Michael Montour

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth!
#protistsonsky 🧵

Ok palate cleanse time. In case you missed it, here's my most popular post ever

a drawing of a boat heating torwads an iceberg - lower temps still collide with ice but not as badly.

This, by @giacgrassi.bsky.social, remains one of the simplest and best climate visuals

A reminder that Trump's "peace plan" for Ukraine came from Russia going back to 2016. From the Mueller Report:

you should see the story of how it got in macOS www.pacifict.com/Story/

How AP News whitewashes genocide.

TESTING THE CEASEFIRE??

Israel is *BREAKING* the ceasefire. Do you really think this would be the headline if Hamas killed 24 Israelis?

AP doesn’t even have the integrity to say Israel killed Palestinians. “Are dead” is passive to avoid attributing liability.

I don't have that specific model, but yes.

Diagram explaining how the timing between a bullet’s supersonic shock wave (“crack”) and the muzzle blast (“pop”) can be used to estimate the distance between a shooter and a microphone. Three scenarios (T₁, T₂, T₃) show a rifle firing a supersonic bullet past a microphone. In each scenario, the ballistic shock wave cone reaches the microphone before the slower muzzle blast sound. To the right of each diagram is a waveform: a sharp spike labeled the shock-wave “crack,” followed by a later cluster of peaks labeled the muzzle-blast “pop.” The time delay between these events (t_d1, t_d2, t_d3) increases as the microphone is positioned farther downrange. A formula shows distance = t_d / (1/c − 1/v), where c is the speed of sound and v is bullet speed. Text boxes explain: “Downrange timing between shock wave ‘crack’ and muzzle blast ‘pop’ gives distance estimate between shooter and microphone,” and “For investigation of Trump assassination attempt: microphone signal was from the lectern.”

The forensic audio analysis by Rob C. Maher of the 2024 Trump assassination attempt has been peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. This is great news for visual and audio investigations! aes2.org/publications...

How Does Life Happen When There’s Barely Any Light? | Quanta Magazine Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature.

For @quantamagazine.bsky.social, I wrote about an incredible arctic expedition, the deep blackness under the polar ice, and the mind-bending limits of photosynthesis among the organisms that live there

A screenshot of a Facebook post where a person named Andy ask the Well now “What the hell is transgender?” The Royal Canadian Air Force account response with “That’s a pretty big question asked in a pretty small way, Andy. ‘Transgender’ putting describes someone whose gender – who they know themselves to be – doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. It’s not new, and it’s certainly not a fad. People have lived this experience for as long as people have existed; we’re just finally talking about it openly. You don’t have to fully understand it right away, most learning takes time, but we can always start from a place of respect. That’s how decent folks handle things they’re still getting used to.”

Massive shoutout out to whoever handles the Royal Canadian Air Force’s social media account. They responded to every single comment on their already very solid Trans Day of Remembrance post and they responded like this…

Breaking: Administration officials working overtime to find turkeys with sexual assault and crypto scam convictions so the President can pardon them

this is the peace plan we should be pushing

russia goes home and gets nothing. they learn from this that adventures in occupying neighbors has no benefit and only costs

Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..."

https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1

8675309 is prime, and so is 8675311, so if you ever need a middlin'-large pair of adjacent primes to test your cryptographic suite, all you need is a 1980s earworm and a +2 and you're all set.

It’s fun to think about the surgeon who will botch your surgery 20 years from now and what he’s doing at this moment. He just ran all his homework through ChatGPT. He just read that article about vaccines and autism at the CDC website. He just watched an Instagram video about the moon landing hoax.

U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses as hate symbols The military service, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has drafted a new policy that classifies such items “potentially divisive.”

“The U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify the swastika — an emblem of fascism and white supremacy inextricably linked to the murder of millions of Jews and the deaths of more than 400,000 U.S. troops who died fighting in World War II — as a hate symbol”

www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Yesterday, Trump defended the Saudi Crown Prince in the Oval Office.

He said he had “nothing” to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

But I reviewed a call while serving on Trump’s NSC that I believe would be of interest to the Khashoggi family and the American people.

Release the transcript.

Trump's economy is being held up by a massive AI bubble.

A recent study found that of 300 companies that owned generative AI tools, 95% reported zero return on their investments.

We will not entertain a bailout of these companies should this bubble pop.

Let me tell you about the other Epstein files the Trump administration is STILL HIDING — records that aren’t affected by the bill Congress passed today.

Updated with a .torrent file and magnet link: ddosecrets.com/article/ddos...

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:24ee2c7cd672e6d50a053005cabefc6f6962a193&dn=ddosecrets-2025-11-16.aes256&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.opentrackr.org%3a1337%2fannounce

Windows does update.

Now opens Game Bar when webcam turns on.

Industrial paper cutter uses a webcam to detect registration dots.

Game Bar opens on every sheet feed.

I swear half of admin work in 2025 is slapping windows' fingers away from the controls. No! Bad OS. BAD! *gets the spray bottle*

What the U.S. Government Is Dismissing That Could Seed a Bird Flu Pandemic Egg producers suspect bird flu is traveling through the air. After a disastrous Midwestern outbreak early this year, we tested that theory and found that where the wind blew, the virus followed. Vacci...

After a bird flu outbreak tore through Midwestern barns, killing millions of chickens and spiking egg prices, the federal government didn’t investigate if the virus was airborne.

So ProPublica did.

Absolutely terrifying reporting from @natlash.bsky.social:

www.propublica.org/article/bird...

Video from Tuesday morning shows gas pipeline explosion near Rostovka village in Russia's Omsk Oblast.

Prashant Singh in the lab of Tina Iverson at Vanderbilt published this image of the bacterial 🦠flagellar motor, a detailed molecular model made possibly by CryoEM 🔬.

The similarity to mechanical motors are strong enough we can use terms like stator, rotor, rod & gearing to describe it.

False colour though. Hydrogen alpha is red.

PSA: if you are a cannabis grower in the United States or have been thinking about starting to grow, get any seeds you’ve been wanting to buy online before the end of the year. The new changes to the hemp laws make buying seeds online illegal again as of January 1, 2026

did you know we had ~80 huge sturgeon die this year (that we know of) in 2
BC rivers? These deaths occurred during the summer when the sockeye salmon were returning

sturgeon eat many salmon at once, and this may be overloading their metabolic capacity during hot summers 😱

#sturgeonsaturday 🧪👩🏻‍🔬🌎🌐

Green baby head on a gold ring

Part 138 of 200 in historically interesting things to inspire your ttrpg

A cherub carved in malachite, with inset diamond eyes, mounted over a gold ring. United States, late 19th century (damn this looks so evil and cursed lol)

Department of War @deptowar.b... • 7d To all narco-terrorists who threaten our homeland: If you keep trafficking deadly drugs—we will kill you.

okay so why is this post still up & account still existing? actual question. the account isn’t even verified like some of the other fed gov accounts either, but also it shouldn’t matter when they post “we will kill you” along with videos of them killing people.

An empty Russian oil terminal in Novorossiysk. Following the recent Ukrainian strikes, the port has halted crude loading operations. By @mtanderson.bsky.social