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Kevin Palmer (@krp234) — Jun 17 This is a muon, aka a secondary cosmic ray. They often show up on long exposure images. But this is the longest one I've seen at 176 pixels wide [Embedded photo: night-sky long-exposure landscape photo over a canyon/river, with a magenta/purple aurora-like glow amid clouds and stars, greenish glow on the horizon. Inset zoomed panel shows a bright diagonal magenta-green streak identified as the muon track, with a line pointing to its location in the full image. Photo credit watermark: "Kevin Palmer Photography".]

whimsy loh... @SexyLikeMeio... · Feb 15 TIL about the existence of blebbisomes (large extracellular vesicles that contain everything but a nucleus) and they are named this because they, in the technical parlance, "bleb around" it's so WHIMSICAL i'm so happy bleb bleb bleb [screenshot of a scientific text, highlighted: "Timelapse imaging revealed that blebbisomes continuously bleb for at least 72–96 h. As membrane blebbing requires a..."]

Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty · 11h Lab leaks are extremely common, but usually benign. Last month, I went to a conference in the UK. I was talking to some plant biologists who work with Arabidopsis thaliana, a weed in the mustard family. Arabidopsis seeds are tiny, like grains of pollen, and they stick to clothing. These seeds are often engineered with GFP, for example, such that they fluoresce green. And, being so small, they inevitably get carried (accidentally) outside the lab. One plant biologist told me that that their lab group goes outside and picks all the Arabidopsis plants they can find in the areas around campus each year. They then bring these plants back into the laboratory and sequence them. Last year, half of these "wild" plants had GFP. [photos: left — tiny brown seeds next to a marker pen tip for scale; right — a seedling glowing green under fluorescence, showing GFP expression in the root/hypocotyl]

From @trevorcousins_, @aylwyn_scally, and @richard_durbin: "Here we introduce a coalescence-based hidden Markov model. . . . [W]e present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%. Immediately after their divergence, we detect a strong bottleneck in the major ancestral population. We inferred regions of the present-day genome derived from each ancestral population, finding that material from the minority correlates strongly with distance to coding sequence, suggesting it was deleterious against the majority background. Moreover, we found a strong correlation between regions of majority ancestry and human–Neanderthal or human–Denisovan divergence, suggesting the majority population was also ancestral to those archaic humans." [Diagram: population-genetics tree chart showing two ancestral lineages "A" and "B" diverging at ~1 Ma, admixing at ~300 ka with B contributing ~20%, branching further into Neanderthals/Denisovans, Khoisan, West Africans, and Non-Africans, with a ~2% Neanderthal/Denisovan admixture into non-Africans around 30-100 ka.] 11:56 AM · Feb 8, 2026 · 697 Views