Café Homunculus

Charles Turner was born in the United States just a few years after the end of the civil war. His brilliance was evident from the start, and after graduating valedictorian of his high school class he quickly went on to earn his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in short order. While in school, Turner’s relentless curiosity became his greatest advantage. He was drawn to and fascinated by topics that were largely ignored by modern science at the time, namely the cognitive behaviors of insects and other invertebrates. While many of his colleagues believed insects to be mindless automata acting on instinct alone, Turner felt deeply that the brains of these oft overlooked animals were far more complex than the scientific community suspected. He performed extensive experiments to test his theories and found overwhelming evidence of problem solving and individualism among organisms as small as ants and spiders.

By the time Turner earned his zoology pHD in 1907 he had published dozens of papers in highly esteemed journals and had even co-authored a book. It is likely that Turner was the first African American to earn a pHD from the University of Chicago. With such a sparkling academic reputation and enormous body of research, one would expect this candidate to have no issues obtaining a professorship at a prestigious school. Though by every right Turner should have been head of science department at a top university, the systemic racism that permeated academia meant that doors a white man would have walked through were locked and bolted shut for Charles Henry Turner.

Turner did not allow this prejudice to dim in any way his blindingly bright passion for knowledge. He took a job as a high school teacher, and continued to perform and publish research on his own all while he instilled his students with a love for zoology. He published more than 70 papers in extremely respected journals and he remained passionately curious for the entirety of his life. If I tried to list here all of the incredible discoveries Turner made in his lifetime it would take me days to sufficiently express the impact he had on the field of invertebrate behavior. His experiments were so ahead of their time that entomologists today marvel at his research and wonder how much more we would know if Turner’s work had been given the attention and respect of other scientists working at the time. Turner’s mind was about a century ahead of those entomological contemporaries who had no interest in giving him a seat at the table. His tombstone simply reads “scientist”

“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.

“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.

“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.

The AIDS epidemic was monstrous. Not only for the lack of cure, but for the easy excuse it made for 'good people' to rid themselves of those disgusting gays.

The national willingness to discard an entire generation of (at first) gay men and then any queer persons has done immeasurable damage to every single one of us who survived it. The horror stories you might have seen in tabloids or online memorials only scratch the surface. We were unpersoned. We were named dangerous simply by our existence, and our presence was a herald for death and disease.

Our joy was not in spite of this. Our mad parties, the tendency to live in the moment, the stereotypical 'cattiness' and sex-crazed outlooks that media showers us with us even now, these were survival techniques. We dance because we lived another day. We craved physical contact from a world that feared us even in the same room, or touching the same door handle, or gods forbid us holding your hand.

And it's happening again.

If you notice your queer elders seem a little agitated beyond their usual baseline with what's happening with their trans peers this time around it's because we all recognize it from the 70s, 80s, 90s.

Name it a disease. Imply it's contagious, made-up for attention, or masking the 'real' problem (it's always pedophilia, always), often in the same breath. Consistency doesn't matter, only fear and hatred.

Say trans folks aren't worth the same considerations that good, upstanding people are. Deny them the medical care that, were they not trans, they would otherwise qualify for. Gender affirming care. Hormone treatments. Comprehensive therapy. Acceptance.

(Hell, even those lucky enough to escape obvious open discrimination find it on the back end, with medical care suddenly not being covered after being prescribed. Ask me how I know.)

And it's not just the right-wingers. Ask your Democratic or NP rep, if you have one, their thoughts on transgender rights. Listen close. See if they actually say anything of substance.

And then when trans people start dying off in droves, vanishing to forced detransitioning, assault, murder, or worse, well, that's just proof there's something wrong, isn't it? Not with the system. With us.

And with that the last formation piece of the year is done! Monte Bolca is one of the most famous productive fossil lagerstätten in the world! This Italian paradise for Eocene fossils is just as ingrained into paleontology like Solnhofen or Hell Creek. But since we...

don't have dinosaurs from here it is certainly less known despite it's incredibly importance. Monte Bolca's research history goes at least as far back as the Renaissance and it remains an important window into our understanding of this time and the evolution of fish...

The lagerstätte consists of several small localities around the town of Bolca, near Verona and preserves a shallow marine, marginally brackish, environment with a reef framing a tropical lagoon with sea grass meadows and near by Nypa mangroves. The biodiversity here is truly...

something else, with hundreds of species described so far and much work still to be done. As you might have noticed the patch reef I use as a focal point here is not just made of corals but actually largely consists of encrusting red algae and foraminifera...

As you can expect we barely scratched the surface here. Many major clades aren't even included here, it's just way too many. Not to mention that these size charts - by Discord members JW and Montana - don't even include ALL taxa from here. These are just two localities.

In 1882, the French Naturalist Camille Viguier was among the first to propose the existence of a magnetic sense. His speculation proved correct. Many animals—from bats, to migratory birds and sea turtles use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate. Yet despite decades of research, scientists still know surprisingly little about the magnetic sense. How do animals detect magnetic fields? Which brain circuits process the information? And where in the body is this sensory system located?

A well-looked after Trabi became the pride and joy of many East German families in the 1960s when it was still comparable to the small cars of the West such as the VW Beetle or the Mini. The trouble began when the government refused to work on technical innovation and only allowed incremental changes in the engine size or interior design. By the 1980s, the Trabi had indeed become the dated and underpowered relic that the West so ridiculed.

In the early 1960s, however, the Trabi helped to support Ulbricht's New Economic System and get the public on board. A special new edition had been developed for the 6th Congress of the SED in 1963: the 'Sachsenring Trabant 601'. Built in Zwickau, Saxony, it bore resemblance to the British Triumph Herald, following the same design techniques, which were indeed modern and considered fashionable at the time. It had a little more legroom, a bigger boot and came in different editions once mass produced a year later. One could get an estate version, a DeLuxe edition with two-tone colouring or the Sonderwunsch (Special Edition) which came with optional fog lamps and other additions, embodying the spirit of progress Ulbricht's economic reforms were designed to evoke".

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany by Katja Hoyer (2023), pp. 197-198.