Dr Alessio Veneziano
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aveneziano.bsky.social
Dr Alessio Veneziano
@aveneziano.bsky.social
2.2K followers 3.6K following 730 posts
Biological Anthropologist with an inordinate fondness for science, nature, bones, fossils, primates, data and R! 💀🦷🦴🩻🦍🦧📊
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aveneziano.bsky.social
I love finding notes, receipts, etc from the past in secondhand books 📚, like this 1947 invite from a British lieutenant to an italian consul and missus in Palestine! It's a tiny bit of history, tangible proof it used to be #Palestine 🇵🇸!

#BookSky #books
The 1947 edition of the book "Thieves in the night" by Arthur Koestler, opened at its first page on a wooden table, with a note placed over it. The note reads, in english and italic style: "Lieut. Col. Richard Norman requests the pleasure of the company of Sig et Signora Giacomo Silimbani in the garden of the King David Hotel on Wednesday, 28th May 1947. Cocktails 6-8 p.m. R. S. V. P. G. S. I. H. Q. Palestine Please bring this card with you." The names of the invitees are hand written.
September 29, 2025 at 5:42 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Fantastic #fungi from Algonquin (ON 🇨🇦) and the places they chose as their home! Great diversity! If any expert wants to share curiosities on these guys, I'm all ears (I am not knowledgeable about fungi but mesmerised by them and secretly dreaming of living in a forest of fungi) 🍄‍🟫🍄‍🟫🍄‍🟫

🧪 #science
A collage of seven pictures of fungi. Top row includes two tiny orange mushrooms surrounded by foliage, one that looks like a light brown/pinkish coral and a solitary yellow friend surrounded by moss. The central row shows layered green fungi growing on a rotting tree trunk and a grey mushroom between two rocks. The bottom row has pictures of one black fungus with a red band living on the cut surface of a tree trunk and one brownish white mushroom sitting on the broken trunk of a tree.
August 4, 2025 at 6:34 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Ghost Pipes 👻🌷, another wild encounter in Algonquin (ON 🇨🇦)! Monotropa uniflora is a plant with no chlorophill, getting energy not from light but by parasitising fungi 🍄‍🟫

More info at www.natureconservancy.ca/en/what-we-d...

🧪 #science 🌱 #botany 🍄‍🟫 #fungi
Ghost Pipes, white and with flowers pointing downward, with forest in the background.
August 2, 2025 at 3:10 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
The carnivorous northern pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) 🌱 chilling in a bog area at Algonquin Provincial Park (ON, 🇨🇦)! Apparently, in Algonquin this plant was found to regularly feed on small salamanders! Some examples at canadiangeographic.ca/articles/awa...

🧪 #science #botany #zoology
A northern pitcher plant with its pitcher shaped leaf, red on the outside and green with red veins on the inside, in between the dense vegetation of a bog.
July 31, 2025 at 10:40 PM
aveneziano.bsky.social
An emotional encounter (for an European biologist) with a Monarch Butterfly 🦋 in Georgian Bay (ON🇨🇦). Monarchs migrate south and back for thousands of miles, and the butterflies going back are not the same generation of the initial travellers 🤯

🧪 #science #biology

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch...
A monarch butterfly resting on a pink flower, seen from the side. Its body and rim of the wings are black with white spots, and the internal part of the wings is a creamy white with some orange on the top.
July 28, 2025 at 3:04 PM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Behold the joint township in the heart of Ontario 🇨🇦 whose name looks like the citation of a scientific paper! (I was expecting "Publish or Perish" on their coat of arms)

🧪 #science #Canada #PublishOrPerish

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysart_...
The coat of arms of the joint township of "Dysart et al", Ontario (Canada). The coat of arms has the shape of a shield with turrets on the top, two mirrored moons over a star on a light blue background in the top left corner of the shield, a beaver on the bottom left corner, three pine trees on the right side and a smaller shield in the center, decorated with a light blue diagonal stripe over a yellow background.
July 25, 2025 at 11:22 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Unexpected while #sciencing around 🐕🐾
A text with the sentence "Aloof and dignified, yet gay." Referring to the temperament of the Afghan Hound as reported by the American Kennel Club
June 12, 2025 at 6:09 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
On the use of positive words in scientific abstracts! Spoiler Alert: they increased over time! I had to check my own abstracts and can happily report I keep them honest (is that the reason I don't have a permanent position?) 🧪 #science

