I like science and shouting into the void

Just a science side blog I repost cool science shit to, and occasionally post my own stuff. I'm a bioscientist so I mostly post about that, but occasionally some other sciences see some love. my main is idlethyme255.

[muttsandmustelidae]

From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!

[muttsandmustelidae]

Because people will pay attention to cute animals, here are some of the critically endangered/endangered species housed at the Nashville Zoo!

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

Look at them!!!! Look at them and fight like hell to save them!!!!

[idlescience]

Also, AI data centers release constant low and high frequency humming sounds. They've caused complaints from humans living nearby, I can't imagine how disruptive they would be to animals with more sensitive ears.

An article about it

I couldn't find much research on the impact of infra and ultrasound pollution on wildlife (even the research on humans is really limited), but wind turbines might have detrimental effects, which emit similar constant hums, and there's plenty of evidence that general noise pollution disrupts animals' natural patterns/behaviours and causes them stress.

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks

[creepymutelilbugger]

posting the spotted hyena vision diagram again

[pupdotcom]

real

[wizardarchetypes]

writing a graduate thesis will have me, a marine & fisheries biologist, looking up the most asinine shit i can never let my professors see

[wizardarchetypes]

suddenly i don't know anything

[herpsandbirds]

Authors set out to correct under-representation of female sounds – and found some surprising revelations

When we hear the beautiful call of a bird from a high bough, we’re told it’s likely to be a male – singing for territory, or belting out tunes to woo a female. But as the annual dawn chorus reaches a crescendo this spring, a new guidebook is urging us to think again – and turn our ears to the hidden world of female birdsong. The songs, sounds and sights of female birds have historically been overlooked in field guides and sound archives. In 2016, just 0.01% of the bird sounds in the global Xeno-Canto sound library were labelled female. Another sound archive was just 0.03% female, according to a 2018 study. But the new book – The Sound Approach to Birding 2 – aims to correct this under-representation and properly explain female birdsong. Female birds sing for territorial displays, to ward off other females and to attract extra males, according to Lucy McRobert, a writer and researcher who studied the issue for the guidebook. The book comes with its own library of 300 sounds from 200 species, accessed via web or app. The clips are drawn from the larger online archive of Sound Approach, a birdsong project founded in 2000 with confirmed recordings of females for 41% of species found in the Western Palearctic, a biogeographical region encompassing Europe, north Africa and most of the Middle East...

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/19/hidden-world-of-female-birdsong-book

[idlescience]

Sometimes I think about how crazy it is that creatures can evolve to mimic other plants or animals perfectly. All through completely random chance and a bit of natural selection.

This is a praying mantis pretending to be an orchid

This is an orchid pretending to be a spider

[mxbitters]

h-hey guys

apparently clouded leopards can use their claws to hang upside down

wild huh

[meet-again]

Pics or it didnt happen

[mxbitters]

they just.  they just do that

[catboybiologist]

Imagine if a like 8 foot tall guy that looked kinda like an alien species just kinda showed up at the house you rent a room in and crashed on the couch and at first everyone hated him but you kinda just accepted this weird massive kinda-human alien species thing as a part of your group even though he's like twice the size of everyone else there

[catboybiologist]

Cuz that's literally happening to sea lions in San Francisco right now

[catboybiologist]

So there's two species of sea lion in North America: the California sea lion, ranging along California (including Baja) but not ranging into the north coast or into oregon

And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska

A male Stellars sea lion showed up in SF like a month ago and just kinda. Didn't know what to do, and joined a colony of California sea lions, and is just kinda chilling there now.

[catboybiologist]

Weird vagrant species happen from time to time, but this is just a particularly funny instance of a highly social species getting very lost, and just trying to blend in with its closest nearby relatives

[hodgepodge-collage]

He’s so large!!! Here’s an NYT article about him

[victusinveritas]

[naughtypiggy]

Scientists uncovered the nutrients bees were missing — Colonies surged 15-fold

Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in

TLDR- Modern agriculture pollen is low in nutrients, and there aren’t enough wildflowers. Science has to develop vitamins to supplement the diets of agricultural bees. So plant some wildflowers for the wild bees near you.

