Eric LoPresti

Identifier Profile: @ceiseman This is the twenty-ninth entry in an ongoing series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist. An iNaturalist observation records an encounter between an observer and an organism or recent evid...

Charley is probably the best naturalist I've ever met - every time in the field with him has been eye-opening/mind-blowing (he's a wonderful person, too!). Nice to see so many @inaturalist.bsky.social users appreciating him in the comments users on this post: www.inaturalist.org/blog/124811

anything that gets people out of a car is a good thing, full stop.

dude, i have to keep listening to you singing "it's alright, it's alright, it's alright" over on little dawn to be able to take all this (that whole album helps). not sure that helps at all, but its true.

there is an AWESOME pbs documentary on monopoly. do watch, it is sobering and hilarious (it was meant as a social critique!).

i feel that 100%, here's my angry signal - put on for a protest, but now i'm just riding it around to school, groceries, etc.

yeah, we're fine. just pissed off.

fuck bad drivers, fuck the cop who watched this happen

the (quite disturbing) video makes that abundantly clear

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

So pleased to have been included on this paper, which is all PhD candidate Sierra Jaeger from the LoPresti lab! @ericlopresti.bsky.social

IMO - that shouldn't be an (unpaid) reviewer's job, especially in citation-dense papers - we have enough to do besides looking into every reference. Its either on the publisher or the reader, unfortunately.

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing One of the 15 publications that put out the most studies globally has been expelled from the indexing system for irregularities. Its publisher, Elsevier, has a 38% profit margin that reached $1.5 bill...

now its Frontiers in Plant Sciences' turn... 3,288 articles this year so far (most are fine - many are not)

english.elpais.com/science-tech...

my post-break brain couldn't do any serious writing today... but i got through a lot of moths!

🧐

... what did i miss?

"i swear that email must have gone to spam" (my approach to the required hazardous waste training for the undergraduate students that... count seeds in my lab).

ha! enjoy!

Moths, Myths, and Mosquitoes: The Eccentric Life of Harrison G. Dyar, Jr. Amazon.com: Moths, Myths, and Mosquitoes: The Eccentric Life of Harrison G. Dyar, Jr.: 9780190215255: Epstein, Marc: Books

it was, unfortunately, a little bit of a slog (it describes a lot of trips collecting caterpillars), though with bits of absolute nuttiness thrown in. www.amazon.com/Moths-Myths-...

I read Harrison Dyar's biography a few years back and his hobby tunnels weren't anywhere near the strangest part.

flannel moth caterpillars (megalopygids, puss caterpillars) are amongst the strangest we have. but, even stranger is the fact that they make LITTLE BOWL-SHAPED POOP. how have i not learned this? why does this not seem to be all over the internet?

i used to think OA was the solution, but now that the big publishers are doing it, its just another way of skimming off the top.

yeah, that much is true everywhere. that's why unions are important in setting those bounds.

Unions good. I do think most research universities classify them as employees - ours are, and are given benefits (I wouldn't feel comfortable taking students if not!). Professional degrees are different though, I think (but I don't know much about those).

google scholar alerted me to a paper citing a (great) Abronia paper - weirdly it was on fish biology. and with that i have happened into my first published and obviously used AI for referencing paper...

the first one of those i saw threw me for a total loop, too. what weirdos.

i only like driving because i don't have to do it much! (and because of that, i have fun, impractical cars!)

8 emails later, no resolution and the springer OA people are giving me the run around. $3900!

I had a solicited commentary "accepted" at a Springer Journal and now they are asking me to pay a publication fee. What an utterly sleazy move - here, do something for us and we'll make you pay for it.

i don't see any problem telling about the existence of sci-hub...