Paper at link.springer.com/article/10.1...
An image presenting multiple graphs showing how the use of positive/valence words (e.g. excellent, improved, novel, successfully, beneficial, etc.) in the abstracts of scientific articles has changed through time. Overall, the graphs tend to record a generalised increase in abstracts using positive words to describe results.
May 26, 2025 at 8:29 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Tomorrow (May 6th) I'll speak about bones, coding, geometry and #3D at @palaeopercs.bsky.social! To join, register at paleopercs.com/participate/

(15.00 UTC; 17.00 CEST)

🧪 #science 🦕 #paleo 🏺 #BioAnth 🦴 #bones
The title slide of a Power Point presentation. The background is black and a white stripe with deceitful ads is in the foreground. Among the ads, there is a fake ad with the title of the seminar: "of Bones and Bytes: The Geometry and Coding Hacks Palaeontologists DO WANT you to know"
May 5, 2025 at 2:12 PM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Yesterday, I spoke to a high school class about #anthropology, thanks to @skypeascientist.bsky.social! Many were interested in my "origin story" as a scientist. My advice is to share it with others: it may be the little they need to find the confidence to do #science! 🧪
A slide of a power point presentation with a list of questions and the image of a lab mouse breathing while submerged into an oxygenated Perfluorocarbon solution. The questions are: "Have you always had a passion for science or was it something you were just good at?" "What/who inspired you to do what you do? What made you want to become a scientist" "Do you like your job and why? Is it gross?" "What made you study primate and human bones?" "Have you ever gotten stuck on one of the things that you were studying?"
May 2, 2025 at 7:51 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Today, the 25th of April, in Italy 🇮🇹 we celebrate the #Liberation from NaziFascism. We celebrate to remember the people of the resistance, we celebrate to remember that we kicked fascists' asses once and we can do it again.
Partigiani of the resistance movement. Four people (three men and a woman) stand in the front of a crowd of fighters. Image from the book "Noi Partigiani, memoriale della resistenza Italiana".
April 25, 2025 at 9:37 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
"Suffering in Paris" 🇫🇷, frustration on keyboard, 2273x2160 px. 💻
The leftmost letters on a French keyboard, with A-Q, W-Z in frustratingly different (for a non-French) positions than in other keyboard versions.
April 15, 2025 at 10:48 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
#WomenInSTEM 👩‍🔬👩‍💻👩‍🏫
Neurobiologist Rita Levi Montalcini's career was cut short by the fascist regime but she persevered and won a #NobelPrize! May her example give strength to the scientists whose lives are being disrupted by the US' regime!

🧪 #science

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Le...
Photo portrait of Rita Levi Montalcini at the age of 100 (2009). Photo by Presidenza della Repubblica Italiana.
April 7, 2025 at 6:59 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
It seems that Gideon Mantell, in a sentence otherwise praising Mary Ann's drawings for their correctness, still describes her as "a lady but little skilled in the art"...dude, what are you talking about? 👇 (2/2)

#paleo
A skillful engraving depiction of an iguanodon tooth by Mary Ann Mantell.
April 4, 2025 at 8:10 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
I'm doing a thing in #Rstats 👩‍💻 and it seems that the result is Germany 🇩🇪

🧪 #science #stats #coding
A bivariate plot showing a grey point cloud resembling the shape of Germany.
April 3, 2025 at 9:33 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
#WomenInSTEM 👩‍⚕️👩‍💻👩‍🏫
Florence Nightingale is known as a nursing icon 🏥 but did you know she was a pioneer in #stats? 📊 Among other contributions, she conceived the "Nightingale rose diagram" to analyse the causes of death in the army.

🧪 #science #dataViz

More at en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florenc...
The Nightingale rose diagram: a circular bar plot where bins are slices of a circle, each with a radius proportional to the quantity visualised. This image shows an original rose diagram by Florence Nightingale herself. The title on the diagram says "diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the east". The date range of April 1854 to March 1855 is reported.
April 3, 2025 at 8:10 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
#PrimatePost 🦧🍑
Several #primates have hardened skin called ischial callosities (ic) that help them sit more comfortably, for example on branches 🌳. Our buttocks (not ic) offer similar comfort but originate from enlarged gluteal muscles!

