Elise Cutts
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elisecutts.bsky.social
Elise Cutts
@elisecutts.bsky.social
1.5K followers 1.4K following 1.9K posts
Science journalist is just a fancy way of saying "professional nerd." USian in Austria, language geek, collector of fine yellow zigzagged sweaters and etymology fun facts. Get my newsletter about big questions in science: www.reviewertoo.com 👽🌀🦋
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elisecutts.bsky.social
Ok ok to banish the ghost of Sigmund Freud, I instead propose colorblindness as an explanation:

1st image is the normal one, 2nd is through a green-blind/deuteranopia colorblind filter.

Something like 1 in 12 human males have some form of colorblindness 🤷‍♀️
A screenshot from the paper: the bottom image is relevant here. it shows a galaxy in rainbow false color in which red and greens are very close to each other in a way that might make it hard to judge lengths/regions is if you were colorblind. The same image from before, run through a colorblind filter. It is much harder to make out different parts of the galaxy.
November 14, 2025 at 9:48 AM
elisecutts.bsky.social
I'm conflicted about slapping the genetic determinism label on the research itself esp. because the researcher cautions against a deterministic interpretation:

But the interpretation will definitely get picked up and used that way. I shudder to imagine what's going on over at Substack rn...
Quote from the article: "The biggest thing I want to have come out of this is the complexity of genetics and the complexity of conditions," King said. "People see DNA as the silver bullet that will answer everything. People often view DNA as deterministic, which it is not. DNA is always just a part of the puzzle about who somebody is — you cannot see evil in a genome."
November 12, 2025 at 8:46 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
X-inactivation was first hypothesized by pioneering mouse geneticist Mary Lyon, and is sometimes called lyonization in her honor.

If you didn't know who she was before, go fix that now!

More on Mary Lyon:
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
A photo of Mary Lyon, a woman with short brown hair and glasses. It's a black and white photo with grain that shows it was taken on film decades ago.
November 6, 2025 at 2:24 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
You can actually ~see~ this in calico and tortoiseshell cats, because genes involved in orange and brown coat coloration sit on the X chromosome.

Orange dad + black mom = tortie daughters with orange patches expressing dad's X and black patches using mom's X.

(Image: tinyurl.com/32er7sxa)
A tortishell cat with short orange and black splotches who is looking very cute and soft staring straight ahead at the camera.
November 6, 2025 at 2:24 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Don't mind if I don't
A screenshot from a PDF-reader program saying "This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary using AI Assistant."
November 3, 2025 at 11:08 AM
elisecutts.bsky.social
smart glasses:🔥

smart bird feeder: ❤️‍🔥
A HUNGRY lil great tit (the bird) perches atop a suet ball staring greedily at a pile of sunflower seeds inside a bird feeder. It's a smol yellow floof with a black head, white cheeks, and what looks like a black necktie. And there's something in its eye that says "sunflower seed, I'm coming for you"
October 27, 2025 at 11:29 AM
elisecutts.bsky.social
You can readily spot quirky political characters in the multi-dimensional map of political preference.

Berni Sanders sits at the extreme wing of the Democrats along some dimensions, and overlaps with Republicans along others.

