Pleased to say that @slate.com has published an excerpt of BEYOND BELIEF. This part of the book looks at how critical decisions on how to save species are often made with little regard for evidence of whether they work. Includes two of my fave stories: bats + caribou. slate.com/technology/2...

Some Weird Looking Wires Showed Up on a Road in England. They Didn’t Do What They Were Meant To. They Were a Sign of a Larger Problem.

In conservation, it can be difficult to simply consult the evidence.

slate.com

Loved researching this for @nature.com. A mist of DNA engulfs us & ecologists are figuring out how to grab it to measure biodiversity. @jlittlefair.bsky.social @richardmleggett.bsky.social @profbatgirl.bsky.social @erinhahn.bsky.social @drbarnes.org www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The air is full of DNA — here’s what scientists are using it for

Airborne genetic material can be used to paint a picture of ecosystem health, watch for invasive species and even identify humans.

nature.com

Also, this is maddening. The authors could have *asked* why even zero-profit-margin journals is the AAS Journals cost so much to produce. No need to imagine! There's a lot more to producing a real, archived, edited, typeset, scientific article with data than peer reviewer labor.

www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/01/stri...

Striped Eel Catfish Traverse the Ocean Floor as a Strategically Rotating Mass

For young striped eel catfish, there really is safety in numbers. A recent Instagram post shares a video by Marie-Laure Vergne of about one hundred juvenile fish moving across the bottom of the ocean....

thisiscolossal.com

The ecologists who study nature without going outside bit.ly/3YtoSnu @tadeorp.bsky.social @sarabssethi.bsky.social @tokehoye.bsky.social @billsutherland.bsky.social @bessonmarc.bsky.social @laura-pollock.bsky.social @kevinjgaston.bsky.social

‘I rarely get outside’: scientists ditch fieldwork in the age of AI

In the race to embrace new technologies, some ecologists fear their field is losing touch with nature.

bit.ly

Energy transitions can happen faster than we think: In 2000 almost 90% of Denmark's electricity was from fossil fuels. In 2024 less than 10% of Danish electricity was from fossil fuels.

NVIDIA and Starcloud have just taken a big step toward moving power-hungry, polluting data centers from Earth to space. Starcloud think they can have a commercial scale data center in orbit in the early 2030s. It does seem to make sense. What do you think? spectrum.ieee.org/nvidia-h100-...

NVIDIA's H100 GPU Takes Data Centers to Space

Could space-based data centers be the answer to Earth's energy and cooling challenges? NVIDIA's H100 GPU is leading the charge in orbit.

spectrum.ieee.org

Attacks on healthcare facilities in #Gaza across 2024 (play gif). “I’ve not seen anything like it... In my work on human rights and healthcare attacks over decades, I have not seen anything like the almost daily attacks on hospitals.” More: buff.ly/u02hKUp (free to access)

Do we really want 250,000 mirrored satellites in Low Earth Orbit? Hasn't the Starlink megaconstellation already done enough damage? 🧪 @mjibrown.bsky.social

A US startup plans to deliver ‘sunlight on demand’ after dark. Can it work – and would we want it to?

Satellites beaming sunlight down to Earth sound like science fiction – and they have astronomers very worried.

theconversation.com

after the 10th radioactive shrimp recall in 7 weeks, i decided to do some digging little did i know it would lead me to an underreported industrial accident that may have released an airborne plume of radioactive debris over swaths of indonesia www.consumerreports.org/health/food-...

What Is Really Going on With All This Radioactive Shrimp? - Consumer Reports

Here’s the latest on how shrimp and spices got contaminated with cesium-137, how the FDA has responded, and why consumers should not panic.

consumerreports.org

Bleak account of working in local papers for Newsquest, which continues to send millions of pounds a year to its US private equity owners, while producing "cheap, synthetic, low-quality fare" and using AI reporters to cover councils. westcountryvoices.co.uk/ultra-proces...