I like all these goofy guys you post. Does the pointy nose perform a function or is it just stylish?

Plant enjoyers should also appreciate the Sparganium inflorescence in the back

Do you have pet isopods?

Merriam Webster has this definition for liquidate: To do away with especially by killing.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/...

Those are mites, or more specifically Mesostigmatid mites. They are hitchhikers frequently found on insects associated with dung or carrion. These resources tend to be very patchy in the environment and mites are so tiny they can't disperse well by themselves, so they take advantage of beetles, flies, millipedes etc. to get there faster. These mites are predators that feed on worms or other small critters, they're not parasites.

Looks like your beetle has at least two mite species on it: the lighter ones with two separate dorsal shields likely belong to the genus Poecilochirus, and the darker ones with undivided dorsal shields are unfamiliar to me. They might belong in the family Macrochelidae.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...

I thought the thumbnail was butter for a second

They sound absolutely fantastic:

https://ebird.org/species/commur

So I recently reinstalled Linux on my machine but hadn't bothered to reinstall Analog Lab, so I just did that now to confirm it still works. It was really easy.

From their website I got the installer, and ran Analog Lab V Setup.exe with Wine. I went through the setup wizard just like you would on Windows, and then manually moved the vst file from the Wine directories into my normal vst location (~/.vst). After this, I generated the .so file with yabridge. This is also a really simple process. If you are using yabridge for the first time, you need to tell it where your plugins are:

$ yabridgectl add path/to/vst

After that, generate the .so files:

$ yabridgectl sync

Once this is done, your DAW of choice should be able to find and open the plugin. For me, Analog Lab V opened without issue and prompted me for my account info. Here's Analog Lab V on my machine:

Edit: I forgot to mention my copy is legit and it activated no problem.

This is really bugging me. The article claims the fungus is an edible mushroom, but Pestalotiopsis (the spores on the right) is an endophytic, microscopic ascomycete. Not a mushroom and certainly not edible. So why is there a picture of Pluteus on the left? I can only imagine the author googled "Pestalotiopsis mushroom" and grabbed the first picture that came up.

The colors are striking in among the flowers like that. Great shot

The word 'quietly' seems to be in every other headline lately, it really bugs me.

Government / company x quietly does y.

Native Linux audio plugins are frustratingly uncommon. I'm gradually trying to replace my Windows plugins with Linux native ones but it's hard to do sometimes. My thing lately has been building my own replacements with plugdata.

Interesting instrument, thanks for sharing. Apparently Haydn wrote a whopping 175 pieces for the baryton, which have all been recorded by the Esterházy Ensemble. This will keep me occupied for a while!

Neat. Another paper reviewing fungal bioluminescence just came out on New year's eve, and according to which there are 132 bioluminescent species known to date. More than I realized!

Link to the (open access) paper for anyone curious: https://www.mdpi.com/2309-608X/11/1/19

It's easy to confuse the two because of how morphologically simple they are. Fun fact (or not depending on how much of a nerd you are), fungi that produce sticky droplets of spores on long stalks like this are often dispersed by arthropods, such as mites or springtails, which bump into the spore droplets as they walk along.

Don't all the big publishers do this though, or is Elsevier especially bad?

Are you familiar with yabridge? It can take a windows vst (.DLL) and create a Linux counterpart (.so) that daws can scan and open normally.

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

In my experience, it works pretty much perfectly about 80% of the time, and the remaining 20% are buggy but useable, or rarely completely broken. I don't have Arturia's V Collection, but I have Analog Lab 5 and that runs without bugs. If they are built with similar technology, then you might expect V Collection to work as well.

Cute bug enjoyers need to know about springtails.

Picture is from this site, which I highly recommend for it's incredible photography:

https://www.chaosofdelight.org/...