🧪 #science #BioAnth

📷 by Josef Gelernter
A Lar gibbon on a cut tree trunk showing the bum and ischial callosities to the camera.
March 27, 2025 at 9:00 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
#PrimatePost 🦧🐮
We think at #primates eating leaves 🍁 or fruits 🍎 but Geladas eat mostly grass by grazing, pretty much what cows do! 🐮 To add more cool, they also sport a hairdo unparalleled by the most bewitching 80s rockstars! 🎸 (1/2)

🧪 #science #BioAnth

📷 by Shemimages www.shemimages.com
A Gelada (Theropithecus gelada) sitting on a rock, looking at the camera, fluffy light brown hair covering their body, a patch of naked red skin on the breast, with long hair on the head and cheeks.
March 17, 2025 at 8:28 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Almost forgot today 14 March (3/14) it's #PiDay, the best occasion to learn about how to approximate #Pi using pizza, mozzarella and geometry 🍕, all made in the unusual kitchen of #Rstats 👩🏻‍💻!

🧪 #science

rpubs.com/aveneziano/p...
March 14, 2025 at 3:52 PM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Two random morning thoughts:
1. very few things are better than smelling fresh basil 🌿
2. in the morning, you need a mug that reflects your spirit ☕ (a #Darwin, #science or #paleo mug will do it for me)
A picture with fresh basil in a red plastic vase and a white mug with a drawing depicting Charles Darwin sitting on a Galapagos tortoise while reading books.
March 5, 2025 at 8:59 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
Write to the @royalsociety.org to let them know their credibility is in jeopardy if they do not cancel Elon Musk's fellowship. Whether you are a scientist or value #science 🧪, this is the least we can do to make our voice heard!
The text of an email, reading: To whom it may concern, I am writing to highlight how disconcerting it is to see one of the major global threats to science - Elon Musk - still retained among your fellows. I am in disbelief, having once considered your society a stronghold of science. All the more upsetting that with Musk's current actions in collaboration with the US government, you not only decide not to retract his fellowship, not to take a position against his actions, but plainly write the following statement in the main page of your website: Science under threat The Royal Society is defined by the principles of open, transparent, decision making based on scientific evidence. The freedom of researchers to follow the scientific evidence is a key pillar of progress and where it is threatened, we put at risk the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. This statement, linked to your inaction toward Musk's fellowship, undermines your credibility. I think you already know that but I thought it's good to hear it from other people. Consider it a peer-review on your actions from a member of the scientific community. Good day, Dr Alessio Veneziano
March 4, 2025 at 10:15 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
@royalsociety.org is this a joke? Do you condemn threats to #science and yet retain a major global threat among your fellows? Remove Elon Musk's fellowship if you want to be credible! 🧪
March 4, 2025 at 9:47 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
#PrimatePost 🦧🌌
The large eyes of some nocturnal primates see in the dark thanks to the tapetum lucidum, a reflecting cell layer that increases the light hitting the photoreceptors! Cats/cows have it!

🧪 #science #BioAnth #primates

📷 by zoologist Joseph Smit and medical photographer Andrew Meyerson
An illustration of four faces of Lorises showing their large eyes - compared to their head size - and fur colour patterns. The tapetum lucidum of a cow, shown in the isolated concavity of the eye bulb and exhibiting beautiful shades of green and blue.
March 3, 2025 at 9:04 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
#PrimatePost 🦧🤥
An extreme nose and extremely handsome! Male Nasicas (right) - aka proboscis monkey - shows a remarkable nose, probably a sexually selected trait to attract females (left). Not their only "oddity"...(1/2)

📷 by Charles J. Sharp

🧪 #science #primates #BioAnth
A female Nasica with reddish-light brown hair and exhibiting what can only be described as the primate equivalent of a French nose! A male nasica with reddish-light brown hair and showing a large nose shaped a bit like a pendulum.
February 25, 2025 at 9:10 AM
aveneziano.bsky.social
#PrimatePost 🦧✖️3️⃣
Meet Megaladapis edwardsi, a giant lemur species from Madagascar 🇲🇬, gone extinct only around 600-700 years ago! It was an arboreal species, likely much less agile on the ground like some extant lemurs!

🧪 #science #Primates #BioAnth
The skeleton of the giant "Koala" lemur Megaladapis edwardsi, anatomically reconstructed in a life-like position clinging to a tree branch. The specimen is preserved and exhibited at the Museum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle, in Paris, France.
February 17, 2025 at 10:12 AM