This paper title is 🔥🔥🔥
"Systematic non-compliance of satellite megaconstellations with IAU brightness limits" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.10834
Congrats to the Global Meteor Network team on a great paper demonstrating how bad SpaceX and other satellite operators are on following through on their promises to make their satellites fainter.
Oh man. Is there a way to automate fixing the reading order on PowerPoint slides? I can't count how many dozens of hours I've spent manually editing these so I can share my slides with students in Canvas and have them pass the Ally checker. (Not PDFs. Don't say Claude) #Academia
Margaret Hamilton, pioneer of software engineering who led the software effort for the Apollo program, dies at 90: https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007
It's a system.
"Insect declines are among the most pressing biodiversity issues of our time, with consequences for ecosystem functioning and human well-being. Fireflies (Coleoptera: Lampyridae) are emblematic insects, whose populations are declining worldwide due to habitat alteration, light pollution, and hydrological disturbance. In Europe, ecological factors shaping firefly abundance in riparian ecosystems are poorly known. The Eurasian beaver Castor fiber, a key ecosystem engineer, profoundly alters stream morphology, vegetation, and hydrology, potentially generating habitat conditions favorable to moisture-dependent insects such as fireflies. In our work, we tested whether beaver activity influences firefly abundances in two European river systems: the Merse river in central Italy and the Danube River in Slovakia. We conducted standardised nocturnal transect surveys comparing sites with active beaver presence to nearby control sites lacking recent beaver activity. The Italian surveys focused on adult Luciola pedemontana, an Italian endemic species, whereas the Slovakian surveys targeted larvae and adult Lampyris noctiluca. We detected a marked effect of beaver presence on fireflies, with significantly higher numbers found at active beaver sites in comparison to controls. This difference was mainly driven by male abundances, since females and larvae were found in very low numbers, or were not directly targeted by our methodological approach in the case of Luciola. Among environmental variables such as temperature, canopy cover, and local humidity, only the occurrence of beavers proved as a significant driver of firefly abundances at the local scale. These findings provide the first empirical evidence linking beaver ecosystem engineering to firefly occurrence in Europe. By promoting wetland heterogeneity, moisture retention, and vegetative structure, beavers may indirectly facilitate firefly populations. Our results, albeit limited to a small spatial scale, pave the way to further research tackling the ecological relationships between fireflies and ecosystem engineers in Europe and worldwide."
#beavers
#CastorFiber
#fireflies
#LuciolaPedemontana
#LampyrisNoctiluca
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10841-026-00829-1
Today was a great harvest day in our demonstration garden!
Pupils from Jerome Academy Nursery and Primary School first had a practical lesson on what causes plants to fail as they grow and how to overcome these challenges organically.
For almost one and a half hours, they asked questions, shared ideas, and learned directly from the garden.
Then came the harvest. They harvested spinach and sukuma wiki, taking the fresh greens back to school for their lunch.
We are happy to share our harvest with a school that has been actively involved in our garden work. Learning by doing makes the lesson meaningful.
#sustainability #GreenSchoolsWeek #foodsecurity #TheOrganicFarming #gardening #nature #ecoyouthsnetworkprojects
Attention high school educators!
"Learn about upcoming professional development to introduce data literacy in the classroom through youth-led air quality investigations."
The BEST AQI program gives students access to "instruments, data, and analysis tools" for investigating air quality in their communities.
Sponsored by The Center for Astrophysics (Harvard & Smithsonian) and Framingham State's Christa McAuliffe Center
Webinar explaining more on Oct 28, 6 to 7 pm EDT
https://cm-center.org/event/bestaqi
I think I'm in a position to drop some tips about how to improve at lecturing, even though I can fuck up with the best of youse.
Shorten feedback loops. If you hear from staff-student liaison committee six weeks later that you fucked it up, that's not good. Some things need feedback in real time (talking too quietly? action off the screen?); other things need next-lecture repair. Make sure there is a quick channel and that you are seen to be live to it.
Bring a friend. Even if you don't co-lecture with a colleague, it's great to have an observer who can help you reflect. But yer actual co-lecturing (with a mentor, with a peer, whatever) gives you a high bandwidth source of feedback on how it's going and a shoulder to cry on, and a co-conspirator about how to make better.
Wean yourself away from slides and scripts. Even if you use them as safety rails, try to be more in the room and less on TV. If bunging your slides online is a worthwhile substitute for lecture notes, then you are putting way too much on a slide. Notes are their own thing and a good thing. Students love seeing you work in real time.
Hundreds of people demonstrated in Berlin against the presentation of the Axel Springer Award to the right-wing oligarch Peter -Thiel — one person even protested during the award ceremony itself on stage. They criticized Thiel’s role in building an authoritarian society and his companies’ involvement in wars. (Article in German)
May the hearth be warm, the company sweet and the harvest bountiful. May your home be filled with laughter, your tables with good food and your heart with peace. Blessed Be.
“Never Again”: Czechoslovakian Hardcore in the Syrian Civil War
Anarchists who participated as internationalist volunteers in the fight to defend Rojava against the Islamic State describe the role that the anti-militarist song “Už Nikdy” (“Never Again”) by the Czechoslovakian hardcore band Kritická Situace played in their experience.
The assassin stared into his victim’s disbelieving eyes as the life slowly drained from them, avoiding the blood still spurting from where his teeth had pierced their jugular. Jarred from his reverie by a woman’s screams behind him, he hopped away, a siren rising in the distance.
I've just added a reviews plugin to the #Mastodon merch shop. If you've bought something from us before, would you mind leaving a review? (If you are okay with using reviews.io) Thank you! (And if this is the first time you hear that there is Mastodon merch, yes, there is, please help yourself, it supports our mission)
"Share your location with us!"
No. Get your own location.
AI slop. Article on bamboo uses "ribozymes" instead of "rhizomes"
If you're slightly different, don't fit in, look mildly different, don't look like most, please be safe, we need you all
Hugz & xXx
Archeologists in the future, "It was likely a religious or ritual object."
A study has found that climate change likely contributed to the avalanche of rock and ice that unleashed devastating floods on the Nepal-Tibet border.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmlyrzve5pwzo
There was "absolutely no doubt that human-induced climate change played a role here in the preconditioning of the disaster", said Dr Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London who co-authored the study.
Turns out the climate modellers were right, and the (fossil fuel lobby) economists were wrong...
While many assume plants are an ‘incomplete’ protein, that’s not true. All plants contain all 20 amino acids, including the nine essential ones, according to a peer-reviewed paper from 2019 in the journal Nutrition Reviews. It’s just that some plants are lower in specific amino acids.
You don’t need all 20 in one meal. Our bodies assemble the necessary proteins from a pool of free amino acids in our bodies over the course of the day
I invite students and staff of Radboud University to join me in this protest. For more information: https://www.cs.ru.nl/~hiemstra/radboud-against-microsoft/