples - but that photo from Isua seems to show a much larger scale (but no scale marker!) The wiggly bedding with the pointyness is pretty diagnostic, but you also need the larger humpy shapes as well,

Not yet, as I was among a cohort laid off from my institution by neoliberal tories intent on cutting funds to science, so my journal access these days is patchy!

Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up 78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive. 14% say it's a 10x improvement. So where's the flood of new software? Turns out those productivity claims are bullshit.

I'm not even sure that tons of software is being produced. It certainly wasn't the case when this was written in September 25 mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the...

NYT image of the Isua stromatalitic structures

I can't currently access the paper, but the images of the Isua structures do seem to look like stromatalites I've seen in the Brachina Gorge in South Australia, with a similar cross sectional structure.

Maximum wave height plot for 16/2/2026 at the mouth of Wellington Harbour NZ, showing wave heights climbing from 1, to 2, then a step up to sustained heights between 5 and 10 metres over the 15th, to a peak of 13 metres early on the 16th of February.

So the wave buoy at the entrance to the harbour recorded a 13 meter wave this morning:

Don't think too hard about all the grogans surfing in on that from the failed privately owned sewage centre that had to shift to the short outfall pipe again in the storm last night.

Sometimes, the three are one, and it's being blown at you horizontally by gales.

Ok, now its worse:

Earth.nullschool.net image of the South Pacific and Tasman sea showing the current storm hitting New Zealand and the 3 hourly rain accumulation overly showing 20-30mm of rain

How it's going:

The three waters are floodwater, fecal contaminated water and nitrate contaminated water—

It's wimdy.

Wellington Water chair Nick Leggett resigns over Moa Point sewage disaster Nick Leggett said the failure of the treatment plant was deeply serious and had affected the environment, public health and the community.

Nick legs it from Moa Point, saying it's now time for someone else to clean up his shit
www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

What lovely idealism about human behaviour you have.

Even if they do leave the building, they take time to save their work, finish that email, pack their bag, etc. Thus ensuring in an actual event, they're one of the casualties.

Sighs in Health and Safety rep who's experienced most types of accidents firsthand as a participant or bystander. On sites where there are regular tests of the fire alarm, there are people who will ascertain if it's a test, and then either take their time to evacuate, or will just keep working.

I suppose what I left off this would be the incipient/buried rangefront faulting under the Canterbury Plains that introduced itself with the Darfield 'quake in September 2010.

Screenshot describing an incident where a fire alarm went off, and someone in the office checked with the work slack channel to see if it was a real alarm, and the AI assistant assured them that it was a scheduled test and not to leave the workplace. It was a real fire alarm...

So, it's ok if we use these chatbots to run safety critical messaging systems and stuff in our internal systems, right?

Current working idea is that the historical injury photos of my right retina either pinged an automated 'Gore' image moderation function, or, given the round shape with veins, maybe a 'Boob' automated moderation function.

Most of the generic plate boundary/subduction zone/continental breakup ones were done so that they could be strung together as A1 printouts and then coloured and annotated for school students. We also used a set for the rock display at my childhood schoolhouse, which became a museum at Staveley.

I'm a metric kinda person, but my thumb is exactly an inch across for hand specimen size comparisons.

A t-shirt graphic showing a geological cross sections of a Normal Fault, then a Reverse Fault, and then an image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with the caption 'Engineer's Fault'.

There's always this one, which we did for the student geol. society T-shirt one year:

A pen and ink cross section of the geology of the Mid Canterbury area, showing the Torlesse greywackes that accreted to Zealandia between the Permian and the Cretaceous, overlaid with the Mt Somers Volcanics which erupted during the later stages of Zealandia rifting off Antarctica, and then the marine transgressive and regressive sediment covering from becoming a quiescent microcontental fragment in the pacific prior to the inception of the Alpine Fault and modern Taupo Volcanic Zone and associated deformation.

And a wee sketch cross section of where i grew up, and the rocks I ran around on.

Pen and ink sketch cross section of the volcanism of the late Cretaceous in the Canterbury area of the Zealandia continental block as it was extended and drifted north after rifting off Antarctica, with localised tholeiitic magmatic systems having different volcanic expression depending on how thick the Torlesse crust was as they erupted through it.

A more NZ specific one - what was going on in the Canterbury region ~95-100 million years ago as Zealandia, now welded to the paleopacific after the collision with the Hikurangi plateau (and possibly a spreading ridge on the Phoenix plate) jammed the old gondwana margin, we rifted, and drifted north

Pen and ink sketch cross section of a back arc basin spreading zone and a passive margin with fossilised old subduction zone.

And the back arc basin and quiet passive margin I tacked on behind the island arc sketch

Pen and ink cross section sketch of a mid ocean spreading ridge with a hotspot volcano to one side.

A mid ocean ridge. With bonus hot spot island volcano.