Mr Creosote, as usual, diplays impecabble taste
MAÎTRE D: Oh, monsieur, I assure you, just because it is mixed up wis all ze other things, we would not dream of giving you less than ze full amount. In fact, I will personally make sure you have a double helping. Maintenant quelque chose à boire. Something to drink, monsieur?
MR. CREOSOTE: Yeah, I’ll have six bottles of Château Latour Forty-five…
MAÎTRE D: Forty-five.
MR. CREOSOTE: …and a double Jeroboam of champagne.
MAÎTRE D: Bon, and the usual brown ales?
MR. CREOSOTE: Yeah. No, wait a minute. I think I can only manage six crates today.
MAÎTRE D: [tut tut tut tut] I hope monsieur was not overdoing it last night.
MR. CREOSOTE: Shut up!
We found that Harvard Forest soils contain a higher diversity of giant VLP morphotypes than all hitherto isolated giant viruses combined. These included VLPs with icosahedral capsid symmetry, ovoid shapes similar to pandoraviruses, and bacilliform shapes that may represent novel viruses. We discovered giant icosahedral capsids with structural modifications that had not been described before including tubular appendages, modified vertices, tails, and capsids consisting of multiple layers or internal channels. Many giant VLPs were covered with fibers of varying lengths, thicknesses, densities, and terminal structures. These findings imply that giant viruses employ a much wider array of capsid structures and mechanisms to interact with their host cells than is currently known.
Fascinating stuff! And more “WTF are these things, anyway?” talk. As I am a fan of the “RNA viruses are refugees from an RNA world predating DNA” theory, I love these kind of articles.
Viral Kaiju scare me.
Bacterial Kaiju too.
in the paper, published in the journal Science, the authors conclude that the discovery “suggests that large and more complex bacteria may be hiding in plain sight”.
It’s behind me right now isn’t it.
It’s in your fridge, hiding among the grapes.
I’m late to the party, but: deuterostomia or protostomia, is that the question?
This is pretty cool. Maybe the “boring billion” wasn’t so boring after all!
I mean, yes, misogyny, but how the scientific world is navigating it seems heartening.
60 symbols reports on the room temperature “superconductor”
Seems like they’ve become more thoughtful since the days of Accutane. I remember hearing women talking about the pregnancy tests and wondering WTAF the pharma industry was doing.
Interesting discoveries in articles initially posted here:
FTAs:
Now materials scientists have developed a color-changing film that can switch between heating and cooling modes. The film, which is thinner than a credit card, operates on very little energy and could one day envelop even the most wasteful of buildings to help radiate unwanted heat in the summer and trap it in during the winter.
researcher Debashis Chanda, a professor in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center, has drawn inspiration from butterflies to create the first environmentally friendly, large-scale and multicolor alternative to pigment-based colorants, which can contribute to energy-saving efforts and help reduce global warming.
Physicists use a 350-year-old theorem to reveal new properties of light waves
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-physicists-year-old-theorem-reveal-properties.amp
This doesn’t make sense to me, at least the way it’s described.
Qian’s team interpreted the intensity of a light as the equivalent of a physical object’s mass
Why is number of photons equivalent to the mass? I’d expect frequency to be the equivalent measure.
Frequency determines the energy of a single photon, but the total energy still depends on how many there are too. That said, in the actual paper they are using polarization coherence matrix eigenvalues as the masses…so it may be more a mathematical than an intuitive analogy. 
So they just doofliggy the whatzitz, resulting in the integration of the universal matrix, right?
(Damn, I get over my head so fast on some topics!)
