Timeline cleanse:
Baby tapir getting scritches for their itches.
If you want to scritch your very own tapir & you live outside of Central or South America or SE Asia, you'll need to visit a zoo.
But these little guys are (evolutionarily) from around here, in North America. Let's talk about it.
Re-upping this @uio.no starter pack. Let me know if you want to be added!
go.bsky.app/EMD9mq2
Five years after the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines started, it seems the mystery of why the Astra-Zeneca and J&J vaccines led to a rare but deadly side effect of unusual blood clots and bleeding has finally been solved.
It's a fascinating case of molecular mimicry that may help make vaccine safer.🧪
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.
Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Really interesting and confounding trend reported in Dynamic Ecology - ecology citations peaked in 2021 and have been declining since. Continued impact from the pandemic? 🧪🌐🌾 dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/01/14/s...
14.01.2026 14:48 — 👍 42 🔁 12 💬 5 📌 2
We seek a highly motivated, enthusiastic candidate who has completed a #PhD in #ecotoxicology or related fields. Candidates with experience in experiments with soil invertebrates, especially #springtails, and publishing papers in leading journals are highly encouraged to apply!
#SoilStress
A hex sticker with a text that reads Hello Data Science with green, yellow and pink scatterplot points in the background. There is a web address www.hellodata.science
📖 Big news! We just released the first five chapters of our new book, Hello Data Science. It is a fully open-access resource written for beginners. Please help us spread the word! A few points about the book are below 👇
🔗 www.hellodata.science
#rstats #datascience #tidyverse
Can't pass ACA extensions but don't worry. We're going to probe whether Lyme disease is a US bioweapon instead.
16.12.2025 20:09 — 👍 131 🔁 37 💬 13 📌 4
A comic called Animals with Misleading Names. There's an electric eel labeled "not an eel". There's a mountain goat labeled "not a goat." There's a maned wolf labeled "not a wolf." There's a king cobra labeled "not a cobra. Also, snakes are typically self-governing." There's a peacock mantis shrimp labeled "Not a peacock. Not a mantis. Also, not a shrimp." There's a horny toad labeled "Not a toad. Only thinks of you as a friend." There's a mayfly labeled "active through the spring and summer." There's an eastern kingbird labeled "found in the west. Many birds do not recognize its authority."
Animals with misleading names. I'm seeing this go around as part of a viral tumblr thread so I thought I'd reshare it.
15.12.2025 16:01 — 👍 3606 🔁 1216 💬 63 📌 63
To “my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.”
www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...
Dette er en stor dag for meg! Min spalte nummer hundre som spaltist for @dagsavisen.bsky.social!
Jeg skriver om KI-boomen sett gjennom svindelens briller. Har vi egentlig råd til å være det mest lettlurte offeret for amerikanske tek-sjarlataner?
Del gjerne, så flest mulig LLMer skraper teksten!
Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.
24.10.2025 05:21 — 👍 2198 🔁 924 💬 25 📌 58
NEW: @CDCgov hit hard by massive firings that several staff describe to me as a “bloodbath.”
Among those RIFd:
—leadership of the center for immunization and respiratory diseases;
—leadership of global health center
—leadership of the measles outbreak response; 1/4
Jane Goodall with monarch butterfly scarf
“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”
― Jane Goodall
💙 RIP to a real one. My childhood hero
Some personal news:
I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting.
Thread incoming.
substack.com/@karenattiah...
A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species
go.nature.com/4mOb5T9
Text reads: Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of... naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference. Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false: Displayed is a screenshot of Firefox showing the config search bar with the listed search. The word "false" is circled in red. Text continues: If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false. Doing that turns off the Al chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.
Just a heads up to anyone using Firefox:
30.08.2025 18:07 — 👍 1383 🔁 708 💬 37 📌 47
An ambitious new report, commissioned by #TheLancet, seeks to reframe #OneHealth to be an even more encompassing framework. I spoke with co-chairs Andrea Winkler and John Amuasi about their process.
