Quickies: Grad student labor rights, the end of SETI@home, and more…

Happy Friday!

It’s spring break for me, and I’ve spent a good deal of it recovering from the FIRST half of the spring semester and generally agonizing over the presidential primaries. Well, it’s time to move on and get things done, whether it be to finish grading or to just let my brain figure out what it wants to freak out about next. Before that, here’s your Friday morning Quickies!

• In a shameful move, University of California Santa Cruz dismissed 54 graduate students who are striking for a cost of living increase just so they can actually afford to survive in the very place where they are doing their work for the university. Yesterday, strike actions closed down the entire campus. What I sadly don’t see are reports of tenured faculty out there protesting with them…
• The 20-year-long crowd-computing SETI@home project is coming to an end. This was unique in 1999 when it allowed everyday users to donate spare computer cycles to the crunching of data, looking for signals from life in the universe. Many citizen scientists that I have talked with remember it fondly as their very first citizen science project!
• Residents along Lake Eerie woke up to their houses completely encased in ice after two days of strong winds. It’s not a winter wonderland, unless your wonderland is terrifyingly creepy.

And for Cute Animal Friday:

• China considers deploying 100,000 ducks to Pakistan to help it fight a swarm of locusts. Cutest. Deployment. Ever.
• A Pennsylvania man shares a complication of all the critters that crossed a log bridge near his home in a year using a trail cam.
• It’s entirely possible I’ve shared this one already, but who cares? It’s an adorable friendship between a pupper and an owl.
• From Muscadine, we find that red pandas are two different species (double the adorbs!), a female komodo dragon named Charlie that doesn’t need a male to procreate, and MICE IN SPACE with the most amazing visuals ever. (Skip ahead to 1:35 below for SPACE ZOOMIES!)

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