J Pardo

Glad to hear you, Shane, etc will make it through this though. What a goddamn mess.

Deepest condolences. A particularly senseless decision in a senseless time.

So, temnospondyl.

If our nonmajors curricula do not meet this need, we can and should change them. We can in fact even introduce basic philosophy of science (I spent half a lecture on Popper this semester, so, si se puede). But it is our responsibility and we need to rise to the challenge.

It is our responsibility as a part of the university community to prepare our students to meet these challenges. Handing these off to a department that cannot teach the foundational observations and theory is an abdication of that responsibility.

I disagree. I think philosophy is very important but reading snippets of Quine or Berkeley is not sufficient to prepare students to have educated opinions on issues of public health, a surging eugenics movement, the biodiversity crisis, etc.

Trump is a master at enforcing literal readings of widespread metaphor. Here, literally they "no longer recognize the face in the mirror."

Just finished teaching a bio for non-majors class and I don't agree. Many of the biggest challenges our students will face ARE biological. We owe them enough biological literacy to navigate these issues with confidence and humanity.

Reviewers in December

so everyone's new years resolution is gonna be "no more nanotyrannus papers" right?

Number of times you checked the status of a manuscript submission.

I remember collecting some examples of driftwood that had been colonized by Sphenothallus. Bear Gulch Limestone, late Mississippian, Montana.

Maybe the real paleoniscoids were the friends we made along the way

Sickness is the real deal this year though.

I don't really know the right solution to the problem but we've reached the point where you need to make a reservation a year in advance for a timed vehicle entry to many parks. If the purpose of the NP system is to allow Americans to experience their natural spaces, the system is already failing.

The ones who get hurt most here are individual tourists but the increase in price is really just the cost of a meal in Estes Park or Moab or Gatlinburg anyways. But it might raise funds primarily from tour bus agencies that do not contribute meaningfully to the local economy.

Not that I trust this administration with literally anything, but annual entry fees have remained the same over the past 20 years and major NP destinations are so oversubscribed that it is hard for even locals to use those parks. We have the same problem in Canada too.

I am seriously considering setting aside a large percentage of lab class time for report writing, because the choices are making data analysis and writing an in-class activity or just cutting them because they're meaningless assignments.

Heterostracan-inspired design

How do you not?

People get kinda mad if you bring either into a movie theater.

The terminal Ediacaran Tongshan Lagerstätte from South China - Nature Communications Here, the authors present Ediacaran fossils from the Tongshan Lagerstätte (South China), including Burgess Shale-type rangeomorphs preserved both with fronds and holdfasts. They use sedimentary and ch...

Burgess-type preservation of Ediacarans. This is perhaps the most important paleo paper you will read in a while.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Divine punishment.

The holotype of #Stenokranio boldi at the Geoskop Urweltmuseum #fossilfriday

With this working, as a first test we took two plasmids, identical save for 8 point mutations changing the color, and competed them against one another. Here’s a video of what it looked like when we activated the recombinase. You can see the two compete in real time: 4/

I'm not saying we shouldn't care about this (we should) but we need to be clear-eyed about what we care about and the fact that universities as institutions are not inherently aligned with those things we value and for most of their history have not been.

I mean, go back 100 years and class/caste/gender was an insurmountable barrier for most people who wanted to access these "public" institutions, and the people who did have access to them cared less about learning and more about establishing social cred. So, return to form.

Again, a post-WWII innovation for the most part. Which is not to say that it is a bad thing but it is to say that "people seeking degrees for social clout and not giving a damn about learning" is not new

And the minority groups who DID have increased access to education and literacy without class barriers were systematically excluded from those formal institutions until the early 20th century, and the ramp-up to WWII involved the intentional purge of these groups from European university systems.

In general. Poor peasants weren't receiving subsidized educations in Bologna or Cambridge in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, or even pre-war 1900s "because a complete education was considered standard for every member of society." Their education was largely limited to what the church deemed necessary