with two (2!!) days left before the new Twitter blue sends all of my tweets into obscurity, now seems like a good time to take y’all on a journey with me.

This question has been living rent-free in my brain for 1.5 months now: are male seahorses pregnant??? A thread The way I see it, there are a few different ways to answer this question.

There's the pedantic answer, the biological answer, and the philosophical answer. I'm sure you know which one I think is more fun.

Let’s talk about sexual dimorphism in humans.

This is something that comes up a lot in Jordan Peterson & incel circles. And it sets you up for terrible answers, because it fundamentally misunderstands the question.

A better question: why are human males and females so SIMILAR. The story of human evolution is one of increasing sameness.

I know, this flies in the face of every “men are hunters, women are gatherers” piece of evolutionary psychology you have ever read.

I think something else we need to discuss is that this isn’t happening in secret. People notice — students and postdocs and lab managers… But science can be very hostile to whistle-blowers.

Two years ago, I was approached by a postdoc managing a database for a high-profile lab.

https://twitter.com/erineaross/status/1550925606946160641

This post-doc found several instances of manipulated data. They’d brought it to their lab head’s attention & the university, thinking it was a mistake. Their concerns were ignored, and fearing retaliation, this post-doc backed down.

Ethics watchdogs have been raising concerns about manipulated western blots in research for years — but this is completely wild — and pretty terrifying, for Alzheimer’s research, and research in general.

science.org/content/articl… It’s not a new problem. Western blots are easy to manipulate & copy-paste. And there have been a lot of high-profile retractions:

retractionwatch.com/2020/09/30/aut…

the ridiculous thing about ivermectin isn’t that people are treating themselves daily with horse paste.

it’s that people decided it was safe to treat themselves daily with a poison that’s so good at being a poison we gave it a freaking Nobel prize for poisoning. Roundworms are an animal. They’re an invertebrate. Ivermectin binds to a type of pore in nerves and muscle and eventually paralyzes them to death.

We’re lucky: we only have those cells in our spines and brains, and ivermectin is not very good at crossing the blood-brain barrier.

A person with COVID-19 just *died* in a Roseburg waiting room because the hospital is so crowded. Literally everyone has a duty to ease the burden on our hospitals right now.

If you are unvaccinated, you should stay home, at least for now. everyone should be taking precautions. Remember March of 2020, when people stayed home before it was required? Because we were all so afraid of seeing what was happening in hospitals around the world happening here?

It’s happening here, now. But we’re still holding major sporting events and outdoor concerts.

Today’s @OregonGovBrown and @OHAOregon press conference makes it sound as though swamping our hospitals is avoidable via vaccines and taking caution now. But with a 64% increase in daily cases this week and hospitals already overrun, it seems like the swamping is already baked in I also find the continued emphasis on vaccination as a way to end this surge disingenuous given the two-dose schedule and the time it takes to build immunity — and, frankly, given the high levels of transmission which means lots of breakthroughs.

I'm sorry, did I miss something? There has always been evidence that vaccinated people could transmit COVID-19. There has been wishful thinking, fueled by misrepresentations of poor data (you want to show transmission? Have a real testing & tracing system), that you could not. We have also always known that the higher disease circulation is in an area, the greater the risk to vaccinated people.

We have also always known that vaccinating 70% of adults wouldn't be enough to really slow transmission.

The mask mandate lifted in Oregon on June 30. Oregon was one of the last states to reopen - and obviously, there's confounding factors, like the increase in detected cases of the delta variant. But delta was first detected here in April & started to grow when county restrictions started to roll back.

This is a good question with a longish answer. But the short answer is no.

The long answer (thread) Forest management practices (which have nothing to do with 'raking forests') have absolutely contributed to the size and intensity of wildfires over the last 100 or so years.

https://twitter.com/MJT36165368/status/1305047597690822659

Basically, for a long time, if there was a fire you did one thing: put the fire out, ASAP.

But fire is a natural part of forest ecosystems, so that lead to fuel buildup, which increased the intensity of fires.

What a healthy forest looks like depends on the ecoysystem.