Dr. Vaskar Nepal

We’ve started the Thermal
Ecology Alliance! Go grab a cup of TEA and join the movement www.thermalecologyalliance.org/participation

Wild mammals once dominated the mammal kingdom. Not anymore. Today, humans and our livestock account for 98% of the world’s land mammals by weight, while wild land mammals are just 2%.

Good old Woz. Good for him.

Science in 2025

for the humanity left in us 🖤

Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI | The New Journal Amid ChatGPT's rising popularity and a computer science cheating scandal, Yale students, professors, and administrators wrestle privately with the proper role of AI in education. What happens when eve...

This may be the best thing ive read yet on AI in higher ed, and its written by a Yale undergrad. Highly recommend.

A sign with my face that says “reserved for Dr. David Shiffman” placed on a toilet seat

A few years ago, I gave a talk, and when we arrived at the facility, this sign was used to reserve a parking spot for me.

Mom and dad kept the sign and this was what I saw when I walked into their house.

We are phasing out the terms “extant” and “extinct” from our exhibits and will now refer to species as either “Darwinners" or “Darlosers.”

Ichthyologist Fang Fang Kullander would have been 63 years old today. She travelled the globe for her taxonomical studies of freshwater fish and her work with Fishbase, but passed away at the age of 47 in 2010 from gall duct cancer.

#WomenInSTEM #Ichthyology #FishSky #BioSky 🧪🐟

“Cake causes herpes?” - promiscuous dichotomisation induces false positives - BMC Medical Research Methodology Background Continuous biomedical data is often dichotomized into two or more groups for analysis, despite long-standing warnings from statisticians that this constitutes bad practice. This dichotomisa...

Nice one, from @drg.bsky.social and @jamesheathers.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Hey, you wanna give a guest lecture to my ichthyology class in Spring? If yes, let’s connect.

Wake up babe sesame street just dropped some new iconic scicomm

Any published papers in the wild with a declared use of AI for analyzing the data yet? We know people are doing it. Probably quite often. So there must be one where use was declared?

A gar scale arrowhead. The long peg portion of the scale is tied to the arrow shaft and the hard diamond point creates the arrowhead

Native Americans used gar scales as arrowheads, native Carribeans used gar skin as breastplates, and early colonizers wrapped gar skin around their plow blades. In other words, it's really hard to get through gar skin
5/8

A gar surfacing to gulp air between aquatic plants. The spots on the short, broad snout suggest it's either a Florida or spotted gar

The gar swim bladder functions as a lung and they must surface periodically to gulp air. Studies have shown that gar switch between breathing air and breathing water based on temperature. Warm water holds less oxygen, so they breathe air more in warm temps
6/8

Yikes. I talk about this every time I teach my students about DNA structure.

Wait, what? A RAT caught and ate a BAT? And there's video! What does it portend? Scientists filmed bats to see how they communicate while swarming. They found a surprise: In urban settings, rats attack bats. What are the implications for bats ... and virus spread to humans?

Scientists filmed bats to see how they communicate while swarming. They found a surprise: In urban settings, rats attack bats. What are the implications for bats ... and virus spread to humans? n.pr/3WNy2KL

I read through a few lectures, and I am very impressed with how clear this is. This should be very useful for beginners. I may refer my students to this as a resource.

Comic. PERSON 1 with white hat: How tall are you? PERSON 2: 5ft 24cm [caption] When switching to metric, make the process easier by doing it in steps.

Metric Tip

xkcd.com/3164/

Nice story. Should read.

Hey we all blunder into doing hard things, and some of us reluctantly do hard things on purpose, but none of us do them because they’re hard.

Personally, I do things not because they’re easy, but because I incorrectly thought they’d be easy

deep cut! `fortunes::fortune("dog")`: "Firstly, don't call your matrix 'matrix'. Would you call your dog 'dog'?
Anyway, it might clash with the function 'matrix'." -- Barry Rowlingson, R-help (October 2004)

GitHub - hadley/genzplyr: dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap. Contribute to hadley/genzplyr development by creating an account on GitHub.

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp....

genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

Another #GarWeek spotlight species is the Bowfin. Check out this young of the year bowfin from a Green Bay coastal wetland. #GreatLakes

Read about the Bowfin, the gar’s closest living relative. #GarWeek

Hey Gar (and other toothy fish) enthusiasts, my lab group is looking for length, weight and location data for alligator gar and emerald/eyetail bowfin from across their range for a study. If you have any, can you share? #GarWeek

Oxygen supersaturation has been reported to protect aquatic animals from heat waves. We tested this in a large collaborative experiment on many species of fish and crustaceans. Our new paper in @plosbiology.org shows that the effect of hyperoxia on thermal tolerance is negligible. Unfortunately.

New to Bluesky. Let's see if this is better than the garbage I have to wade through in X.