Designing the Future 3 - Schmidt Ocean Institute In the edgeless realm of the midwater, there is remarkable biodiversity. It is the largest habitat on Earth, extending from just below the sunlit surface layers to far beyond the sun’s reach. Biodiver...

Cruise page is up! Lots of great info there. And links to live stream etc. I'm on leg 2 of 3 to Brazil.

schmidtocean.org/cruise/desig...

#protistsonsky

Lunar Flyby - NASA

Oh this is great: there’s now an #Artemis II Lunar Flyby Gallery on the NASA images site: www.nasa.gov/gallery/luna... (thx @dpmanchee.bsky.social for pointing it out)

I'm packing now! Expedition is April 15 to April 30; Salvador --> Fortaleza, Brazil

Attending Protistology Open? Check out @nicolecoots.bsky.social & I's ISOP-sponsored symposium "The Symbiotic Continuum across the Tree of Life" (April 20th @ 11 AM)! We have an amazing lineup of speakers including Ondřej Pomahač, @mixotrophe.bsky.social, & Gillian Gile #ProtistsOnSky #Symbiosis

#protistsonsky

Behold the silver commode. A silver can, with a white hose crossing across the front. That’s the urine funnel.

Never could’ve predicted I’d spend so much time in my career talking about toilets, but there’s just no way around it, we can’t take people anywhere without a toilet. For all critical systems, we have to have failure tolerance which general,y results in having 2 of just about everything.

We tested the efficacy of semi-permeable capsules to capture protists from cultures and environmental samples using the Onyx from @atrandi.bsky.social. Tremendous effort from everyone in the lab and led by Marco Fantini and Nik Brask - check out the videos here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is what baby eels looks like. The long trailing tail is its *stomach* (nope, we scientists have no idea why)

Eels hold their mysteries close

📽️ by Fan Zhang

If all goes according to plan, in a few hours, a crew of astronauts will begin a journey that will take them on a loop around the moon. Here's a video that NASA put together to help people visualize the journey through space, first orbiting the earth before looping around the moon and flying home 🔭

The Artemis II mission will be piloted by Victor Glover, who will fly further into space than any Black person has before. Christina Koch, a white woman, will be flying the furthest into space that a woman has ever flown before.

The mission is a test run for a future moon landing trip.

Roman - NASA Science The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and astrophysics.

If anyone is wondering what space news I'm very excited about in 2026: it's the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named for the scientifically accomplished infrared astronomer who also made sure the Hubble Space Telescope got built and launched 🔭

science.nasa.gov/mission/roma...

We are continuing our efforts at iterative expansion microscopy of loricate choanos. Not only does the lorica expand, it seems you can iterate expansion pretty much infinitely. Here’s our latest - incredibly, it expanded to macroscopic size! #ProtistsOnSky

Want to hear *more* about our research trip to Antarctica to study the effects of melting sea ice on the microbes, zooplankton, and chemistry of the Weddell Sea (😉)? Carlyn Scott from the @cmarinescience.bsky.social communication office interviewed me and put together this Q&A. 🌊🇦🇶🦠 #oceanography

"men continued to publish the same number of papers after becoming fathers, women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers 8 years after the birth of their first child)"

Friendly registration deadline reminder.
It's TOMORROW!

(...and I heard that the short video is in fact not mandatory ;) )

Transient molecular chimerism for exploiting xenogeneic organelles - Nature Communications Kleptoplasty, the transient integration of foreign organelles, could illuminate organellogenesis. Here, using the flagellate, Rapaza viridis, the authors show that host nuclear proteins are imported i...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... #protistsonsky

Karen is standing in front of the “Geoscience for the Future” poster on the wall.

Elementary School Career Day!
My favorite day of the year. Today I spoke to the 1st graders about geoscientist detective skills and career paths. I brought the @geolsoc.bsky.social Geoscience for the Future poster for the students to ask questions about and, of course, my favorite rocks.

Anna's hummingbird seen at my mom's house yesterday in #DavisCA #birds

Ah, makes sense! That's why they look like outlines. Cool!

A fish eater. YouTube video by Schmidt Ocean Institute

whoa. stunning siphonophore by @schmidtocean.bsky.social ! youtube.com/shorts/G218j...

😃 are the blue bacteria visualized by just a DNA stain?

Meet Hexatilemonas jangsaensis a new uncultured apusomonad clade by Jeong et al. doi 10.1111/1462-2920.70282. #protistsonsky. Mark the trunk 🐘 (sleeve around base of flagellum) and laterally consumed bacterium in 🟥 .

#Ichthyosporea are not just the 5–6 species we and others have helped establish as models. Our recent synthesis suggests that ~95% of their species-level diversity remains uncultivated. In other words, we still know only a fraction of the map! #protistsonSky @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social @prbb.org

Birth of a crustacean. [Presumably some kind of copepod?]

The cover of the illustrated children's book "Nature's Remarkable Partners. Wild poems for two voices".

Personal note acknowledging my contribution.

The pages on the spotted salamander!

Acknowledgements page.

I just got this wonderful surprise in the mail. I gave some feedback to the Author a few years ago and they sent me this beautiful copy with 16 symbioses represented with poems in 2 voices and fun, brief descriptions. Really beautiful 😍 #symbiosky

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803205...

A pair of clam shells, slightly askew, protruding from a gray sandstone concretion. There is a circular drill hole from a predatory snail in the clam.

#molluskmonday A well-preserved clam (Macoma sp.) with a naticid snail boring, protruding from a fine sandstone concretion. Middle Pleistocene Port Orford Formation, Oregon.

Rave worm! What a gorgeous display this polychaete worm’s setae is giving under UV light!

#marineplankton 🦑

Saying this is ‘so good’ does not do it justice.

Arp2/3-dependent actin assembly shapes endosomes and promotes intracellular trafficking in fission yeast Endosomes serve as crucial sorting centers that streamline the distribution of cell surface proteins. The early endosome receives traffic from both th…

Arp2/3-dependent actin assembly shapes endosomes and promotes intracellular trafficking in fission yeast

The work from Alejandro Melero @ameleroc.bsky.social and Miguel Basante-Bedoya just out in Current Biology.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@biology-unige.bsky.social