Gunnar De Winter

I know, it's crazy!

A Feathered Dinosaur Tail with Primitive Plumage Trapped in Mid-Cretaceous Amber Xing et al. describe the tail of a non-avialan theropod (coelurosaur) preserved in Burmese amber, combining bone outlines with microscopic details of plumage and integument. This specimen sheds new li...

Dinosaur tail (with feathers) in amber!
Dinosaur! Tail! In amber!

#science #biology #dinosaur

That means so much to me. I really appreciate that. Let me know what you think when you read it!

What a pleasure to contribute to this issue with an essay on... space bears!

👉 clarkesworldmagazine.com/de_winter_10...

Message saying: "I discovered you through your Clarkesworld article “Symbiosis and Holobionts, or Life Is a Manifold”. It was brilliant, and I’ve been following you here ever since."

I've had worse Monday mornings...

#writing #science

What makes a novel timeless?

"... bestsellers are longer, and include more punctuation, social words, and pronouns. In contrast, timeless novels feature longer sentences, more plural pronouns, more numbers and enumeration, and more food-related words."

#science #writing

osf.io/preprints/ps...

The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem | The Walrus Companies keep betting on the next bestseller. Literature is poorer for it

I spent the summer reporting this essay on why it seems harder than ever to sell a book right now—especially if it isn't a debut and comes with the dreaded "sales track." I'm grateful to the writers, agents, editors, publishers & experts who spoke to me for this piece: thewalrus.ca/the-publishi...

This goes for every day ending on -y.

Gardening strategies of termite farmers Termites use microbe-infused soil to protect a fungal symbiont

Termite farmers.

"... termites build a nest that protects the fungal comb, or “garden.” These insects are therefore driven to increase the yield of their garden by exhibiting behaviors such as garden feeding, habitual planting, altering the garden environment, and harvesting."

#science #biology

Can synthetic biology help save endangered ecosystems?
Our new paper with @vmaull.bsky.social explores how engineered genes can spread through soil microbes.
We model how synthetic gene transfer can support biodiversity. @vdlorenzo.bsky.social @guimaguade.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A grue jay? Rare hybrid bird identified in Texas Biologists at The University of Texas at Austin, who have reported discovering a bird that's the natural result of a green jay and a blue jay's mating, say it may be among the first examples of a hybr...

When a Blue Jay and a Green Jay have a baby, it's a... Grue Jay! (One for hybrid scholar @jenteo.bsky.social)

#science #biology #animals #evolution

AI And Human Creativity Science says... - man of steel - rust

AI and human creativity, or a story about productivity, men of steel, and creative souls.

#technology #culture #science

A pile of Uncertain Sons, just a lot of uncertainty and a lot of sons

Hey! It's midnight on the east coast, so it's release day. Thanks to @undertow.bsky.social for being such a fantastic publisher. Thanks to family, friends, and fellow writers for their support. The short fic grind has ups and downs, but it's a blast. Fricken love what we do. Thanks for reading.

Integrated behavioral and metabolically flexible responses of wild orangutans to ecologically driven dietary variation Orangutans have evolved behavioral and metabolic flexibility to cope with a feast-and-famine ecology.

Orangutans are intuitive gym bros who track their macros!

"... orangutans regulate protein and regularly switch between exogenous and endogenous nutritional substrates as preferred food resource availability declines."

#science #biology #animal 🧪 🦧

Or a very, very big man.

Totally agree, mari!

Lewy body dementia promotion by air pollutants Evidence links air pollution to dementia, yet its role in Lewy body dementia (LBD) remains unclear. In this work, we showed in a cohort of 56.5 million individuals across the United States that fine p...

*holds breath

#science #health

The Last Days Of Social Media | NOEMA Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.

RIP SoMe (as we know it). Great reflections by @jamesosullivan.bsky.social in @noemamag.com

"The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied."

#technology

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

Crazy discovery in ants 🤯🐜

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants | Nature
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago."

No suffering, no death, no limits: the nanobots pipe dream | Aeon Essays Thirty years ago, nanotech was about to change everything. Let’s not get tricked again by Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

In this piece for Aeon, I argue that, while nanotechnology is now a very real and mature field, a popular early vision of it was an example of what I am calling an "oneiric technology": a fantasy of the sort that Silicon Valley loves.
aeon.co/essays/no-su...

A photo of two portrait format gouache paintings, placed on a wooden desk and surrounded by a paint brush, hag stones, semi-precious stones, leaves, and a painted magic circle in the top left corner. The left painting features a magic cavern lit up both by pale pink back lighting, and tiny luminescent teal minerals in the fore- and middleground. The right painting featured a purplish, misty nighttime canyon, bordered by conifers, under a sickle moon. A fallen, arching tree trunk creates a bridge between the sides of the canyon.

Two fantastic sceneries that are waiting for their forever home in my shop! ✨

And if you want to learn how to paint your own, head on over to my Patreon where you can find video tutorials for them~

Which do you prefer? 💜

Shop: lindenshieldarts.com
Patreon: patreon.com/lindenshieldarts

The abstract of "AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto", available at the posted link.

Here is "AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto". I've been working on this feverishly because the issue seems to me so urgent - and I'm worried extreme positions on both sides are becoming locked in, when the best way forward is in the centre. Please read it! philpapers.org/rec/BIRACA-4

A graph of trends in despair by agein the United States for two periods - 2009-2018 (the blue line) and 2019-2024 (the red dotted line). It is apparent that the hump-shape in despair by age in the first period has been replaced by despair declining in age due to a rise in the rate of despair among younger people.

The U-hump of happiness has disappeared. It's basically despair until retirement.

"... this change has come about because the mental health of the young has deteriorated compared to that of older people"

(study: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...)

#science #culture #health

Happy to announce that "The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home" will be out this Wednesday at Reactor! 🎉

Stay tuned for:
☄️ Space Fantasy
👹 Evil space entities
👻 Ghosts of dead captains
🇧🇷 Brazilian street markets
👵🏾 Goddess-grandmothers

Reality is not what you think it is. It is not the foundation of our joyful flourishing. It is not an eternally renewing resource, nor something that would, were it not for our excessive intervention and reckless consumption, continue to harmoniously expand into the future. The truth is that reality is not nearly so benevolent. Like everything else that exists – stars, microbes, oil, dolphins, shadows, dust and cities – we are nothing more than cups destined to shatter endlessly through time until there is nothing left to break. This, according to the conclusions of scientists over the past two centuries, is the quiet horror that structures existence itself.

What a killer opening paragraph!

(From a recent @aeon.co essay: aeon.co/essays/philo...)

AI personalities: clues from animal research The existence of individual behavioural variation within and among animal populations has become a popular topic of investigation in behavioural ecology. So far, research has revealed the complexit...

New and excellent essay in @noemamag.com on AI personalities.
www.noemamag.com/embracing-a-...

Me as a bright-eyed academic pup in 2015: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

#science #technology

Sexy Models and the Rise of the Sea Squirt Morgan's angels - runway models - dish brains and sea squirts

Sexy sea squirt. That is all.

#science #biology #technology

Prevalence and implications of sex reversal in free-living birds | Biology Letters The ability to unequivocally identify the sex and reproductive status of individuals is crucial across many fields of study. Recent evidence indicates that avian sex determination is more flexible tha...

Male pregnancy, coming soon?

"One sex-reversed ZZ genetically male kookaburra was reproductively active, with large follicles and a distended oviduct, indicating recent egg production... from a peri-urban agricultural zone, where endocrine-disrupting substances may accumulate."

#science #biology

Two, please

Always the life of the party, you.