Adam Mahood 🌻

I guess the real question is why did our elected leaders choose to believe Uber and Lyft when they made these claims?

The obvious 20/20 hindsight is to keep the good but not great QB until AFTER the new kid demonstrates that he's a) ready to play in the NFL and dare I say b) has more upside than the former. E.g. 49ers

Agricultural soil carbon sequestration gets a lot of attention but let’s not forget that the best way to keep carbon in soils is to stop further expansion of agriculture into natural ecosystems.

#WorldSoilDay

Who's gonna bail out the raiders tho

Yellow sunflowers clinging to a rocky cliff face

Wyethia scabra, our Whitestem Sunflower, blooming above Vermillion Falls #nativeplants

#FallBackFlowers #FallBack to June 5 🌿

Well he was nominated for the Nobel peace prize...

Trade secret: Put on some headphones, then don't listen to music. Carte blanche to ignore everyone and work in peace

Two hot pink cactus flowers atop a mostly buried spiny cactus body

Pediocactus simpsonii, our Mountain Ball Cactus, blooming in North Park #nativeplants It’s not unusual to find them half-buried in soil or sand like this one.

#FallbackFlowers #Fallback to June 1 🌿

Or actually have policies that people would be excited to vote for

Yes, there are conifers in Greenland! 🌲

500 yr-long Juniperus tree ring-based temperature reconstruction with oldest living shrub 367 yo! 💪

Striking here: 1/3 of corpus is from archive (collected end of 19th c)
Highlights importance of reanalysing old samples using modern analytical techniques! 👏

Haters like @edzitron.com will point to this as evidence that AI is *not* the future

They also have really good spikes on their benches

Exactly!!

What are the chances that the peer reviews are also AI slop?

If only there was a safer way to transport large amounts of people

For only $2690 you too can publish any kind of ai-generated garbage you want in a Nature journal

Infographic with AI slop published in Nature Scientific Reports

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

Good stuff!

Does this mean that JJ is good now?

Ready for the Winston era next year🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞

We show that DAFNEE journals compare favourably to non-DAFNEE ones in terms of editorial and financial policy, while offering similar citation rates. Finally, we offer several recommendations aimed at encouraging authors, reviewers, and evaluators to adopt more responsible publishing practices.

DAFNEE includes information on over 600 journals (co)run by academic or non-profit institutions, aiming at helping to keep publishing funds within the academic community. The database details these journal’s business models, article processing charges, citation rates and partnerships.

Focus North America | University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki’s North America Programme 2025-2035 focuses on our interaction with partners in Canada and the United States to create meaningful impact and address global challenges throug...

The U of Helsinki is offering 2-4 month visiting research fellowships for USers to come to do research and develop collaborations across borders. I did it and it worked out great for me. Interested in collaborating and moving to Helsinki? Please reach out!

www.helsinki.fi/en/innovatio...

🤌🤌🤌

HIS NAME IS 9. GET IT RIGHT

doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...

Mama capybara and five babies

Baby capybara eating leaf

Baby capybaras @ the Sacramento zoo #healing #love #hope

Vegetation change in dry grasslands in NE Germany was studied across 20–25 years.There were early signs of biodiversity decline. Increase in competitive, mesophytic species and decline in disturbance-tolerant specialists was found. Highest diversity was associated with intermediate levels of grazing

An oil painting of a handful of yuccas at White Sands in New Mexico. The sand takes on the oranges and blues of the sun and the sky, and the sky is bright and cloudless.

The yuccas at White Sands are so striking 🌵

#BlueskyArtShow #Bright #BotanicalArt #OilOnCanvas

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...