Mental health stigma hasn't gone away

First tweeted by @guardiansciblog

Mental health stigma hasn't gone away

In the Observer last Sunday, Elizabeth Day wrote an article questioning whether there was still a stigma surrounding mental illness. Her reasoning was that because there has been an outpouring of stories about depression in the wake of Robin Williams' death, we're all fully tuned in to the nuances of mental health problems now.

  • First seen in a tweet by @guardiansciblog. Subsequently shared by 20 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

LGBTQIA Astronomers

First tweeted by @SciBry

LGBTQIA Astronomers

As openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) members of the astronomical community, we strongly believe that there is no place for discrimination based on sexual orientation/preference or gender identity/expression. We want to actively maintain and promote a safe, accepting and supportive environment in all our work places.

  • First seen in a tweet by @SciBry. Subsequently shared by 16 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

You Almost Certainly Have Mites On Your Face

First tweeted by @edyong209

You Almost Certainly Have Mites On Your Face

Think of all the adults you know. Think of your parents and grandparents. Think of the teachers you had at school, your doctors and dentists, the people who collect your rubbish, and the actors you see on TV. All of these people probably have little mites crawling, eating, sleeping, and having sex on their faces.

  • First seen in a tweet by @edyong209. Subsequently shared by 29 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Women in Astronomy Workshop 2014

First tweeted by @astroduff

Women in Astronomy Workshop 2014

Information for participants, including homeworks to prepare for the workshop, what to bring, where to park, and where to eat, is available on the Participants page.

  • First seen in a tweet by @astroduff. Subsequently shared by 15 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Monthly SpaceOut From NASA's JPL & DNews

First tweeted by @NASAJPL

Monthly SpaceOut From NASA's JPL & DNews

Each month DNews will sit down with NASA to discuss amazing space topics! This month, we'll be talking about Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Could its subsurface oceans harbor life? What extreme engineering challenges would we have to overcome to explore it? What field work is going on on Earth right now to help find life on other worlds?

  • First seen in a tweet by @NASAJPL. Subsequently shared by 10 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

'Wandering stones' of Death Valley explained

First tweeted by @alexwitze

'Wandering stones' of Death Valley explained

Ending a half-century of geological speculation, scientists have finally seen the process that causes rocks to move atop Racetrack Playa, a desert lake bed in the mountains above Death Valley, California. Researchers watched a pond freeze atop the playa, then break apart into sheets of ice that - blown by wind - shoved rocks across the lake bed.

  • First seen in a tweet by @alexwitze. Subsequently shared by 19 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Twitter Analytics

First tweeted by @loisbeckett

Twitter Analytics

Twitter Cards help you richly represent your content on Twitter. Now use analytics to measure their effectiveness. Learn more

  • First seen in a tweet by @loisbeckett. Subsequently shared by 26 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26111-schrodingers-cat-caught-on-quantum-film.html

First tweeted by @PennySarchet

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26111-schrodingers-cat-caught-on-quantum-film.html

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  • First seen in a tweet by @PennySarchet. Subsequently shared by 23 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Women in Astronomy Workshop 2014

First tweeted by @BlackPhysicists

Women in Astronomy Workshop 2014

For one of the interactive sessions, participants will be asked to answer a series of questions via either SMS, or web-browser (phone-sized one is fine). Participants are encouraged to bring a 'device' of some sort (not nuclear), and preferably one that is web-enabled.

  • First seen in a tweet by @BlackPhysicists. Subsequently shared by 11 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Evolution's Baby Steps

First tweeted by @carlzimmer

Evolution's Baby Steps

If you explore our genealogy back beyond about 370 million years ago, it gets fishy. Our ancestors back then were aquatic vertebrates that breathed through gills and swam with fins. Over the next twenty million years or so, our fishy ancestors were transformed into land-walking animals known as tetrapods (Latin for "four feet").

  • First seen in a tweet by @carlzimmer. Subsequently shared by 15 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Memories 'flipped' from bad to good

First tweeted by @rebeccamorelle

Memories 'flipped' from bad to good

By artificially activating circuits in the brain, scientists have turned negative memories into positive ones. They gave mice bad memories of a place, then made them good - or vice versa - without returning to that place. Neurons storing the "place" memory were re-activated in a different emotional context, modifying the association.

  • First seen in a tweet by @rebeccamorelle. Subsequently shared by 11 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Sanrio's Shocking Reveal: Hello Kitty Is NOT A Cat

First tweeted by @feliciaday

Sanrio's Shocking Reveal: Hello Kitty Is NOT A Cat

For years we've been led astray thinking that Sanrio's iconic Hello Kitty is a white, fluffy cat with a red bow clipped below her ear: Hello Kitty is, in fact, not a cat. Christine R. Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii who is curating the upcoming Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum in October, told the L.A.

  • First seen in a tweet by @feliciaday. Subsequently shared by 11 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Journal takes down autism-vaccine paper pending investigation

First tweeted by @ivanoransky

Journal takes down autism-vaccine paper pending investigation

An article purporting to find that black children are at substantially increased risk for autism after early exposure to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine has been shelved, amid claims that a CDC whistleblower has accused health officials of suppressing information about the link. Not surprisingly, the prospect that the CDC has been sitting on evidence of an...

