Jeff Atkins
@atkinsjeff.bsky.social
Assistant Professor @ Virginia Commonwealth University; displaced Forest Service scientist; ecosystem ecologist with a remote sensing problem; standard time apologist; proud luddite; lover of loud, noisy, weird music.
idk it just feels like at this point it’s clear that sustained use of AI does something to your brain and for some people that ends up being truly life ruining and i’m like why would you not want to protect your brain.
I completely missed this article from a couple of days ago. We have to get rid of these markets at the least, or best case, just make virtually all gambling illegal imo. www.cnn.com/2026/07/17/c...
People are making wildfire bets on prediction markets. Experts say it could lead to disaster | CNN
As the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires raged last year, people placed bets on how how many acres the fires would consume, which locations they would reach and when they would be contained.
cnn.com
Join us through the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship in EEB! Conduct your own research, mentored by 2+ EEB faculty. $65k salary + research/moving $. All areas of EEB welcome. Apply by 11/1 I co-chair this search and am happy to field questions Spread the word! eeb.msu.edu/initiatives/...
Postdoctoral Fellowship - Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior
eeb.msu.edu
📢 PhD opportunity at the University of Helsinki! Join the ANEW project to study ecological networks, seed dispersal and biodiversity conservation under global change. Apply by 31 Aug 2026. 🔗 jobs.helsinki.fi/job/31_8_202... #PhD #Ecology #Conservation #AcademicJobs
Doctoral Researcher (PhD student) in Ecological Networks and Biodiversity Conservation
Doctoral Researcher (PhD student) in Ecological Networks and Biodiversity Conservation
jobs.helsinki.fi
BREAKING: The Boston Red Sox are acquiring three-time All-Star catcher Adley Rutschman in a trade with the Baltimore Orioles, sources tell ESPN.
Tennis: 1) Young & Old, 2) Ritual in Repeat, 3) Yours Conditionally Modest Mouse: 1) Long drive... 2) Lonesome Crowded West, 3) Moon & Antarctica Elder: 1) Dead Roots, 2) Lore, 3) Reflections I got a ton of these I will stop now.
Mia Murphy 🏳️⚧️@miamurphy.com · 4d agoWhat's the best three album run from a band? (the correct answer is Moving Pictures, Signals, and Grace Under Pressure by Rush, but I'm excited to learn second place)
Bell Witch - 1) Longing 2) Four Phantoms 3) Mirror Reaper
Mia Murphy 🏳️⚧️@miamurphy.com · 4d agoWhat's the best three album run from a band? (the correct answer is Moving Pictures, Signals, and Grace Under Pressure by Rush, but I'm excited to learn second place)
Hot Water Music - Fuel for the hate game/Forever and Counting/No Division
Mia Murphy 🏳️⚧️@miamurphy.com · 4d agoWhat's the best three album run from a band? (the correct answer is Moving Pictures, Signals, and Grace Under Pressure by Rush, but I'm excited to learn second place)
If you've been working on forest structural diversity recently, please consider submitting an abstract to our AGU session! Co-conveners: @atkinsjeff.bsky.social, Qinfeng Guo, and myself. Invited speakers: Jody Vogeler & Marco Giradello. Session description: lnkd.in/evE3jAJn Deadline: August 5, 2026
This new Man Mountain album is pretty good even if it is kinda of an advert for a Strymon Big Sky.
"yeah i just ask chatgpt and-" cool i no longer take you seriously as a person
Satellite-based analyses systematically underestimate carbon accumulation in mature forests. This study illustrates the importance of independent lines of evidence and suggests that terrestrial carbon budgets need to account for forest structure. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Widespread carbon accumulation in mature forests remains underestimated by satellite observations - Nature Ecology & Evolution
The authors combine satellites, repeat airborne lidar, dynamic global vegetation models and field plot monitoring across the conterminous USA to show widespread continued carbon accumulation in mature...
nature.com
I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:
How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran
The question is: what on earth is Google doing?
digitaldigging.org
So question, for lab communications/organization where are we at on the Slack vs. Discord debate? I an open to opinions. Teams isn't an option (and I am okay with that hahaha).
Finally posted an ad for the postdoc position on my new NSF-funded project—come help build a new method to study plants' responses to environmental variation in space and over time, and figure out interesting ways to use it! Apply by 23 August to ensure consideration. Details: buff.ly/qTvaqvD
Weird musing but being a lifelong baseball fan, a sport where failure is the norm and a 30% success rate for some things makes you an all-star, is very helpful as a baseline for a career in science 🤣
Agree with Cate, this is a very thought provoking piece well worth reading.
Cate Macinnis-Ng@loraxcate.bsky.social · last wk.This is an excellent piece - "remote control science" captures it so well.
📣 Registration is now open for experts to review the First Order Draft of the Working Group I contribution to IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report. Interested experts can register until 25 Sept 2026 🔗 https://bit.ly/4vi25cq The review starts 10 August until 2 October. More 🔗 https://bit.ly/WGI7Fod
Do consider submitting an abstract to our #AGU26 special session on forest structural diversity--we are looking for any and all research connecting structure to function, especially where remote sensing is integrated.
Which has been the intent of things like DOE's Genesis Mission all along.
Alex Wild@alexwild.bsky.social · 2w agoReading between the lines, there is a fair amount of desperation in attempting to capture the entirety of the nation's annual research expenditures across all fields to redirect to a handful of tech people.
Foiled yet again at trivia. Me plus two teenagers is not a competitive team in this town. And I am too much of a hermit to meet other people.
Chocolate week on Bake Off is gonna be insane this year.
Erin Sikorsky@erinsikorsky.bsky.social · 2w agoUseful for Met Office to say. Now UK govt needs to absorb this in its bones. "We are right now living in a time of historic and unprecedented change, and in terms of temperature, on annual, seasonal, monthly and daily timescales, this evidence shows the climate of the 20th Century has now gone,"
I would buy a print of this. Amazing.
Jake Berv@jakeberv.bsky.social · 2w agoHere is Supplementary Figure 18, which better showcases the beautiful illustrations we commissioned from @umich.edu undergrad Olivia Stein. These illustrated species represent clades where our method identifies significant increases in the rate of body-shape evolution. Also see Supp Table 7.
New paper out, "A quantitative evaluation of forest aboveground biomass density map products in Oregon, USA" in ERL, led by the incomparable Andy Hudak. Findings go way beyond Oregon--central to how we think about and constrain AGB estimates: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
A quantitative evaluation of forest aboveground biomass density map products in Oregon, USA
A quantitative evaluation of forest aboveground biomass density map products in Oregon, USA, Hudak, Andrew Thomas, Bakken, Jennifer L, Lister, Andrew, Mauro, Francisco, Gregory, Matthew, Riley, Karin L, Wilson, Barry Ty., Santoro, Maurizio, Healey, Sean P, Ma, Lei, Yu, Yifan, Bright, Benjamin C, Byrne, John, Mita, Roy, Houtman, Rachel M, Shaw, John, Fekety, Patrick, Domke, Grant Michael, Walters, Brian, Bell, David, Weiskittel, Aaron, Atkins, Jeff, Duncanson, Laura, Hunka, Neha, Kennedy, Robert E, Babcock, Chad, Saatchi, Sassan, Raczka, Brett, Silva, Carlos, Tang, Hao, Hurtt, George
iopscience.iop.org
I have seen AI described as a "technology founded on a lack of consent" and it has been echoing in my head since then