Nate Upham

Really sad, so senseless. What a life of contributions too

Rev. Jesse Jackson's "I *am* somebody..." remains one of the all-time great pieces of 20th century rhetoric / agitprop

And he could deliver it at a Black separatist meeting, the Democratic National Convention, or on god-blessed Sesame Street (see below 🥹)

RIP to the Voice of the Voiceless

Group of Ansell's mole-rats huddling

Do subterranean mammals have hyper-elastic skin thanks to super-sized hyaluronan (HA) polymers?

We challenge this popular idea in a new preprint, presenting the first skin elasticity measurements of burrowing rodents & HA size profiles for Ansell’s mole-rat (1/8) 🧪

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Important cause! @plazi-species.bsky.social Plazi.org is doing some of this work through Biodiversity Literature Repository -- are you linking forces w that? DOIs minted through Zenodo

Utah Hogle Zoo photo, giraffe and parents

In good news, a little one was born in Utah🦒

www.sltrib.com/news/2026/01...

Upcoming training courses The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit organization whose mission is to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland.

Pre-announcement ... keep an eye out for news of our upcoming #Biodiversity #Bioinformatics Summer School 21-26 June in Germany co-organised by @sib.swiss & @denbi.bsky.social ... sign up to the mailing list to be sure not to miss it! www.sib.swiss/training/upc...

“War is Obsolete, All Life is Interrelated” – Martin Luther King, Jr “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, a…

Full speech: creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/w...

YouTube video by chasefukuoka61 War is Obsolete, All Life Connected - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world... We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN8e...

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

Watch Midnight Diner | Netflix A scarred man operates a midnight diner in the backstreets of Shinjuku. No one knows his name or his story, but his customers each bring him theirs.

Midnight Diner available on Netflix is beautiful, haunting, affecting. Subtitles not dubbing. Poetry of the city from a great Japanese director. www.netflix.com/watch/80113542

A pinhole camera photo taken from Summer to Winter Solstice. It's a bit blurry as the aperture was made with a tiny needle and no focus mechanism. There are yellow to green lines across the photo, that's the Sun moving across the sky over the course of a day. The top line is from the Summer Solstice, the bottom line from the Winter Solstice. Cloudy days don't have any lines or broken lines as the Sun was obscured by clouds. There are some trees on the left, right and in the background.

A pinhole camera photo, a 6 month exposure from Summer to Winter solstice. There are trees on the right side and background. A house with two cars in the drive are visible almost in the center of the photo. The lines are made from the Sun moving across the sky with the bottom line being the Winter Solstice and the top line the Summer solstice. On cloudy days the lines are broken or not visible as the sun was obscured by clouds. The lines show some reflections from a tree trunk. The lines are mostly a white color with some hints of blue, green and yellow in places. Some of the colors could be from rain or snow staining the paper I was using.

A solargram/pinhold camera photo taken from the Winter Solstice of 2024 (21 Dec) to Summer Solstice of 2025 (20 June). It's a 6 month long exposure taken with a beer can pinhole camera, it shows the sun's movement across the sky during that time period, each day the Sun scribes a line on the paper in the pinhole camera. The bottom line is Dec 21 2024 and the top line is 20 June 2025. This kind of photo makes the movement of the Sun during the day into visible trails on the paper in the camera. There is a long orange-yellow arc going across the paper showing the whole 6 months. There is a shadow of my tree on the image, the tree blossomed during the exposure. Shades of blue and pink are on the paper too. There is a black kind of semi circle at the top of the image, that's where the water was disintegrating the top part of the paper.

Happy Winter Solstice!

Beer can, pinhole camera photos of the Summer to Winter Solstice (2024) and the Winter to Summer Solstice (2025).

You never know quite what you're going to get with these photos, set the beer can pointing towards the sun at hopefully the correct angle and wait 6 months!

Cryptic species and taxonomic revision of kangaroo mice, the rodent genus Microdipodops Abstract. This study presents the first systematic revision of kangaroo mice, the heteromyid genus Microdipodops, in over 8 decades. The study relies on a

Finally published: #Cryptic species and taxonomic revision of kangaroo mice, the rodent genus #Microdipodops. 4 new species! Integrative taxonomy! Great co-authors! @n8upham.bsky.social @mammalogists.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jmam...

