Notices by Dr. Dan Killam (dantheclamman@scicomm.xyz)

Funding crisis at Brazilian science agency could leave 80,000 researchers and students without pay

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/funding-crisis-brazilian-science-agency-could-leave-80000-researchers-and-students

UC Irvine astrophysics PhD student Jose Antonio Flores Velazquez killed in drive by shooting. Child of immigrants from Mexico. Dreamed of helping his dad retire from construction work.

"Before he died, he submitted a draft of his research paper in which he used advanced supercomputer simulations to interpret telescopes’ observations about the rate at which galaxies form stars"

Sometimes this world is so cruel

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-17/two-childhood-friends-killed-in-south-la-shooting

when a company advertises a "machine learning" or AI approach, we should ask them

- what is the model you're using? no, I won't accept that it's proprietary info.
- what is your training set? is the data complete? no, quantity is not good enough. where are the blind spots and how have you consulted with experts in the field to correct them?
- have you received peer review? If not, there's the door. come back when you have.

https://nyti.ms/2YTMfcx

Jessica Wade has added nearly 700 Wikipedia biographies for important female and minority scientists in less than two years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/science/jess-wade-wikipedia-science-women.html

By combining MRI tech with a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers were able to visualize the electron configuration of individual atoms. You can see the cloud move around, as well as their magnetic fields. It's something I wanted to see when I took HS physics and now it's happened. I love science.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope-atom-magnetic-mri.html

Been at this for a while now and still learning about new clams every day.

DID YOU KNOW

The ocean quahog (Arctica islandica) is the longest lived animal on Earth (that we know of). One individual was found through growth banding to be 507 years old. There are probably older ones out there right now. They are indifferent about us. We are a mere blip in the timeline of their lives. #clamfacts

I am a PhD candidate at UCSC. I study the tiny growth bands of clam shells (kinda like tree rings) to answer questions about their physiology and environment.