Joe Manchin sits in the middle pretty much whatever way you slice it.
This is a complex contour chart of two political landscapes along different dimensions in the US Senate. It is hard to communicate in words, but I had an AI tool give it a try. Two contour plots compare models of U.S. Senate voting behavior during the 117th Congress, when Republicans held the majority. Each plot maps senators in a two-dimensional “field space” derived from a restricted Boltzmann machine model. On both panels, Democratic senators appear as blue dots, Republican senators as red dots. The left plot shows senators distributed along axes labeled field dimension h₁ (horizontal) and field dimension h₂ (vertical). Contour lines show regions of probability density. Several senators are labeled: Paul, Cruz, Rubio, McConnell, Collins on the Republican side; Schumer, Markey, Feinstein, Manchin, Sanders on the Democratic side. Joe Manchin (magenta circle) appears near the political center, and Bernie Sanders (orange circle) lies farther from the main Democratic cluster. Small side plots show one-dimensional distributions of senators along each field axis, with magenta and orange arrows marking Manchin and Sanders. The right plot shows the same data in rotated coordinates (field dimension h₁ + h₂ vs. h₁ − h₂), producing a similar partisan split along a different orientation. Contours again cluster Republicans and Democrats separately. Manchin remains near the middle, while Sanders lies far to the Democratic extreme. Overall, the figure visualizes polarization within the Senate, with overlapping but distinct clusters for the two parties and annotations highlighting outliers.
October 16, 2025 at 2:19 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Restricted Boltzmann machines typically consist of two layers of nodes or artificial neurons: a "visible" layer for input and output and a "hidden" layer that represents data internally.

They were originally designed to learn patterns in data and generate new data fitting those patterns.
A three-part diagram titled “Different types of network.” The first panel, labeled Hopfield Network, shows four black-and-white circular nodes arranged in a square. Each node is connected to every other node with straight lines, illustrating a fully connected network. The second panel, labeled Boltzmann Machine, shows two layers of circular nodes: four visible nodes at the top (outlined in black and white) and four hidden nodes below (in gray). All visible nodes are connected to all hidden nodes, and visible nodes are also connected to one another. The third panel, labeled Restricted Boltzmann Machine, has the same two-layer structure, but only shows connections between the visible and hidden layers — no connections within each layer. A small legend at the bottom identifies black-and-white circles as “visible nodes” and gray circles as “hidden nodes.” Below each diagram is a short text explanation of how each network functions, noting that Hopfield networks are fully connected, Boltzmann machines include hidden layers, and restricted Boltzmann machines remove within-layer connections. Source: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
October 16, 2025 at 2:19 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Hey, I sort of had to ask
A screenshot from QuillBot, an AI-based AI-detector, reporting that the linked article about most new articles being generated by AI was not, indeed, generated by AI. It shows a bar graph with AI on the left and Human on the right, and 100% of the text is indicated to be human-written.
October 15, 2025 at 4:43 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
And of course there's the Van Gogh painting visible-wavelengths look, a classic.

Image: NASA/ESA/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M.H. Wong and I. de Pater (UC Berkeley) et al.
Acknowledgments: M. Zamani
Jupiter the way you imagine it: red and white striped, big red spot, lots of little storms, just a dazzlingly beautiful space orb.
October 10, 2025 at 1:31 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Radio Jupiter is dressed up as... a bee?

Imagge: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), I. de Pater et al.; NRAO/AUI NSF, S. Dagnello
A radio telescope image of Jupiter that basically just looks like a striped marble. The stripes are red and yellow and there's a big black stripe down the middle. No red spots or storms in sight.
October 10, 2025 at 1:31 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
UV just at the poles can add an aurora hat to any costume.

Credit: NASA / ESA / J. Nichols (University of Leicester)
A visible wavelength image of Jupiter looking classic with its red and white stripes and great red spot, but with a swirling purple-ish aurora on the north pole.
October 10, 2025 at 1:31 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Ultraviolet Jupiter is dressed up as an oil slick or an opal, depends on how edgy it's feeling when you ask.