[lichenaday]

what makes a lichen a lichen? (what makes it different from a moss or other plant?)

Lichen aren't moss or plants, even though the look and act an awful lot like them, in some cases. Lichens are a symbiosis between a fungus (typically an Ascomycete fungi) and a photosynthesizing, unicellular organism (usually either a green algae and/or a cyanobacteria). The fungi (the mycobiont) provides structure and protection, and the photosynthesizers (the photobiont) provide nutrition. Because we think of the mycobiont as the obligate member of the symbiosis, and because it makes up the bulk of the organism, we classify lichens taxonomically based on the mycobiont. So I often describe them jokingly as a fungi that wanted to be a plant so bad that it domesticated a bunch of unicellular organisms to be its chloroplasts. A farmer, if you will.

How do you tell if you are looking at a lichen or a plant? Its easy with a microscope. With that you can see that the internal structure of a lichen is VERY different from a plant. But with the naked eye? Mostly its familiarity. For every rule I can tell you, there exists an exception to that rule. So you kinda just gotta know its a lichen because of the way it is. So you know, get out there and start meeting them!

[falloutnewvegans-deactivated201]

i love how scientists in fiction are always called  “scientists”. thats it. they wear a Labcoat Of +5 Science and +5 Medicine. They do not specialize in a tree of science, like Biology or Astrology.

No.

They are just Science Men ready to do Science.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

“Do you understand what this could mean for science?

It could mean real advances in the field of SCIENCE”

[sweetmeatdale]

Literature majors trying to figure out what everyone else does

[climatepositive]

Historic moment: China & India’s coal power just fell for the first time since the 1970s. 

China: coal power ↓ 1.6% / India: ↓ 3% (2025 data)

Why? A record clean energy boom — China added 300GW solar + 100GW wind last year alone (that’s >5x the UK’s entire power capacity)

India added 35GW solar, 6GW wind, 3.5GW hydropower

Together, these two countries drove >90% of global emissions growth from 2015–2024 — so this could signal a real peak in global coal & emissions 

Caveat: ~36% of India’s drop was due to milder weather, not just clean energy. But still — first back-to-back drop since 1973.

(Source: Guardian / Carbon Brief analysis / CREA)

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/13/coal-power-generation-falls-china-india-since-1970s

[reasonsforhope]

Coal power generation falls in China and India for first time since 1970s

‘Historic’ moment in biggest coal-consuming countries could bring decline in global emissions, analysis says

-via The Guardian, January 12, 2026

[depsidase]

[hope-for-the-planet]

Study Finds Rainforests Bounce Back Much Quicker than Expected

Text and image from this article in the New York Times:

Scientists once thought it would take a century or more for animals to return to deforested land in the tropics. Now, new research has found ecosystems can recover in mere decades. “It’s been a huge surprise for all of us,” said Timo Metz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and first author of the study, published in the journal Nature. “None of us expected it to be so impressive and so quick.” Rainforests have been disappearing at an alarming pace for at least a century, and millions of acres a year are still burned or cut down for logging, farming or ranching, or are lost to wildfires. In 2024, the rate of loss was as fast as 18 soccer fields per minute, adding up to an area nearly the size of Panama. At the same time, hundreds of millions of acres of formerly deforested land are thought to be regrowing. Scientists have generally found that it takes more than a century for trees and plants to fully resemble the old, original pristine forest. It was long assumed that animals would take just as long to return. The new study found that’s not necessarily the case. “The expectation was that the animals would need the forest to come first,” Dr. Metz said. “But surprisingly, many of the animals recover much more quickly than the trees.”

[the-big-mood]

[prokopetz]

Carcinisation is fun, but it's just one example of an odd recurring pattern in parallel evolution. Humans probably will not become crabs; mammals have their own patterns which incongruously recur across unrelated clades. I believe the inheritors of humanity will evolve long, sticky tongues which enable them to feed on burrowing insects.

[cutecipher]

science has always been political. what gets studied. what doesnt. who gets to do the studying. on and on and on.

[cutecipher]

scientists on this post: yuuuup 👍

people who aren't scientists: um actually ☝️