Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 2h

You can pretend you’re in Massachusetts 😊

Reposted by Erika

Jennifer Molidor @jennifermolidor.bsky.social · 4d

Hanging onto every bit of good news

The river has come alive in the Klamath with wild Chinook salmon. The wider ecosystem is healing.

This most powerful story of Indigenous-led #rewilding after the largest dam removal in US history keeps getting better.

lostcoastoutpost.com/2025/oct/9/o...

One Year After Klamath Dam Removal, 'There's Just Fish Jumping All Over the Place': Scientists Describe Improvements to Water Quality and Wildlife

lostcoastoutpost.com

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Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 8h

There’s a new human vaccine going into trials soon, can’t happen soon enough!!! My long struggle with Lyme and other tickborne illness left me with some permanent negative effects that I might call disability. People do not take prevention seriously enough.

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Reposted by Erika

Sasha Costanza-Chock @schock.cc · 11h

Rest in Power, Miss Major. You were an inspiration to so many of us. A legend. Kind, fierce, and funny as hell💙💜

Girl, I Guess @mikellestreet.bsky.social · 12h

Very sad to have published this obituary tonight, but tried to do her legacy justice

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Stonewall Veteran and Legendary Trans Activist, Has Died at 78

www.them.us/story/miss-m...

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Stonewall Veteran and Legendary Trans Activist, Has Died at 78

Miss Major continued fighting for trans rights even after two strokes and other health concerns.

www.them.us

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Annalise Ophelian @dr-ophelian.bsky.social · 13h

The documentary I made with Miss Major 10 years ago is on Vimeo on Demand. If you want to spend some time with her on screen tonight and learn some abolitionist trans history while you're at it, it's free to rent with the code "shinebright" vimeo.com/ondemand/major

Watch MAJOR! Online | Vimeo On Demand

The award-winning documentary "MAJOR!" follows the life and campaigns of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a Black transgender elder who has been fighting for…

vimeo.com

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genna @genna.bsky.social · 16h

the practice of giving books a star rating out of five has degraded literary culture profoundly and ought to be wiped from the face of the Earth

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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Katie McKissick @katiemckissick.bsky.social · 13h

Husband requested I crochet a bone for Halloween decor. I have regrets.

A crochet bone on a couch. Supposed to look like a standard cartoony femur but it looks disturbingly phallic.

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Reposted by Erika

Celeste Labedz @celestelabedz.bsky.social · 15h

A lot of comments on Mars rovers or Moon landings, but it's important to remember that the planet NASA studies most is Earth. This is less about cutting flashy things like moonwalks and more about keeping communities in the dark on climate, weather, agriculture, pollution, natural hazards, and more.

Reuters @reuters.com · 18h

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to lay off about 550 workers reut.rs/4302N2L

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to lay off about 550 workers

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Monday it will cut nearly 550 jobs as part of a restructuring, not related to the current U.S. government shutdown.

reut.rs

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Kevin 🚀🤠 @astro-cowboy.bsky.social · 19h

Tomorrow about a third of Perseverance rover staff will be laid off, despite the mission being the penultimate step in a decades long effort to bring samples back from mars.

Reckless, needless budget cuts intended to hinder the pursuit of knowledge.

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Robyn Mieko Dahl @dahlgeoed.bsky.social · 19h

I’m looking for a grad student or two to start in Fall ‘26 on a new project on geoscience identity formation. Please get in touch if you’re interested in a masters in geoscience education at WWU! Contact and other info at robyndahl.github.io

Geoscience Ed & Paleontology at WWU – Robyn Mieko Dahl

robyndahl.github.io

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Andrew Alden @geology.bsky.social · 21h

New blog post: geology is all around, everywhere and for everyone.

Geologizing on the bus: The 18 line

Most of my geologizing around Oakland is on foot, with the help of the Citymapper phone app and all manner of public transit, which I’ve praised before. In fact, I’ve written a whole co…

oaklandgeology.com

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Reposted by Erika

George Gantsoudes @pedsortho.bsky.social · 1d

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

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Dr. Kat Napaaqtuk❄️ @napaaqtuk.bsky.social · 1d

Western Alaska was hit hard by the recent storms. Houses floated away in Kipnuk, houses flipped over, people lost everything from the flooding that came with the storms. Please donate if you can. This group has a long history of supporting AK communities.

alaskacf.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/c...

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Dr. Kat Napaaqtuk❄️ @napaaqtuk.bsky.social · 1d

I am seeing a lot of people reposting Lakota Man today bc it's Indigenous Peoples Day. A reminder that he is not well liked amongst many (most?) Natives on social media. Many of us blocked him a long time ago. Some of the reasons why are in this article.

www.dailydot.com/irl/lakotama...

Who is LakotaMan, the user behind one of the most popular Native American accounts on X?

John Martin is adored by white X users—but infamous among Native and Indigenous communities.

www.dailydot.com

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Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 1d

Anyone else seeing shockingly high priced Halloween candy where they are? The big mixed bag of snickers etc that I always buy was TWENTY NINE DOLLARS. What on earth?!?

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Reposted by Erika

Sasha Costanza-Chock @schock.cc · 1d

Abolish ICE

Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 1d

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago

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A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.

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Reposted by Erika

Dr. Sandra Steingraber 🏳️‍🌈 @ssteingraber1.bsky.social · 1d

Your reminder—or maybe no one ever told you—that complications from a measles infection include immune amnesia (where you lose immunity to everything), vision and hearing loss, brain damage, and a fatal brain disease called Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis that can show up years later.

Miranda 🖤🤍💜 @doomscroling.bsky.social · 2d

Hundreds of children in multiple states are in quarantine and on remote learning due to measles outbreaks.

The decline in MMR vaccinations has resulted in the US experiencing an increase of measles cases with 1563 total cases & 3 deaths since January.

#Pinks

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Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 1d

I was not aware of lifer pie but now I am adding that to my future birding to-dos. :D

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Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 1d

I saw one for the first time EVER last month! I parked in the lot and looked up and there it was just creeping on the tree right there in front of my windshield!

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Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 1d

I completely agree. I made the mistake of having a long in person conversation with a woman who claimed she was working to find a funder to “disrupt the wastewater industry” and I was flabbergasted. We need energy efficient filtration and public investment in the infrastructure, not “disruption”.

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Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 1d

Got it. Thanks for the reply!

Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 1d

Ok these are too cute! I have a friend in mind! Are the digital files suitable for use as a monitor wallpaper?

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Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) @drspacejunk.bsky.social · 2d

If you're horrified by this, complete the survey.
cc @niais.bsky.social
Thanks @dotsandlines.bsky.social for the HT
🧪 🔭

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NightMar on Hicks Street, Part 4: The Rabbit’s Revenge @histoftech.bsky.social · 2d

every big AI pitch is like “what if we took away your means of survival and devalued all your skills to make stonks go up temporarily? You’d like that wouldn’t you?”

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Erika @elevatedmn.bsky.social · 2d

My mom's a huge fan of hers, she's gonna be so sad!

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