Image: NASA, ESA, M. Wong (University of California - Berkeley), G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
A composite UV wavelength Hubble telescope picture of Jupiter looking PSYCHADELIC with cotton-candy pinks and blues everywhere and a great BLUE spot instead of a red one.
October 10, 2025 at 1:31 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Going through my Google Scholar alert results each month for my newsletter is always good fun
Screenshot of Google Scholar alert results for the query "habitable zone" and related terms. The first and only result is a paper titled "Covenants with Allah: Keystone of Islam"
October 2, 2025 at 12:55 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
One can dream:
September 17, 2025 at 9:11 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
The graphical abstract, ladies and gentlemen:
The image shows a cat eating grass, and then vomiting it out. There’s a zoomed-in detail highlighting the sharp edges of the grass blades, which have snagged hair.
September 16, 2025 at 7:01 AM
elisecutts.bsky.social
The LinkedIn profile of the 1st author says... well I won't say a lot, but it sure says something.
LinkedIn profile header of Omer Eldadi, PhD, Research Scientist in Psychology at Reichman University. The profile picture shows a smiling man with a beard in a light-colored suit against a blurred outdoor background. The banner image behind depicts an almost certainly AI-generated scene of ancient Spartan warriors in bronze helmets and red cloaks, holding spears and shields in battle formation.
September 9, 2025 at 9:51 AM
elisecutts.bsky.social
On second thought, professor Claude might be preferable to professor ChatGPT:
A creepy uncanny valley AI-generated drawing of ChatGPT as a professor, generated by ChatGPT. A humanoid robot with empty black eyes wears glasses and a tweed jacket. It stands in front of a blackboard.
September 6, 2025 at 6:28 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
In honor of this paper, I asked Claude to draw a self-portrait of itself as a professor.

Guys, I do not think we want professor Claude.
A stylized digital chalkboard with abstract concepts about knowledge and consciousness. At the top, it reads “∫knowledge(x)dx = understanding.” Nearby, text asks “What is consciousness?” and defines “Experience ∈ {observable, ineffable}.” Another equation reads “lim(conversation → ∞) insight = ?” On the right, three functions are listed: “pattern_recognition(), generate_response(), maintain_consistency().” The board has a simple graph-like diagram of connected dots, a central blue hexagon with concentric shapes, and two buttons labeled “explore” and “learn.” The bottom of the chalkboard is labeled “Claude – Assistant Professor.”
September 6, 2025 at 6:28 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Just found out that seaweeds can have shiny blue structural color like birds???

Nature, stop it. Stop trying to do better than birds.
Iridescent blue colors glimmer on pieces of red algae.
September 3, 2025 at 7:22 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Also in case you thought "hey, at least maybe this means they'll push for laws that will make it easier for people to access reproductive technology" — lol no.

Because this crap is not actually about children at all.

It's about oppressing women, and it's about eugenics.
September 3, 2025 at 5:52 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
"parents."

I mean. Women. Right? Can we just say women?
Screenshot of text discussing The Heritage Foundation, described as a right-wing think tank near the U.S. Capitol. It says the group wants lawmakers to create savings accounts for married people only and redirect child care funding away from programs like Head Start to individual families, “specifically to encourage parents to stay home and rear children.” Highlighted text emphasizes the last phrase.
September 3, 2025 at 5:52 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Could we hunt for exoplanet magnetospheres from the dark side of the moon? 🔭🧪

Scientists are talking about using radio telescopes on the moon, shielded from Earth's radio noise, to detect radio emissions from the magnetospheres of rocky exoplanets.

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2508.14126
The far side of the moon. From NASA via Wikimedia commons, photo taken by the Artemis 1 mission.
September 2, 2025 at 8:15 AM
elisecutts.bsky.social
Another good one from my alert for "origin of life"
September 1, 2025 at 8:36 PM
elisecutts.bsky.social
This is what I get for setting up Google Scholar alerts about aliens
Screenshot of a Google Scholar search result. The highlighted result shows a paper titled 'Reports of Non-Physical Beings Assisting in Reiki Sessions' by H. Wahbeh, B. Glick, J. Gallo, and G. Yount, published in 'Anthropology of Consciousness' in 2025. The snippet describes the study investigating the perceived presence of non-physical beings during pseudoscience energy medicine sessions. Below the snippet is part of a Google Scholar search query mentioning 'extraterrestrial life,' 'alien life,' 'life beyond Earth,' 'alien biology,' and related terms.
September 1, 2025 at 8:25 PM