Good Soup

Leon / 27 / they/them / 🏳️‍🌈. PhD in origins of life bioorganic chemistry

[alphynix]

New museum find shows nature can't stop inventing seahorses

At first glance, it looks exactly like a seahorse. It has the same horse-shaped head tilted down from the body, the same curled, grasping ta

[dogpuppy]

[plaguedocboi]

Aheem heem

[altair-the-heretic]

figures from real scientific papers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.023

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2021.10.008

[stay-human]

The Final Muslim Apology by Fatima Anwar on Intisaab

This blog seeks to archive the original artwork, music, and writing of progressive students from across Pakistan. We wish to encourage creative action and expression by students in various languages in a way that is socially aware and cognizant of not only the hurdles we face as a society but also of the opportunities for hope present at every turn.

Facebook: Democratic Students’ Alliance

[vultures-nest]

im studying histology and i just like the little guys that work so hard to keep our organisms up and running

[todays-xkcd]

We would like to once again apologize to Dr. Jones for last year's mistaken announcement. We should really have double-checked the envelope for this award in particular.

Calibration Nobel [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[Hairy is standing behind a lectern on a podium, holding a piece of paper and addressing the attendees in front of him. Ponytail and Cueball walk toward the podium and Cueball is waving to the audience. In the audience are Megan, another Cueball, and another Hairy sitting on chairs.] Hairy: This year's Nobel Prize in "Calibrating your equipment carefully and not embarrassing yourself by publishing spurious results" goes to Dr. Adams and Dr. Smith, who did not announce the discovery of microbes on Titan. Cueball: Thank you, thank you.

[erbiumspectrum]

The specialization professor got unexpectedly chatty today and started telling us about his doctoral school days here at our faculty: "Those were crazy times. My supervisor and I were working with uranium compounds. The lab and the office were one room. We had tea there, coffee, everything... And there was uranium floating everywhere. My supervisor was once carrying out a reaction with a whole lot of hydrogen gas. It was supposed to run overnight. He was so afraid the whole thing would blow up that he spent the night lying on the floor underneath the furnace, keeping watch. Well, I mean, if it had blown up, what would his keeping watch be good for anyway?"

At that point we all absolutely lost it, and the professor was like, "You know what a glovebox is, right? [We nod.] No, you know what a glovebox is now. Back then we had a big transparent trash bag with holes in it. The lab benches were wooden and they were basically stuffed with uranium. When we were moving labs eventually and packed up all our things, [somebody] came over with a Geiger and the readings were off the scale :D"

Which took us all out again and then he suddenly points to me and says, "Oh! Now it's [my supervisor's last name]'s lab!" which had us in hysterics omfg I don't know what came over him to tell us all that but I almost cried laughing in class today

[ahedderick]

This is the most beautiful scientific diagram I've ever seen.

Also a great example of why pink is a tint of red, but also a completely different color. Erbium? Neodymium? So beautiful.

[literallymechanical]

"Reviewer 2 wants better citations" moodboard

[natalieironside]

If ur a US based academic I bet if u could write a good enough grant application u could convince the current government to give you a bunch of money to look for Atlantis or the kingdom of Prester John or something

[natalieironside]

Now is a great time to take an exciting overseas vacation on Uncle Sam's dime. U can even write about it after, be like "We gave it the ol college try but we still didn't find Atlantis, leading further further support to the consensus that it don't even real" and it'll piss them off soooo bad but that's still doing science abt it so 🤷‍♀️

[notbecauseofvictories]

good morning exclusively to the atlantic’s science editor, or whoever it is that titles their animal biology articles

[notbecauseofvictories]

fellas, they’ve done it again

[notbecauseofvictories]

me, weeping openly: potato

[notbecauseofvictories]

DEFECTOR HAS TAKEN UP THE MANTLE

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[cherrispryte]

Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.

[mikkeneko]

Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.

[grison-in-space]

As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Four days left.

[fredersen]

a meba 🦠 is almost like a really really small anermal but not quite

[ivy-michaels]

[herpsandbirds]

Nguru Warty Frog (Callulina meteora), family Brevicipitidae, endemic to the Nguru Mountains in Tanzania

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED.

I know this frog looks fake but I swear that its real!

photographs by Jacopo Martino 

[a-book-dragon]

You don't have a male or female brain – the more brains scientists study, the weaker the evidence for sex differences

Rather than distinctly male or female, the human brain is much more like the heart, kidneys and lungs – basically the same no matter the sex of the body it's in.

rb to make a biological essentialist mad <3

[liminalweirdo]

“This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.”

[mckitterick]

the notes on this are toxic - to help clear up any misunderstanding, here’s the actual science paper:

Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three dec

in short: brains are brains