High-resolution land-use maps from 1960 to 2100 Harmonized land-use and land-cover datasets that include past and future periods are key to solving sustainability issues, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. However, existing harmonized pr...

High-resolution land-use maps from 1960 to 2100 🌎🧪 🌐 www.cell.com/one-earth/fu...

Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023 - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023

A new study of the last 50 years of US pop music shows “a significant increase in stress-related language, alongside declines in positive sentiment and lyrical complexity.”

Yeah interesting, and I guess "free" research (using public data, just writing code, for example) would still need to account for salary in some manner, even if it is side-job consulting

A red fox sitting in a tree, looking at the camera with its eyes squinted and ears down, giving it a devilish look like it’s planning something

A Red Fox in a tree looking absolutely DEVIOUS 🦊 😈
#mammals #foxes

Adaptive landscape and the evolution of flight in mammals

A big review of the evolution of bats:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

Halloween News: Meet a new vampire fly (Hippoboscidae) 🧛‍♂🪰 1 of 10 species found on citizen-reported bird carcasses in Singapore: Even dead birds can have productive afterlives! See host records, annotated images, pictorial keys & DNA diagnostics here: doi.org/10.1155/jzs/...

Brandon's the best! Super cool you invited him to speak ❤️

My lab is hiring a 2-yr hummingbird evolution and genomics postdoc and a 1-yr salaried research and lab tech. Both with full U. Wyoming benefits. Please spread the word! Info below. Best consideration date Nov 1, start dates early Spring 2026.

Reminder, we’re hiring 2 PhD students for next year!! I’m extending the deadline to Nov 1, but please get your app in soon if you’re interested in joining us! More info is on our webpage. 🦠🦑

Please share with ECRs you know as well and check out our other open positio. (Postdoc!)

PEEP - Power Estimator for Ecological Planning | Statistical Power Calculator PEEP: Your friendly companion for sample size calculations and power analysis in ecological research. Professional tools for field studies, experimental design, and grant proposals.

Just finished a first draft of an ecological power analyzer app. Been watching students struggle to figure out sample sizes. Hope this helps. Fork it, steal it, use it. Mostly accurate. Work in progress. ufduttonlab.github.io/peep-power/

Change in distribution and abundance of southern right whales. (A) Shows historical and contemporary wintering distributions (Figure 1 from Carroll et al., 2018), and (B) shows decline in abundance and subsequent recovery (solid line is the mean, dashed line shows upper and lower 95% CI). Modified Figure 1 from Jackson et al. (2008). Contemporary sightings are divided into regions where large aggregations are seen during winter: Argentina (ARG), Brazil (BZL), South Africa (SAF), southwest Australia (SWA), south central Australia (SCA), and New Zealand sub-Antarctic (NZSA) and regions where sightings are typically of small numbers of individuals per year. The large aggregations are IWC management units and correspond to historical whaling grounds, although another 5 whaling grounds show little sign of recovery. Summer feeding areas are poorly described and so not shown.

The global whaling industry experienced a boom c. 1840-1950 as technology allowed whalers to hunt the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.

Under standard models, we would have expected krill populations to have *exploded*.

Instead, they DROPPED exponentially.

Let's talk about the KRILL PARADOX.

A small brown rodent, the Pacific Pocket Mouse, sits on the ground with its tail slightly curled around its round body.

A big win for one of California’s smallest native mammals 🎉

The CA Fish and Game Commission voted unanimously today to declare the Pacific pocket mouse a candidate species under the California ESA, granting protections for them as the state conducts a yearlong review.

Read on ➡️ bit.ly/474L4Iz

Goodall transcribes field notes by lamplight in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park c.1960

Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Tim Berners-Lee My vision was based on sharing, not exploitation – and here’s why it’s still worth fighting for

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Great article linking Web origins w/ AI today:
"Hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research."

🐍🦎 We're all familiar with snakes, but have you heard of legless lizards?

Join Collections Manager Nefti Camacho behind the scenes in the Museum's Herpetology Collection and learn the similarities and differences between the two species!

The cutest!!! Sea snail larvae are just adorabubbles 🥹
#marineplankton 🦑