  • First seen in a tweet by @ivanoransky. Subsequently shared by 12 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Wolves Vulnerable to Contagious Yawning

First tweeted by @JaneJaeLee

Wolves Vulnerable to Contagious Yawning

Watching a pack of wolves at the Tama Zoological Park outside Tokyo last year, Japanese researchers found that the sight of a wolf yawning often triggered yawning in other wolves. And the more time the wolves spent together, the more likely it was to happen.

  • First seen in a tweet by @JaneJaeLee. Subsequently shared by 9 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Science Headlines I Would Like To See More Of

First tweeted by @HPS_Vanessa

Science Headlines I Would Like To See More Of

The Oceans Are Fine And Full Mostly Of Fish And Water, With A Very Small, Normal Amount Of Plastic In Them Still Plenty Of Places For Us To Put Our Garbage Before We Have To Start Worrying About Anything There Are Over 1300 Species Of Birds In Danger Of BIRTHDAY

  • First seen in a tweet by @HPS_Vanessa. Subsequently shared by 15 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Dumbo Octopus Gives Rare View [Video] | Octopus Chronicles, Scientific American Blog Network

First tweeted by @KHCourage

Dumbo Octopus Gives Rare View [Video] | Octopus Chronicles, Scientific American Blog Network

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Scientific American. Her book Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature In the Sea is out now from Penguin/Current. Follow on Twitter @KHCourage.

  • First seen in a tweet by @KHCourage. Subsequently shared by 10 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Kelly Hills, Mona Gable, Amanda Wilson * DNA: Privacy, Security, Public Health

First tweeted by @rocza

Kelly Hills, Mona Gable, Amanda Wilson * DNA: Privacy, Security, Public Health

Hr 1: Kelly hosts journalist Mona Gable, author of Blood Brother: The Gene That Rocked My Family; about genetic testing, the discovery of her brother's Huntington's diagnosis and the subsequen choices faced by her family. Gable writes about women's issues, health, travel. Also, Arctic explorer, wannabe scientist.

  • First seen in a tweet by @rocza. Subsequently shared by 8 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Orion Rocks! Pebble-size Particles May Kick Start Planet Formation - NRAO: Revealing the Hidden Universe

First tweeted by @TheNRAO

Orion Rocks! Pebble-size Particles May Kick Start Planet Formation - NRAO: Revealing the Hidden Universe

For Release: August 27, 2014 Rocky planets like Earth start out as microscopic bits of dust tinier than a grain of sand, or so theories predict. Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered that filaments of star-forming gas near the Orion Nebula may be brimming with pebble-size particles -- planetary building blocks 100 to 1,000 times larger than the dust grains typically found around protostars.

  • First seen in a tweet by @TheNRAO. Subsequently shared by 12 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Fantastically Wrong: The Legend of the Homicidal Fire-Proof Salamander | Science | WIRED

First tweeted by @rmathematicus

Fantastically Wrong: The Legend of the Homicidal Fire-Proof Salamander | Science | WIRED

In the first century AD, Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder threw a salamander into a fire. He wanted to see if it could indeed not only survive the flames, but extinguish them, as Aristotle had claimed such creatures could. But the salamander didn't ... uh ... make it.

  • First seen in a tweet by @rmathematicus. Subsequently shared by 12 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

Antler Farm

First tweeted by @slaskow

Antler Farm

Antler Farm Where trophy deer are bred to grow hyperreal racks In Old English, a dēor was a beast - any one with four legs. Over time, dēor became der became deer. These, too, were once wild things, the cute little fawns that wander through suburban backyards, the does and bucks that overrun East Coast forests.These days, even when they're outside fences, deer don't live free of human meddling.

  • First seen in a tweet by @slaskow. Subsequently shared by 10 other tracked sources in the past 24 hours.

What Is This?

This is an automated set of links currently being tweeted by the astronomers of Twitter. I take a small set of my favourite astro-Tweeters, and follow their tweets, and the tweets they follow too. As links are shared, I store them and keep track of how often they are retweeted or posted elsewhere. Those that rise to the top in any 24-hour period are displayed here.

Who Am I Tracking?

I'm tracking myself (seems like a good a place to start as any!) and a bunch of my favourite go-to astronomers on Twitter. The accounts they follow are also monitored, up to about 5,000 accounts. It isn't necessarily those people that will rise to the top here though - but more likely the sources of the links they share. I will continuously modify the list of source accounts, to maximise the useful of this page.

Why Do This?

To find interesting stuff! The topics will vary day-to-day, and sources of interesting links should rise to the top organically. I see this as an alternative news source, delivering material aligned with the interests of my peers on Twitter. It's an experiment too - and a coding project I've been wanting to build for a while now.

Resources Used

This site has built on top of several other projects, many of which I have slightly modified. The back-end is written in PHP and the front-end is HTML+JavaScript.

  • OpenFuego: Created by Andrew Phelps of the Nieman Journalism Lab, OpenFuego is the open-source version of Fuego, a Twitter bot created to track the future-of-journalism crowd and the links they’re sharing.
  • Type & Grids: You can find many amazing website templates on Type & Grids. All of them are responsive and well-commented, and many of them are free.
  • Twitter: Microblogging site Twitter is still one of my favourite things about the web, even after all these years.

Future Development

The current to-do list for this project includes an RSS feed and a Twitter account, which will provide other ways to access the same set of links. If you have ideas for how this projects should evolve, please get in touch.