Andrew Jackson

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning.

Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

Curator of Natural Sciences - Warwick,Warwickshire job with Warwickshire County Council | 250490 About Heritage and Culture Warwickshire Heritage and Culture Warwickshire (HCW) provide a wide range of services that help local communities and ...

Curatorial job with significant geological and palaeontological collections at Warwick Museums.

www.wmjobs.co.uk/job/250490/c...

All of the companies that make the software I use are increasing their prices, to account for an "investment" in AI.

I'm sat here imagining how my clients would feel if I added 30% to each invoice, because I "really got into gambling".

Im going to bravely put my hand up and claim that among biologists, ecologists probably have the best appreciation of non-RCD epidemiology studies. And would be reasonably well able to appreciate the complexities. So hire ecologists in public health is my plea! Its ecology all the way down!

shoot me now: "We came across your paper [...] and applied custom AI models on it, which generated 5 new extensions. Our pilot study indicates that up to 60% of scientists found the proposed extensions both thought-provoking and actionable."

agree. This is very well put.

Why does biology keep building things out of tiles? Science talks with two scientists about finding the beauty in nature’s mosaics

More info on our recent paper in this interview in Science...

Why does biology keep building things out of tiles? | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

A screenshot of an email. A person called Denise writes they are "ready to see your insect tissue..."

Well now.. thats quite the offer of a Monday morning.

Great opportunity for those interested in fundamental questions in evolutionary biology and mathematical models: postdoc opening in Laurent Lehmann’s group @unil.bsky.social. We have a lively community of theorists here in Lausanne with good interactions across groups. Join us ! Please RP

Strong vibes i.redd.it/tgsxs3711i18...

YouTube video by Trinity College Dublin Zoology Alumni

It’s Trinity Open Day and one of the most common questions I get asked is ‘what kind of jobs do zoologists do?’ - so we asked our alumni… youtu.be/lJr4AsZ_rLc?...

all three things can* be true

*are

A giant cornflake in my hand, found this morning in my cereal. It is approximately 5x4cm in size.

Amidst all the deep thinking of all things science, it is still the childlike wonder of new discoveries that makes my day

I cannot think of a single ethical or moral argument for Generative AI and this isn’t helping

Quite the thread!

a couple of individually marked godwits. Photo by J. Seenstra

Want your modelling to save birds? PhD with me at UvA (Amsterdam): build spatial integrated population model for black-tailed godwits with world-class dataset and strong team here & @birdeyes-gfn.bsky.social/RUG). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies... Apply by 1 Dec 2025: #Ecology #Bayesian #Conservation

And even then, we already know that people will wilfully ignore their and their family’s ancestry to further their political ambitions. I suspect we have learned nothing of any academic value from this project.

While there _might_ be some value in using these tools to answer specific questions, maybe such as to verify his ancestry, there is absolutely no value in a tabloid style National Enquirer type “exposé”.

Should Hitler's DNA have been studied? Ground-breaking research has made some fascinating discoveries on the dictator, from his ancestry to possible neurological disorders.

This whole project is grotesque and a classic case of just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Prof King’s justification of: well someone was going to do it eventually it might as well be me is lame in the extreme www.bbc.com/news/article...

Valuable reporting here from @cathleenogrady.bsky.social for @science.org, adding context and other important voices to our perspective piece (linked further below, with @wiringthebrain.bsky.social and @deevybee.bsky.social)

www.science.org/content/arti...

Someone did crimes against maths and statistics. A straight line is fitted to a sine wave as a way to show that GAMs are superior. For good measure they also fitted a neural network model to show that it overfits.

I saw this on LinkedIn yesterday in support of GAMs.

Biological performance across the tree of life collapses onto the Universal Thermal Performance Curve (UTPC). Shown are approx. 30,000 performance measurements derived from seven kingdoms, 39 phyla, and 2,710 experiments. Performance is represented by diverse rates including metabolism, individual growth, foraging intensity, voluntary activity, and population growth (see SI Appendix for data grouped by phylum and performance metric). Data are presented on both axes relative to the parameters (Topt, Tc and Pfmax ) estimated by fitting the UTPC equation to each of the 2,710 experiments; the UTPC is overlaid as a yellow line and fits the rescaled data extremely well. Data are colored by the relative density of neighboring points showing very high density of points close to the line and relatively few datapoints further from the line.

Data collapse, and models converge, onto a Universal Thermal Performance Curve (UTPC), which only requires optimal and critical temperatures as parameters. Top panels show empirical data on thermal performance encompassing (A) specific growth rate of proteobacteria (), (B) biochemical rates of photosynthesis in plants (), (C) running speeds of lizards (), and (D) population growth in insects (). Lower panels (E–H) showcase the rescaled data from the processes exposed on top, along with their corresponding alignment to the Universal Thermal Performance Curve (UTPC) equation. Datasets are from Kontopoulos et al. (21) for proteobacteria and from Rezende and Bozinovic (6) for other groups. The upper panels of the raw data show substantial variation in the shape and location of the thermal performance curves. The lower row shows that rescaling the data using the simple model results in the data conforming to a single underlying curve with very little variation from the model.

And our paper is out! One curve to rule them all: a simple universal thermal performance curve for ectotherms that explains at least 2700 datasets across 39 phyla and myriad measures of performance. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Static electricity may be key to helping a tiny roundworm latch onto its insect hosts.

Like a heat-seeking missile, the parasite zooms up to 10 millimeters in the air before getting yanked toward its target by nothing more than the electrostatic charge of its host. https://scim.ag/3WKFVjZ

I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

A scene from Father Ted “Speed 3” episode. The line “is there anything to be said for another mass?” is replaced with “is there anything to be said for another podcast?”

Speed 3

Would you believe this spindly guy is an assassin bug? I picked him up initially thinking he was a phasmid…then I got a closer look at the face and saw the rostrum, and the raptorial forelimbs started to make sense! He's a member of emesinae, a reduviid subfamily I didn't know about before!
#bugsky

New article by @andrewlrjackson.bsky.social and myself in the IPELJ exploring the implications of the ECtHR's climate rulings where we think through what #KlimaSeniorinnen might mean for NGO standing, constitutional rights climate cases, fair-share carbon budgeting and more.

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

haha. oh, sorry. I can make it worse... ive recently gone over to native pipe |> over maggritr %>% too...

A teal flyer for a PhD opportunity to investigate how warming may change antimicrobial resistance. The project will use experiments on Klebsiella bacteria to answer questions about how temperature affects their response to antibiotics, plasmid transfer, and fitness costs. The research involves microbiology lab work, bioinformatics, and mathematical modeling. The flyer includes contact details for Dr. Daniel Padfield and the logos of the sponsoring institutions.

I have an MRC-funded PhD project available (www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...) on how warming will change the problem of AMR. Join a small and friendly group (padpadpadpad.netlify.app/about) in (sometimes) sunny Cornwall. 🧪🦠 #microsky

Please share the ad below with anyone who may be interested.