Bart Hoekstra

#rstats Here's a useful guide to creating publication-ready #ggplot figures to journal specifications, which is often quite fiddly.

jaquent.github.io/2026/02/crea...

In Greenland's Scoresby Sund, a beautiful iceberg floats in front of distant mountains painted in warm light. A glorious morning, as we sailed on calm waters surrounded by crackling ice & towering mountains!

#photography #nature #landscape #bluesky #art #landscapephotography #naturephotography

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!

preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵

Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking

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

1/9

The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering

The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Why are Europe and the Arctic heating up faster than the rest of the world? As the planet continues to warm, not all regions are heating up at the same pace.  Over the last thirty years, the global average temperature has increased by around 0.26°C per decade. But in Europe a...

"Shifts in atmospheric circulation favour more frequent and more intense summer heatwaves in Europe (...) the number of heat stress days is increasing in Europe, with 2024 seeing the second-highest number on record."

climate.copernicus.eu/why-are-euro...

Aurora Borealis, from the middle of Amsterdam. Visible with the naked eye. Truly exceptional from this light polluted part of the Netherlands. Go outside if you can! #auroraborealis #noorderlicht

I research dictatorships for a living and have spend a non-negligible amount of time reading the words of madmen like Gaddafi, Hitler, and the Kims of North Korea. Even to me this is fucking bunkers.

The ICC is under U.S. siege, the majority of Dutch journalists don’t seem te care. The new MAGA world order is here.

That was, unfortunately, no different here. Over time, fireworks had, more than anything, become a topic of identity politics. Recently, bc of extremely visible negatives (warzone scenes and attacks on first aid responders), we've reached a point where a full ban is in place from next year. Hope!

We do! And have been doing it for more than half a century already. ;-)

Thanks for sharing! Somehow I had never come across that Taylor Texas video. Shocking. That one is going into my future talks on the topic.

On the other Dutch radar it is very clear birds are fleeing away from fireworks towards quiet places like the Wadden Sea and IJsselmeer (a huge inland lake). See the patterns of reflectivity moving towards the East/ESE.

More, including GIFs of Belgian radars, here: horizon.science.uva.nl/fireworks/

Happy New Year! 🎆

As expected, sadly, the radars once again lit up with MILLIONS of birds fleeing from #fireworks.

GIF of the @knmi.nl Herwijnen radar

See other years: horizon.science.uva.nl/fireworks/

Thread and more science below 🧪🪶

A composite image of birds flying in front of fireworks, meant to depict fleeing birds.

Another NYE, another night of terror for millions of birds across the Netherlands (and around the world).

Last year we published in @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social Frontiers 🧪 about the massive impact of fireworks on birds 🦅.

Paper: doi.org/10.1002/fee....

Thread below 🧵👇

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Portrait of Marina Vance, a scientist, sitting in a Colorado grassland.

The @nytimes.com Lost Science series continues. Here's my Q&A with a scientist who was studying how wildfire smoke threatens human health when the EPA decided that her research was no longer a funding priority. Gift link: nyti.ms/4jhpw14

Short-toed Eagle. Photo by Nikolina Bukovac.

Recommended read: our 2025 Autumn Report is out!

As part of our tradition and commitment, we’ve compiled a comprehensive overview of the season’s highlights and phenological peculiarities — complemented by many beautiful photos of both birds and people!

👉 batumiraptorcount.org/autumn-report-2025

Book cover for Reproducible Code guide. The cover has a red background with a large yellow-bodied black-headed stag beetle.

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

How should the discipline of ecology and the community of ecologists respond to the ecological crisis? Is it time that these were put on something more akin to an emergency footing?
www.cell.com/action/showP...

The Future of Transportation Is Not the Hyperloop or the Self-Driving Car. It’s the Bus, the Bike, and the Elevator. Getting people around in new, different ways relies mostly on technologies that we have had for a while.

The future of transportation isn’t the #Hyperloop* or self-driving cars. It’s the bus, the bike and the elevator. Via @slate.com.

AND it’s better land-use & infrastructure decisions, reprioritizing space & budgets, accessible streets, & smart pricing mechanisms.

*hyperloop was always a distraction

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US

This view is wrong

A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

Fuller version of Trump security strategy reportedly calls for "pulling Poland away from EU"

Apparently it can always get worse. The full version of the new U.S. National Security Strategy, aptly named “NSC-1488” by the wags, calls for actively pulling Poland, Austria, Hungary and Italy from the #EU. And supporting far right.

US sides with Putin.

notesfrompoland.com/2025/12/10/f...

A few thoughts on the new US national security strategy that was released today.
🧵

www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

Likewise!

I am very excited to share that we have a new paper out today in @natrevbiodiv.nature.com

In it, we summarize the state of knowledge on the Circular Seabird Economy!

1/n 🧪
Link to paper here: rdcu.be/eMOUd

Very nice! So ‘simple’, yet so useful to (finally) see this quantified properly. I've been waiting for this since your IRAC talk. Will certainly find its place somewhere in my dissertation.

Take three minutes to look at pretty birds, explore radar data, and see how we connect the structure of skies to MacArthur's ideas of niche partitioning. 📡🐦☁️🎧