This is a bad deal. It won't help people in the long term and it plays directly into the hands of the administration, reinforcing their narrative, not yours. Your support for this is going to burn all of us.

Tricking a bunch of easily manipulated teenagers into doing your dirty work and training them to deliver abuse and corruption is gross as hell, Elon. #doge #musk

Beavers build planned dams in protected landscape area, while local officials still seeking permits A beaver colony has gained overnight fame by building several dams in the Brdy protected landscape area, creating a natural wetland exactly where it was needed.

Be like the beavers. Do what's needed and dam (pun intended) the consequences.

Nice meeting you too! Esme' was a bit awestruck meeting you - "I talked to a famous guy!" she told her sister afterward, but she had a great time. The person at George Mason I mentioned was Dan Nicholson and the book they just release is "Everything Flows." Hope that helps!

I'd really like to keep a low profile, look at photos of other people's cats and share occasional science nerd stuff. Instead I have to join the masses trying to stop the full on fall of western democracy to a cringy billionaire asshat and his team of embarrassing interns. Not cool guys. #pissed

Super lucky to catch a great lecture by @bittelmethis.bsky.social with my 10 year-old. Sparked a great chat about how we're all pretty much waterfalls; living things more their patterns than the stuff they're made from. Deep talk with your kids is the absolute best. #parenting #science #radford

Even cooler, this is what happens if the digital flowers in our algorithm are "toxic" (cost you points when you click them): they evolve warning colors. Boom. Aposematism.

In case you were wondering, here's what our genetic algorithm looks like when you're "playing" it. The flowers start out pretty colorful, but they evolve pretty quickly to match the background (which we set as a purple-red in this iteration). Green bar means a "hit", white means a "miss."

Virtual "flowers" evolving camouflage in response to human selection pressure over generations in a Python algorithm we wrote (the video snapshots of the whole population over time). Evolution - it just happens.

Universities and the Coming Storm It’s difficult for colleges to defend democracy if they aren’t run democratically.

"Restoring a balance of power on American campuses would be more effective. As our Founders understood, power diffused in a system of checks and balances helps guarantee democracy. Centralized power, on the other hand, is always susceptible to abuse."

#sharedgovernance

prospect.org/education/20...

In our evolving genetic algorithm (see previous post) we saw mutation rates go up in small populations. Why? Seems to be because if mutation stays low, small populations don't have enough variations in their gene pool to evolve new patterns like camouflage and warning colors. Beautiful science.

We just coded a genetic algorithm where real humans act as selecting agents on populations of colorful digital "flowers." In less than 75 generations we saw evolution of camouflage, warning colors on toxic species, and mimicry. Evolution is absolutely a universal process. It just happens.

Yup. Or at least under the larger "life-like" umbrella. I don't have a huge issue with that.

Neat paper! I wonder if it might explain persistence of variance in some of the aposematic genetic algorithms we're working on. We had thought it was just a response to Batesians - keeping them from masking the signal of the aposemat species - but maybe there's more to it!

Not if you think of life not just as things that have evolved (though most engineered things are built primarily from components that have) but as things that are currently evolving. Genetically modified organisms are still acted on by natural selection now.

I usually think of life as anything that evolves through natural selection. That does include some "not lifey" stuff like viruses and genetic algorithms but it at least lumps up what biologists study. AI systems are impacted by NS, but I do like the idea of giving them their own sublabel at least!

Deer selfies.

Brownfields are greener than you probably think. Abandoned industrial spaces can actually have higher amounts of animal activity - and more species diversity - than parks, suburban yards, and even (in some cases!) primary growth forests.

When Helene hit Appalachia it left roughly 750,000 (back of napkin estimate) crayfish in ONE riverside soccer field on the Radford University campus. So... A) the number of crayfish in our rivers is totally crazy and B) that's absolutely one hell of a natural selection event.

Can migrating birds predict the weather that they're about to fly into? And, if so, how do they change their physiology to compensate? That's the question. Spending a lot of our fall sunrises in cow pastures is how we try to find an answer. Ecophys life :)

Cemeteries are incredible reservoirs for biodiversity (which is awesome) but not all cemeteries are created equal; older cemeteries have more biodiversity and more complex impacts on animal behavior than modern memorial gardens. Necroecology is the coolest.