“Shark Bay is on many geologists’ bucket lists. Tim visited in 2015 with a group of geologists. These geologists took time away from fieldwork—their only break—to make the 2600+ km roundtrip visit to Shark Bay. What brings scientists to see these unassuming black lumps? Geologists traveling great distances to visit a place is hardly notable; for psychologists, however, this is far outside the realm of familiar practice. Tim observed that geologists visiting those stromatolites in Shark Bay, Australia, registered the sense of wonder parents see in their young children, as captured by Robert McCloskey in Time of Wonder (Fig. 1A). What the geologists saw was more than irregular dark lumps. It was like seeing a relative’s name on a passenger arrival list at Ellis Island: A place to go where one might viscerally experience the travels of a relative at a different time. What they saw embodied their profession in the way that no historical artifact does.” ❤️🥹
https://t.co/tHZQpoGI4I
Interested in microbes, biofilms & nutrient cycles?
The @UConn Microbial Ecophysiology Lab is pleased to share this article about the work of @luisarchaeota @AlexJProbst @greeninglab @archaeal @BanfieldLab & colleagues (tag them please).
Amplifying diverse voices together!
Our @NASAPersevere Mars rover has found an interesting rock that could be one of the best signs yet that ancient microbial life may have once existed on the Red Planet. However, we'll need to do more research to know for sure: https://t.co/tWpQD6Rcg6
Today is the anniversary of the Pale Blue Dot image's collection by Voyager 1.
Remarking on the image and its impact for our species, Carl Sagan wrote in his book of the same name:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Spoiler alert - I will shortly be advertising for a Research Assistant to help manage the team & a Post Doc in Bioinformatics (2 -3 yrs). If you like what we do & want to join our team why not reach out & have a chat.
Research: seagrass, coral, microbes, probiotics, eDNA 🤩
@bennjordan@TuneCore Oh no! I listen to the Pale Blue Dot album everyday day 😭😭😭 To study, to relax. This is beyond evil. Is there a way I can get this album somewhere else? I can pay whatever 🥺 If I dont have this album I��m going to cancel Spotify, honestly.