Megan Sharkey

City change maker. research socio-technical transitions, transport, healthy built environments, sustainability.
person, mom, partner
Adjunct Lecturer @UNSW

[Megan Sharkey @sharkeysStuff]

Caitlin Clark should go to Atlanta next year. Her and Angel would just dominate for years. The swagger, the fuck you, the dominance. Crossing my fingers to manifest.

#wnba

[Leni @Leni1680234]

A once-in-a-lifetime miracle caught on Google Street View. 😳

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

The arguments behind every landmark Supreme Court ruling have never been freely available to the public… until now.

Thanks to a gift from the Wolf Law Library at William & Mary Law School, more than 125,000 #SCOTUS records & briefs are now freely freely available on the Internet Archive, spanning 1830 through 2019. The arguments that shaped America, including Brown v. Board of Education. Loving v. Virginia.

Read the full announcement ⤵️
https://t.co/yhjqSBVDOa

@WMLawSchool #SupremeCourt #DemocracysLibrary

[Joel J Miller @joeljmiller]

I keep seeing people complain that books are too expensive. They’re not. A hardcover copy of To Kill a Mockingbird cost $3.95 in 1960. In today's dollars, that's $43. You can buy the current hardcover for $27.99.

Books aren't too expensive. They're 30–40% cheaper than inflation says they should be. They’re cheaper today than when Kennedy was president!

Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books. 👉 https://t.co/V7rQ7iRSfa

[Nick Bryant @NickBryantNY]

Strong contender for this weekend’s most beautiful front page. The Sydney Morning Herald aged 195.

[Megan Sharkey @sharkeysStuff]

@theMadridZone 1q,b

[Conor Nolan @conor_draws]

I won.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

France passed a law requiring solar panels on every parking lot with more than 80 spaces.

Parking lots over a certain size have three to five years to cover at least half their surface area with solar canopies or face fines.

The projected output: up to 11 gigawatts of capacity, the equivalent of 10 nuclear reactors.

The panels shade the cars. They can charge EVs directly underneath them. They generate electricity for the grid. The parking lot goes from dead infrastructure to power plant without using a single additional acre of land.

France plans to increase solar tenfold and double wind capacity by 2033.

The US has approximately 800 million parking spaces. Eight hundred million. Most of them are uncovered asphalt sitting in direct sunlight.

Why aren't we doing this?

[Nick Offerman @Nick_Offerman]

•The U.S. Senate may hold a floor vote TODAY which would overturn a 20-year moratorium on sulfide-ore copper mining on 225,000 acres of Superior National Forest land in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) Wilderness in northern Minnesota. The Boundary Waters is the most visited Wilderness in the United States. 

🛶 Enjoying the Minnesotan/Canadian wilderness by canoe or other lesser watercraft is one of our nations greatest available pastimes, and one I have personally enjoyed my entire life. We must protect these public lands from the rapacious capitalists threatening to turn them into a poisoned wasteland.

•This vote in Congress would open the door to copper mining at the headwaters of this entire ecosystem. This kind of mining produces toxic pollution, including acid runoff and heavy metals, that can contaminate nearby waters.

•The Boundary Waters supports a major outdoor economy that sustains thousands of jobs and generates over a billion dollars a year - built on clean water and intact public lands. But this vote would clear the way for toxic mining that puts all of that at risk. It would also set a dangerous precedent, making it easier to roll back protections for public lands across the country, including wilderness areas, national monuments, and national parks. 

•This is a defining moment. If you care about clean water, public lands, and protecting places we can’t replace, now is the time to speak up.
•Protect the Boundary Waters, and vote NO on House Joint Resolution 140. Let’s save this treasured place for all of us—forever. https://t.co/JhNAR6Za2O

[Dr. Jen Wolkin | ADHD + Trauma Therapist @drjenwolkin]

So many mid-life girls, too 🙏

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Canada built bridges for bears, and it worked better than anyone expected.

The Trans-Canada Highway cuts through Banff National Park for 82 kilometers. For decades it was a killing field.

Animals on one side couldn't reach animals on the other, which fragmented populations and cut off migration routes.

Starting in 1996, Parks Canada built 44 wildlife crossing structures, along with fencing to guide animals toward them. Critics called it a waste of money. Editorials said animals would never use them.

They were wrong.

Since monitoring began, animals have used the crossings more than 250,000 documented times.

Wolves, grizzly bears, elk, moose, cougars, wolverines, lynx, bighorn sheep. Wildlife-vehicle collisions dropped 80% overall.

It took grizzlies about five years to trust the structures. Elk tested them while they were still under construction.

Every species had its own preference. Grizzlies and elk liked the wide open overpasses. Cougars and black bears preferred the narrow tunnels.

This is now the longest-running wildlife crossing research program in the world. Delegations have come from China, Mongolia, Costa Rica, and Argentina to copy the model.

Is your state building these?

[Nithya Shri @Nithya_Shrii]

The rarest material in the known universe isn’t diamonds or gold. It’s.. wood. Earth is the only confirmed planet to have trees. Wood is a material that only forms because of LIFE.

[Undiscovered History @HistoryUnd]

Tom Brown, a retired engineer, dedicated 25 years to preserving approximately 1,200 apple varieties from extinction.

[Jake Lundahl @LundahlHorses]

Civilization was built by people like this, and there is a stunning lack of gratitude in our culture for their work.

In this specific case, at least half of the apple varieties in Brown’s collection were considered “lost” until he personally tracked them down and saved them.

He literally went on quests where he did things like, tracking a lost variety back to a stump of a long-ago-cut-down tree near an abandoned homestead in remote Appalachia, took cuttings from the green shoots coming out of the stump, brought them back and planted them.

Absolute legend.

[Basil🧡 @LinkofSunshine]

If you ever see posts by like Ron Paul talking about how we’re “wasting” government money on random studies, just remember that Ozempic comes from a paper on eating habits of an endangered lizard in the Sahara

[NASA @NASA]

Welcome home Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy! 🫶

The Artemis II astronauts have splashed down at 8:07pm ET (0007 UTC April 11), bringing their historic 10-day mission around the Moon to an end.

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

Everyone Should Meet Them: WOMEN OF SPACE

These four women represent different generations of space science, from paper calculations to digital systems and the exploration of other planets.

Katherine Johnson: A key mathematician at NASA, she calculated orbital trajectories for historic missions. At a time when computers were still limited, her hand calculations were so reliable that astronauts asked to check the results before launch.

Margaret Hamilton: She led the development of software for the Apollo program. Their work allowed the onboard computer to prioritize tasks during the Apollo 11 lunar landing, avoiding potential failure. It also helped lay the foundations for modern software development.

Diana Trujillo: A Colombian aerospace engineer who participated in the Perseverance rover mission to Mars, where she led the team responsible for the vehicle's robotic arms, a critical system for collecting and analyzing high-precision Martian rock samples. She also led the first Spanish-language broadcast of the Mars landing.

Christina Koch: The NASA astronaut holds the record for the longest continuous stay in space by a woman, at 328 days. She participated in the first all-female spacewalk. And recently, she became the woman who has been farthest from Earth.

[Megan Sharkey @sharkeysStuff]

#ChristinaKoch the real Samanantha Carter for our time.

#NASA

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

Overlooked reason so many teens are addicted to screens is because their parents won’t let them outside, they can’t go to the movies or the mall, their neighbors call the police if they see them out & about. Kids need independent play. They won’t get it if we over-protect them.

[Senator Mark Kelly @SenMarkKelly]

Yes