tesskou

@tesskou.bsky.social

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Science Journalist 📰 & Fact Checker 🔎 @ScienceAlert 🚀 ❤ 🦇 WildOz, SciArt, SciComm & ClimateAction 🐌 🕷️ 🎓MSciComm, BSc. Zool. & Gen. 🐋
🌿 Views my own 🦎

My work: https://www.sciencealert.com/tessa-koumoundouros

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tesskou

I’m seeing lots of fishermen complain that there’s “more sharks than ever,” so I made a quick guide to what things look like if you zoom out a little.

The haunting howls of wolves fell mostly silent across America's West by the 1930s. Their loss to the region has been largely overlooked by humans, even in our scientific research, a new review finds, but the impact of their absence is written loudly in missing trees... #AmWriting #wildlife 🧪🌎

Wolves Vanished Across America, And We're Still Uncovering The Damagewww.sciencealert.com Everything is connected.

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surged 48%. for a mass plagiarism tool that tells you to eat rocks and glue.

Google says its greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% in the past five years due to the expansion of the data centers that underpin its AI efforts (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Winter at Plenty Gorge 🥰 #WildOz #wildlife #Melbourne #UrbanWildlife

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Paralysis and overwhelm don't disrupt dangerous systems. That's one reason I believe even little actions that disrupt domination patterns and support life-sustaining patterns are important. Not because of their size but because of their direction.

Vaccines teach our B immune cells (pictured) what to target. This can weaken across subsequent boosters. But, incredibly, different COVID vaccines are creating stronger responses instead, suggesting they could strengthen our immune systems against future variants and possibly even related viruses. 🧪

Here's Yet Another Reason to Stay on Top of Your COVID Vaccine Boosterswww.sciencealert.com Great news.

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"What can we do about our 'Ignore more, care less, everything is fine!' era?" This article is an urgent call from two scholars to stop normalizing horrible things, to not lower our standards, to not turn away from wicked problems 🧪 by Marianne Cooper and @drmaximvoronov.bsky.social

We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Realitywww.scientificamerican.com We are living through a terrible time in humanity. Here’s why we tend to stick our heads in the sand and why we need to pull them out, fast

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#InverteFest runs until the end of the month (Tuesday). Keep posting your invertebrate art, plug your merch & service, find some bugs in the wild, do whatever you want. Here's our community science project on iNat if you haven't joined: www.inaturalist.org/projects/inv...

This disembodied grin has been giving me the heebie-jeebies all week 😅 Neat bit of human skin engineering that could inform health sciences as well as its applications in robotics. Great write up by David Nield! 🧪 www.sciencealert.com/this-smiling...

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Great critique: "These articles fall into a genre we’ll call 'science opinion,' where non-experts pontificate...abt the pandemic virus & our response to it. This is distinct from science journalism...where experts in translating sci to the general public report on technical developments."🛟🧪sociology

“The New York Times” Is Failing Its Readers Badly on Covidwww.thenation.com A pair of shoddy opinion pieces proves that the paper is letting its audience down and undermining the fight to improve our knowledge of the virus.

We may all owe our existence to tiny prehistoric water wormlings! 🧪🐙 #AmWriting Such a cool bit of ancient history detective work, revealing how geochemical forces teamed up with life to create the oxygen levels we all enjoy today on Earth. www.sciencealert.com/tiny-overloo... 📷 PaleoEquii/Wiki

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“At normal levels, pain and fatigue are best viewed as adaptive responses. Just like pain, fatigue is a warning signal, implying the body needs to rest. The degree of fatigue is influenced by many factors, also at a subconscious level.” www.sciencealert.com/chronic-pain... 🧪

Chronic Pain Treatment May Offer Hope For Long COVID Suffererswww.sciencealert.com Fighting the endless fatigue.

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🌎🧪Why does #biodiversity matter? 🌱 Every day there are millions of interactions in #nature that are essential for a healthy, functioning planet. Losing even a small species can have massive impacts on ecosystems and on humans. 🦠 Find out more in this handy infographic.

Incredibly, such stunning pink birds are a common site in Australia. Prolific seed dispersers, Galahs (Cacatua roseicapilla) are highly social, hanging out in flocks of up to a thousand individuals. They will feast on grasses, making them vulnerable to predators like introduced foxes #WildOz 🪶🧪

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For Nautilus Magazine, I wrote about a question that has obsessed me: What are the oldest surviving ecosystems on Earth? Turns out some extant meadows, reefs, and rainforests have persisted for hundreds of thousands to *tens of millions* of years. What can they teach us? nautil.us/the-oldest-e...

