Tanya Noel (she/her)

In a woodcut released today the Guild of Thieves and Cutpurses declared that enforcement of regulations against Thieving and Pursecutting would ‘devastate a growth industry’ and damage the economy.

Not sure Canada will take advantage of this, given recent trends …

curious: when MAGA says Kirk's death was an act of "domestic terrorism," it should be noted that the man who #assassinated #MelissaHortman, her husband & dog, & tried to kill John Hoffman & his family for EXPLICITLY political reasons STILL has not been charged as a #DomesticTerrorist

#politics

There are so many areas where Canada could go on the offensive and strengthen our economy and society by taking advantage of US self-immolation. This is one. Poaching all of US academia/R&D is another.
But they all require an activist, high-capacity state, not an austerity-obsessed government.

Reminder that LLMs produce false information because of how they’re designed, and “improved” iterations will produce false information because it’s a basic aspect of how they work. LLMs don‘t try to provide accurate information; they produce information that looks good enough to fool you at a glance

Today I stood with the thousands of NASA employees who the administration laid off. Cutting NASA’s budget by $6 billion will only harm innovation and set us back years.

u know who are skeptics
scientists are skeptics

being anti-science is not being a skeptic

Came back to social media to ask … is anybody actually using Phylocode?

It has been a week since the Ontario government proposed taking away universities' right to determine their own student selection policies in Bill C-33.

Not a peep from the universities yet.

This is not a good sign.

(Quote from: Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. University of Toronto Press.)

Oh yeah.
I finally got around to starting "The Slow Professor" & have been collecting quotes to remind myself of stuff (e.g., “Flexibility of hours can translate into working all the time, particularly because academic work by its very nature is never done.”)

Agreed. A friendly planarian!

So glad I could participate in 2025 Open Consortium of Biology Undergrad Educators in-person UnConference last week! oCUBE = Unique mix of community expertise, kindness & creativity.
Looking forward to Virtual UnConference this Thursday - there's still time to register (free)! ocube.ca/page-18398

The Canadian government needs to do a massive PSA blitz telling people that genAI lies and the results from ChatGPT and all the other slop machines cannot be trusted, at all.

The time has come to bring back the house hippo.

As described this 16” x 20” linocut print combines gold text in a central circle reading “OUR FATE” arching upwards, “IS TIED” horizontally across the middle, “TO THAT OF THE INSECTS” arching downwards in two lines with insects. Clockwise from top: two leaf cutter bees (Megachile relativa and M. brevis), the Imperial moth (Eacles imperialis), the Virgin Tiger moth (Apantesis virgo), an Isabella’s Longwings butterfly (Nymphalidae Eueides isabella), a blue orchard mason bee (Osmia lignaria), a firefly (Photinus pyralis), the rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis), a white underwing moth (Catocala relicta), an eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), a sweat bee (Agapostemon sericeus), a hummingbird clearwing moth (Hermaris thysbe), the common eastern bumblebee (B. impatiens), a long-horned bee (Melissodes sp.), a monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) and centre: eastern snail-shell nesting bee (O. conjuncta).

May 20 is World Bee Day. There are ~20,000 different bee species in the world. 🧪🧵🐝 Here in Ontario we have at least 400 native bees (none of which are honeybees, which are from Europe). Bees are key to pollination. According to the UN nearly 90% of the world’s wild flowering plant species depend, 🧵

Horrifying & sadly predictable.

Scientists are pushing to get their grants reinstated — and some are winning The grant termination letters say there are no appeals. Yet dozens of appeals have succeeded as biomedical researchers lobby and sue to restore funding.

Scientists are pushing to get their grants reinstated — and some are winning www.statnews.com/2025/05/19/r...

the top half shows two panels with microscopy images. Left is a light-microscopy image of a group of algal cells. The cells are round with different sizes. Two arrows point at sporangia: one looks as if someone stuffed 8 footballs in a thin elastic bag. The other is perfectly round and contains many small spores within. The right panel shows the same group of cells, but in fluorescent microscopy, where green color shows chloroplasts. In each cell the chloroplasts are globular with small lobes sticking out. The bottom half shows a photo of Xanthoria lichen - bright yellow and leafy growing on a tree branch

⚡ Attn anyone interested in algal genomics and lichen symbiosis! ⚡ New preprint: a near chromosome-level assembly of Trebouxia sp. A48 (member of T. decolorans species complex), the photobiont of Xanthoria parietina. 1/5 #lichen #alga #genomics
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Not surprising, but still disappointing.

Protests against Trump tariffs held at US-Canada border in Detroit, Windsor Demonstrators in Detroit and Windsor joined forces in a cross-border protest against President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada on Sunday.

Thanks to my neighbors willing to stand up & speak out! www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2...

What Vance is doing here is ENORMOUS disinformation. International students at the undergrad level typically pay full tuition, which subsidizes tuition for American students on financial aid by keeping tuition costs lower. At the grad level, domestic students are harder to recruit!

This works in a lot of bureaucracies! Simply refuse. I’ve seen departments NOT be dissolved, disastrous programs fizzle, whole sectors grind to a halt simply because a person with a tiny amount of power said “no!”

Contribution of vaccination to improved survival and health: modelling 50 years of the Expanded Programme on Immunization Since 1974 substantial gains in childhood survival have occurred in every global region. We estimate that EPI has provided the single greatest contribution to improved infant survival over the past 50...

Nothing will kill more children than the ongoing decimation of CDC, NIH, and USAID work to lift vaccine uptake in the US and world.

Child survival rose 75% in the last 50 years. Vaccines account for 40% of that. Measles vax alone was 60% of the benefit. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

papers being torn apart

📜 How we remember matters. What happens when records become harder to access? OAH has launched the Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative to track changes in the availability of historical sources & their impact on public history.

🔎 Read about it: ow.ly/c9A950VgxWt

I'll correct this:

The government runs out of funding Friday at midnight, leaving Democrats to decide whether to help Republicans ACCELERATE DESTROYING THE COUNTRY or block the bill TO FORCE THEM TO NEGOTIATE.

CALLS ARE WORKING - it has bought us precious time, but we NEED to keep the pressure up.

Tomorrow is the cloture vote.

KEEP CALLING: (202) 224-3121 ☎️☎️☎️

Tell your Dem Senator to vote NO on Cloture and NO on the Republican spending bill.

Do NOT assume your Senator will be good on this. Trust me.

The thing about scientific research is that it’s one of the few national investments that’s a clear public good even if you entirely discount the actual ostensible point of it.

Public measles exposure at UWindsor Toldo Lancer Centre. #Windsor #UWindsor
Hoping this doesn't lead to a large outbreak or serious outcomes. mailchi.mp/wechu.org/po... (Gutting to know that measles can be eradicated ... was nearly eradicated. Instead, we have multiple outbreaks in 2025.)

sorry cancer patients, if you wanted to keep cancer research funding intact you should have sent your $5m cash payment to the President like all the smart corporations