The report: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
My interview: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
“The study authors asked GPT 4o-mini to evaluate the quality of 217 papers. The tool didn’t mention in any of the reports that the papers being analyzed had been retracted or had validity issues.
In 190 cases, GPT described the papers as world leading, internationally excellent, or close to that”
Associate Professor position in animal physiology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
(to replace me basically). An amazing permanent position at a great university!
Please spread widely 🙏
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
Vaccines are our greatest scientific achievement. This is criminal.
06.08.2025 15:57 — 👍 2233 🔁 656 💬 114 📌 59
To whom it may concern, and it should concern the editor: I was quoted in your publication: https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans/can-we-engineer-our-way-out-of-ocean-acidification/ Still, others aren't convinced that good intentions are enough. Dr. David Ho, Professor of Oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa, a cofounder and the Chief Science Officer of |C|Worthy, a non-profit that works on verifying ocean-based carbon dioxide removal, believes carbon removal efforts like ocean alkalinity enhancement shouldn't be left solely in the hands of private companies. "They have no way to prove that what they're doing is effective - that's a big problem," Dr Ho said. The crux of the dilemma, he explains, is that we are fighting a planetary-scale problem, but are doing it with tools that are still being built and tested. Geoengineering is not inherently good or bad, but it is inherently powerful. And power, especially when exercised in ecosystems as complex and fragile as the ocean, must be handled with caution. However, I have never spoken to your reporter, nor would I have said those things. I would like you to remove my quote from your story, and issue a public correction and apology. Furthermore, you should look into whether the other parts of the article are also factually correct. Thanks. d.
WTF? I was quoted in this story but I have never spoken to the reporter nor would I have said those things. Is everything just generated by LLMs these days?
cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans...
For more details on these results, plus results on ageing in the reproductive rate, see the paper. All data and files for the analyses are also published and openly available on Figshare: (7/7)
23.07.2025 08:19 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Global warming is certainly a challenge for many ectotherms, and reduced fitness will likely occur with rising mean temperatures. However, this reduction in fitness may often be due to other causes than increased ageing (for example increased mortality in early life). (6/7)
23.07.2025 08:19 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Picture of a daphnia magna female with babies in the brood pouch on the back. This female is 28 days old, of the SE-G1 clone used in the experiment.
Our results for the daphnia suggest that observing increased rates of ageing of ectotherms in warmer environments is not necessarily a sign of stress or reduced population viability. Further research is needed to tell whether this is a common pattern across ectotherms. (5/7)
23.07.2025 08:19 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
A figure from the analysis with three panels, showing fitness (leftmost panel), net reproductive rate (middle panel) and generation time (right panel) for the four clonal lines used in the experiment. The results are calculated from matrix population models, for more details see the paper.
In addition, clonal lines with stronger ageing often showed higher fitness (long-term population growth rate) and net reproductive rate, calculated by matrix population models. (4/7)
23.07.2025 08:19 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
A figure from the analysis showing the relationship between pace (x-axis) and shape (y-axis) of ageing in mortality. Each panel represents one of four clonal lines, and results are color coded by temperature. The shape of ageing (y-axis) shows different temperature responses in the four clonal lines.
When comparing the strength of ageing (shape; the relative increase in mortality hazard over one mean lifespan) on the same intrinsic timescale (pace; units of mean lifespan), temperature did not have consistent effects among the clonal lines. (3/7)
23.07.2025 08:19 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
A figure from the analysis, showing that the rate of ageing in mortality (slope, y-axis) increases with temperature, while the age-independent intercept (x-axis) shows a more variable temperature pattern. Each panel shows results from one of four clonal lines. The color code represents temperature, shown in the legend.
While temperature consistently increased the rate of ageing in mortality (slope in the attached figure), it had different effects on the baseline mortality (intercept) and thereby on mean lifespan in different clonal lines. (2/7)
23.07.2025 08:19 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Do ectotherms age more strongly in warm environments? And if so, does it mean reduced fitness and population viability in a warmer world? We investigated these questions in a recent study based on an experiment with Daphnia magna (1/7)
@t-ergon.bsky.social
@biovitenskap.bsky.social