The Oldest Ecosystems on Earthnautil.us What they teach us about resilience.

It's we, hi! We're the problem - it's we. 🎶 From Africa's savanna to Australia's bushlands we're the monsters lurking under other mammals' beds. #AmWriting #wildoz 🧪

One 'Super Predator' Instills More Fear in Marsupials Than Any Other Creaturewww.sciencealert.com A universal terror.

A roo having a good belly scratch at Plenty Gorge. #wildoz #urbanwildlife

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cagey ratfish 🐟🐈‍⬛🎨🏳️‍⚧️

Is this it?

Suddenly remembered long stringy stingy things exist! 😁🧪🌏🐙 Siphonophores blur the line between organ and organism, somehow managing to be both at once. With so much incredibly bizarre life tucked quietly away on Earth, who even needs aliens? #AmWriting #WildOz

What The Heck Is This Long, Hypnotic Stringy Thing Floating in The Ocean?www.sciencealert.com It appears to be longer than any animal we've ever seen.

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The thing I like best about Superb Owl day in the US, is the chance to share some Australian superb owls with people in the rest of the world. 1. Australian Masked Owl 2. Christmas Island Boobook 3. Powerful Owl 4. Australian Murder Chicken

Frightening if true: data from long-lived sea sponges suggests starting point of impacts from industrial revolution have been calibrated incorrectly. Based on new data, we surpassed 1.5°C of warming a decade ago. Only 1 study so far, but would explain scale of current #climate chaos 🧪 #AmWriting

We Breached The 1.5 °C Threshold Over 10 Years Ago, Study Warnswww.sciencealert.com "The clock of climate change has been brought forward."

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One thing that strikes me again and again is that many current policies or proposals that are needlessly cruel are also terrible systems thinking - and I don't think this is an accident, I think it's package, and that's part of why I think systems thinking is also revolutionary/radical thinking.

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Helpful distinction

This infuriates me! 🤣😅 I'm a horse girl, but my honors project was on one of our fragile native species impacted by these horses, so yeah I'm likely biased AF, however isn't conservation about restoring functioning ecosystems? This does not do that! But keen to hear what others think? #WildOz 🧪🌏

Rethinking the mantra of biodiversity: Why the past should not determine the future - ABC Religion & Ethicswww.abc.net.au NSW has recently begun the aerial killings of 14,000 feral horses in Kosciuszko in the name of protecting biodiversity. But why should conserving native species diversity take precedence over other in...

As someone who suffers from this condition and has only ever been offered solutions that had even worse side effects (hormone contraceptives that led to 5 years of near constant panic attacks) this is so good to hear! And brilliant work as ever Clare 👏 🧪

After decades of neglect, it's an exciting time for endometriosis research. In the past year, a flurry of studies have been published that could radically change our understanding of the condition, and how to treat it. Learn as much as I did writing my latest story! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Surge in endometriosis research after decades of underfunding could herald new era for women’s health - Nature Medicinewww.nature.com Advances in organoids and the role of the microbiome and diet are leading to new diagnostics and treatments for endometriosis, motivating a precision health approach to this long-neglected disease.

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This right here. As experts like @katharinehayhoe.com and others have pointed out, the knowledge deficit model simply does not work. COVID, climate change, Jan 6, it doesn't matter. This should be a foundational piece of knowledge for any academic, advocacy, and journalistic work.

one of the most important traps liberals need to avoid is believing "if they just knew the facts, they'd be on my side!"

Katharine Hayhoe: 'The true threat is the delusion that our opinion of science somehow alters its re...www.wired.co.uk Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says that scientists have no option but to fight against the politicisation of science

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On Wednesdays we wear pink.

My emotional support crab 🦀 🐙

Emotional support crab. V calm, v wise. 🦀 #MarineLife #invertebrate

A stark example of how everything on Earth is interconnected: tiny ants can reduce a powerful lions' abilities to feast on zebras. 🐜🌲🦁🦓 Such links are more important to understand than ever, seeing we're unraveling them. But not easy to pin the consequence on the disturbance. 🧪🌏 #AmWriting #SciComm

Turns Out There's One Animal Powerful Enough to Mess With Lions' Feeding Habitswww.sciencealert.com Everything’s connected.

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Been a while since I posted some space pottery. Hope we’re all having a good evening. Or morning. Or whatever time it is where you are 👩‍🚀🚀