Heather Lee Schroeder

Yes. This times a million. Insects are a foundation for the animal world. Love birds? You have to love insects. Love flowers? Also...insects. Food? Yep, you guessed it. Insects.

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper. She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. “We specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,” she says, laughing.

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.

t.co/JXeTALBPds

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence Abstract. In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15639576; Smith et al., 2025a) to produce updated estimates for key indicators of the state of the climate system: net emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. This year, we additionally include indicators for sea-level rise and land precipitation change. We follow methods as closely as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One report. The indicators show that human activities are increasing the Earth's energy imbalance and driving faster sea-level rise compared to the AR6 assessment. For the 2015–2024 decade average, observed warming relative to 1850–1900 was 1.24 [1.11 to 1.35] °C, of which 1.22 [1.0 to 1.5] °C was human-induced. The 2024-observed best estimate of global surface temperature (1.52 °C) is well above the best estimate of human-caused warming (1.36 °C). However, the 2024 observed warming can still be regarded as a typical year, considering the human-induced warming level and the state of internal variability associated with the phase of El Niño and Atlantic variability. Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.27 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2015–2024. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high of 53.6±5.2 Gt CO2e yr−1 over the last decade (2014–2023), as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track decreases or increases in the rate of the climatic changes presented here.

Our new paper updating key metrics in the IPCC is now out, and the news is grim:

⬆️ Human induced warming now at 1.36C
⬆️ Rate of warming now 0.27C / decade
⬆️ Sharp increase in Earth's energy imbalance
⬇️ Remaining 1.5C carbon budget only 130 GtCO2

essd.copernicus.org/...

Contact | U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland The Official U.S. Senate website of Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland

Senator Van Hollen took a risk in unprecedented times.

Here's the link to thank him and his staff.

He absolutely deserves it.

@vanhollen.senate.gov

A student journalist at Pellissippi State Community College just published this article about red wolves: www.imaginarygardens.org/index.php/20...

This is what a critically endangered Red Wolf looks like. If we work together, we can save them 🐺

nywolf.org

At least the flood of urgent donation requests in my inbox hasn’t started…yet.

Congratulations! This is a wonderful milestone.

Try your local Aldi. Periodically, they have decently priced rice cookers in the Aisle of shame.

Most notably, he's been on topic the whole time. No reading Green Eggs and Ham or passages out of the encyclopedia just to fill the time.

Dude has gone for more than a day talking exclusively about how Anti-American this Administration is.

Corey Booker has given Democrats much more than a roadmap.

He’s given us hope.

Ah so pretty! We have a beautiful pin oak in our backyard, who we call Mother, and she is like your maple--providing shelter for shade plants, animals, and humans. (Love the hammock too.)

I'm having some serious shade garden envy right now! Gorgeous. (I am now on the hunt for mossy logs!)

Even if the technocrats were right about AI replacing all jobs (they’re not), notice they never pitch any vision for what happens to humans. “No one has to work anymore” sounds great, but the only version of it where we’re not sleeping under bridges is one where these guys pay their fucking taxes

one of my big things lately: interrupting during meetings with technologists to clarify "for the record" that whatever it is we are talking about is humanly possible in similar amounts of time and with fewer errors than with their new scheme. "just want to be clear this is a choice not a necessity"

And I would give up a kidney if administrators and academics enthralled by AI in higher education understood the risks of producing a generation unable to think, read, write or FUNCTION without depending on the products of these evil, greedy, destructive men.

Also see: "renewable natural gas"

I have conducted surveys for in-class use in my composition classes this and last semester. By and large, the students do not trust the government or the media. They believe both are corrupt. The numbers are very clear--more than 75% of them distrust the federal government and mainstream media.

I no longer speak to the person who spread the infection to my family and me after telling us they were taking precautions. I have LC, and my son developed arthritis post-Covid. The person who gave it to us is fine, I guess.

*I'm definitely Team Masking. <--Spellcheck on my phone is antagonistic lately.

I haven't stopped. I definitely Team Masking. (It's nice to almost never get sick.)

When the laundry is folded or toys are picked up in the house, we say that Harvest did it. Harvest is a spirit that eats all the extra cookies and completes household chores while we're asleep. My eleven-year-old knows it's my husband and me (in that order), but he still talks about Harvest.

I have an entire alter ego named Svetlana who emerged after Trump's election in 2016. She has a terrible Russian accent, and I would call my bestie and tell him all about the day's Trump news from her twisted perspective. She's back, obviously. 😂

I voice my bestie's grandson's inner thoughts. My friend: "Hey now we don't touch that." Me: "I will if I want to, old man." <--said in a menacing monotone Southern accent

Punk forever! This story is reported by one of my students and the event is happening in Knoxville.

Some outstanding reporting from students who work on my college's journal. Please consider giving the journal a follow.

My students are reporting about the happenings on our campus. If you could give their journal a follow, I would be grateful.

Red states are hostage situations on a massive scale.

In my red state, we're not allowed to discuss "divisive concepts." Rather than listing all of the things that are considered divisive, here's a link to the law (click on the summary tab to read the list): wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInf...