How are we already into August? It feels like summer goes faster every year. Without further ado, a few things read this morning of interest:

• Enzymes in viruses!
• Invisible work in STEM
• What does awe do for you?
• Cable bacteria make themselves into living electrical wires.
• Not science, but their voices are important to hear
• The scaly-footed snail has been added to the endangered species list because of deep sea mining
• The wonderful world of anglerfish
• Another HIV vaccine attempt, another attempt to out-engineer a tricky virus
• Flickering sky islands
• How do trees communicate?

I know, I know I’m doing horribly on this whole write stuff once a week thing. I haven’t written anything in how many weeks now? Alas I have all these drafts and no time to do anything with them. How do people manage to accomplish so much in one day? I get to the evening and am so exhausted I don’t want to work on anything. Anyway, I digress, here are a few things I’ve enjoyed recently:

• How coastal cities are trying to make their waterfronts more friendly to coastal life
• An art project depicting diseases brought to America through beadwork
• A measles simulator – it’s amazing what a difference high vaccination rates makes…
• Sharks eat…birds?
• Everything connects, no process exists in isolation – how might plate tectonics have aided the origin of life?
• Shouldn’t surprise anyone, but as with much of science, oceanography is another place where women still face barriers
• All of this
• Haven’t explored all of these, but science and poetry!
• It’s the season for live video feeds from deep ocean exploration! Check out Nautilus Live and Okeanos Explorer and see what they’re up to.

It’s a bright beautiful day, and I’m taking a break from work for poetry, picnics and working through the plethora of saved articles, papers, and books I’ve accumulated. A few interesting things:

• Dickinsonia! Weirdest oldest animal we know, identified by its steroids. There’s a kind of hilarious quote that pretty much sums up the scientific process in the article too: “[My supervisor] Jochen [Brocks] said we could try it, but he was always sure that it was a stupid idea,” Bobrovskiy says. “Even I thought it would fail. But it didn’t.”
• How does epigenetics help organisms adapt? A fascinating article about how changes in the expression of genes helps species respond quickly to environmental changes. Also remember learning about Lamarckian vs Darwinian evolution? I remember my high school biology class kind of laughing off Lamarck and his idea of acquired characteristics (“so if I just flap my arms I’ll eventually grow wings?”), but reality is much more subtle and complicated than that. On an epigenetics level, some traits are acquired through experience and passed on to the next generation…
• A lovely essay: “We Should Never Have Called It Earth”
• An actually good article about our preparedness for the next pandemic. There are a lot of factors we need to consider – leadership, hospital staffing and supplying, research, responsiveness (and technological capacity) of industry to produce vaccines and medications, education, funding of all of the above, etc. And as a side note since it caught my eye, I don’t think we can ever hope for a system to produce new vaccines in weeks.
• A big challenge with producing good vaccines is that for some viruses, exposure to the virus (or a vaccine) results in an even more severe illness the second time you’re exposed. Dengue is one of those viruses, and so understanding the challenges of producing an effective vaccine and the potential risks is important.
• Vision in the deep sea – fish eyes optimized to better see the faint lights of bioluminescence
• The deformation of continents. It’s a wild thing to wrap your mind around, the fluidity of the earth, the large-scale malleability of stone.

• Engineering inspired by pistol shrimp
• Old, but apparently I’ve been working with bacterial superfluids all along…not super crazy about the idea of using bacterial cultures for industrial purposes though.
• Whale migrations are guided by memory, not current trends in food availability
• Using jellyfish as a tool for removing plastic from the oceans? Sounds like there’s a long way to go, but points for creative solutions.
• Also old, but I’m glad to know there are people making their bacteria grow in funny shapes
• Geological history of the Grand Canyon

Science for the weekend! I haven’t forgotten about monster theory, I’ve been working on a project involving Frankenstein and climate change…

• Classifying viruses isn’t easy, but it’s important
• I went down the rabbit hole of weird viruses, and am enchanted by the term “genomic accordions.” Basically, some viruses are good at rapidly expanding and contracting their genomes by adding or subtracting extra copies of genes. More copies helps respond to stress and develop new mutations. This paper describes the process in poxvirus. Or if you prefer, an episode of one of my favorite podcasts about it.
• Speaking of fun viruses, check this one out! It splits its genome into separate pieces that each infect different cells…
• Hopeful stories about endangered languages
• I had no idea that Nature published science fiction…
• Huh…colliding plates near the tropics could cool the planet by exposing rocks that absorb CO2…(or here)
• I have been impressed by how seriously a lot of CRISPR scientists have taken the possibilities and ethical questions of their work. Here is a call for a global moratorium on heritable gene editing until we’re really ready.

Yes it’s short and I already failed at my write-something-every-week goal, but interviews! Travel!

• Measuring Earth’s ambient seismic noise
• Subsurface microbial life can live for a really, really long time. 
• There are giant blobs deep within the Earth’s mantle. What are they? What are they made of? Nobody knows…but we’re trying to find out.
• We can learn a lot from squid and octopuses, but here’s a new one – using a squid protein to engineer a plastic substitute.
• Depressing but nothing we haven’t heard before: “Can you afford to be a marine biologist? Or a scientist?” 
• How could I not share a gallery of cephalopods?
• I love this interview with Sylvia Earle, she’s truly inspiring for a would-be oceanographer