🌍🧵 I'd like to tell you a story about a very special rock: A rock that broiled, gushed, and bloomed; that learned to spin sunlight into substance—a rock that came to life and became our cosmic oasis—a miraculous green wet fiery clamorous gorgeous living rock we call Earth ~4 billion years ago, Earth was unrecognizable: the sky was likely orange and hazy; the nascent ocean shallow; no continents, only scattered volcanic islands; little to no green.

Life changed everything. Many of Earth's defining features came from, or evolved with, life.

For @TheAtlantic I wrote about how climate change is warping the seasons, why it's important to remember that the 'Four Seasons' have never been standard/universal, and how much we can adapt our concept of the seasons on a rapidly changing planet
theatlantic.com/science/archiv… Those of us who grew up in the temperate midlatitudes often learn about only one seasonal cycle—Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall—and assume it applies just about everywhere. But the experience & perception of the seasons vary greatly by place, time, & culture

https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1195078389276655616

Lately I've been learning how to make simple digital art in various styles with an iPad and stylus. I made these by following online tutorials (links in thread)

I'm astonished by the power of the Procreate app, and by the generosity of all the creators sharing their expertise

The American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus), aka water ouzel, is North America's only truly aquatic songbird—the "hummingbird of blooming waters" as Muir wrote

Dippers flit about rocky streams, diving and swimming through the currents to feed on aquatic larvae and tiny tadpoles/fish American dippers are named for their habit of rhythmically bobbing when perched

But why do they dip?

Theories incl: blending in w/ turbulent water as camouflage; enhanced scoping of underwater prey; visual communication in noisy environment
📹@spqchan

I recently had the opportunity to go night snorkeling with reef manta rays off the coast of Hawai’i. A thrilling experience with amazing creatures. They eat plankton and somersault like this to maximize the amount of food they funnel into their mouths from a given area We also saw a rippling, bristling fireworm (which you definitely don’t want to touch)

A tree is not a member of a formal taxonomic group, but rather a way of being a plant (tall, branching, enduring) that has evolved indep many times

Pachycereus cacti, for ex, can grow 60+ feet high, weigh tens of tons, & live for centuries

📷Leon Diguet bit.ly/3pWyPJl Tree ferns, which have existed for more than 300 million years and were some of the first plants to evolve tree-like forms, can also grow more than 60 feet tall and live for centuries

📷 bit.ly/36eMqVg bit.ly/3vZQ8Nq bit.ly/3w1qwj4

I saw a viral tweet claiming that the 5 golden rings in The 12 Days of Christmas are actually ring-necked pheasants(!), which would make sense bc the rest of the first seven gifts are birds

That got me wondering: what if ALL the gifts are really birds?

📷bit.ly/3ySsWQo Eight maids a-milking

Milk is mostly a mammalian thing, but pigeons & a few other birds produce crop milk, a nutritious, cottage-cheese like substance that parent birds regurgitate and feed their young. This is CLEARLY a coded reference to nursing pigeons audubon.org/news/pigeon-mi…

Some scientists have proposed that the wild ancestors of pumpkins coevolved with mammoths, mastodons, & other megafauna, which were strong enough to break apart the tough gourds and large enough to disperse their seeds by passing them whole.

I can see it. The wild ancestors of pumpkins and other squashes were probably extremely bitter and toxic, which would have deterred smaller mammals. But megafauna likely had fewer taste receptors for bitterness and were better able to handle toxins. Kistler et al: pnas.org/content/pnas/1…

This is called inosculation: when branches or roots of different trees are in prolonged intimate contact, they often abrade each other, exposing their inner tissues, which may eventually fuse.

It's not so much one tree feeding another as the formation of a new hybrid organism.

https://twitter.com/RebeccaH2030/status/1395352584018399234

In this case, it looks like two beeches (which are partial to inosculation) fused their limbs. Later, the smaller tree's roots/lower trunk were cut away, yet it survived by continuing to exchange water and sugars with its other half. It had already become part of something bigger

By popular demand:

BIRD NESTING STYLES: A CRITICAL REVIEW - PART TWO

White tern
-This is it. This is the nest
-A failure to recognize the fundamental impermanence of being is the source of all suffering
-Taught Marie Kondo everything she knows Red ovenbird
-Fond of turquoise
-Will challenge you to a contest measured in Scoville heat units
-Have you seen my prize-winning succulents?
-Knows the One True Cornbread recipe

BIRD NESTING STYLES: A CRITICAL REVIEW

American robin
-Pragmatic
-Tidy
-Traditional values
-Went to the same high school as Martha Stewart Hummingbird
-Perfectionist
-Substance over scale
-Dabbles in crystals and divination
-Possible fairy ancestry

Many people are claiming that the new coronavirus is as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu, citing a case fatality rate (CFR) of ~2.5%

The truth is that this comparison is, at best, highly unreliable, and may be completely wrong. Here's why: The CFR is the number of infected people that die.

This influential 2006 paper states that the 1918 pandemic infected 500 million people globally & killed 50 - 100 million, a CFR of 10 - 20%. But the paper states the CFR was 2.5%. Why the discrepancy? ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

The viral thread quoted below is missing essential context and contains numerous errors. It does not reflect the latest evidence. #2019nCoV

Here is a new thread with the facts:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1220919589623803905

The basic reproduction number (R0) is the average number of secondary infections generated by one infected person in a totally susceptible population #2019nCoV

There have never been only four seasons. Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter, so often considered the "standard" system, applies only to the mid-latitudes/temperate zones. The concept of seasons has varied dramatically from place to place and culture to culture throughout history: The Nile dictated three major seasons in ancient Egypt:
-Season of the Inundation
-Season of the Emergence (when fertile land resurfaced)
-Season of Low Water/Harvest

If you put chalk under a powerful microscope—white cliffs of Dover type chalk, not the modern blackboard variety—you will see something like this

Because it's not just a rock. It's an accumulation of ancient skeletons: the armored husks of single-celled, ocean-dwelling plankton These tiny photosynthetic creatures, known as coccolithophores, are extremely abundant. When their populations boom they can turn England-sized swaths of ocean an ethereal turquoise—a phenomenon visible from space