Digital Naturalism Laboratories
@dinalab.bsky.social
A jungle makerspace for field biology in Gamboa, Panamá. www.dinalab.net We also organize the Digital Naturalism Conference: http://2025.dinacon.org
Normalize post-capitalist futures! There are so many issues worth discussing - even after we overcome capitalism. So many unrelated but crucial ideologies we need to figure out to productively reclaim our future. Anyway, here's the full intro for "a permanent echo" #indiedev #indiegames #cyberpunk
A robotics researcher from the military once told me that robots made for "search and rescue " was just code for "search and destroy" And i feel like they aren't really try to hide it anymore. interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/...
New centaur robot with chainsaw arms built to tackle dangerous rescues
Garage-built Threehalves, a seven-foot centaur robot, is designed to tackle dangerous jobs while keeping humans out of harm.
interestingengineering.com
Heads up for anyone that likes making cool stuff that there are bunch of exhibit mountmaking and fabrication jobs (both entry and supervisor levels) open at the Field this week. www.fieldmuseum.org/landing/care...
Reed Canary-grass, Phalaris arundinacea (2 of 2). One of the larval food plants for the Drinker moth, Euthrix potatoria. Flight season is July to August.
I am looking for PhD students and postdocs to join my lab at the University of Pittsburgh in Fall 2027. Anyone excited about urban evolution, hummingbirds, & community engagement, please reach out! And/or find me at #AOS2026 this week! More info here: www.valentina-alaasam.com
We're in a magical place 🪄✨ #Nymphalidae: cf. #Callicore [collected by Tyler Bishop] Soltis Center, Costa Rica
Was sharing Moth facts at a fantastic Dan Deacon show in Maine! (Also check out this rad photo that turned out this way because the lights were blinking super fast!) #teammoth
RECRUITING 3 Senior Research Associates to develop responsible AI-enabled approaches to unlock animal behaviour for conservation. Roles include: 🧠 AI/Computer Vision 🐠 Behavioural Ecology 🌊 Marine Field Ecology Join @lec-reefs.bsky.social & @dsailu.bsky.social, Lancaster Uni, UK. Ads coming soon!
This is a much more interesting image than you might think at first glance. Give yourself 10 points if you know why.
Here's the working prototype of my setup. It's a 3D-printed black block with a socket to hold a watch glass, and a 3D-printed diffuser that sits on top of the block. Recessing the glass greatly reduces stray light & glare. #NaturalHistoryCollections #Macrophotography #FocusStacking #DIYImagingStage
Craig B@mutillidae.bsky.social · 6d agoI've been working on a better setup for capturing focus-stacked images of immature insects in alcohol...and it's working well. 🙂 #NaturalHistoryCollections #Macrophotography #FocusStacking #Psephenidae #APennyForYourThoughts
In emails I've obtained via FOIA, scientists at the U.S. EPA fully understood that the Spartan Mosquito Pro Tech does not kill mosquitoes. But their objections were overruled by higher-ups (political appointees) and the agency granted the tube a registration. So it is now an EPA-approved scam.
Pine Hawk Sphinx pinastri caterpillars on Scots Pine. When they reach their final instar the green and white camouflage amongst the pine needles isn't so effective so they gain a brown central line to blend in. Thanks Barry Henwood #teammoth
"A concentration camp, in its most basic definition, is a place where a targeted civilian population, not necessarily accused of a crime, is detained and at least some of their basic rights are suspended," writes @jwashing.bsky.social. "That’s precisely what’s happening in the United States today."
Don’t call them ICE detention centers. Call them camps | John Washington
I’ve spent a decade reporting on immigration enforcement. The word ‘camp’ best captures the political function of these facilities
theguardian.com
FERAL 1.0 is out! Just to remind you: FERAL is an open-source toolkit for supervised animal behaviour segmentation directly from videos with no pose estimation needed. We made it much easier to install and run FERAL First, to install FERAL: pip install feral www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵
FERAL: A Supervised Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping
Quantifying animal behavior often requires segmenting continuous actions into discrete, interpretable states, yet most automated pipelines infer actions from keypoint dynamics and are limited by keypo...
biorxiv.org
And importantly all these grand plans that just waive their hands over all the ACTUALLY DIFFICULT PARTS (policy change, social involvement) make sure the solution ALWAYS comes from making more stuff rather than ever daring to reduce consumption.
Digital Naturalism Laboratories@dinalab.bsky.social · 6d ago✅️ Level 1: we need to reduce our carbon output - sounds good! ☑️ Level 2: Maybe we should get people to drive less - sure that's a really big initiative worked on by many community groups... 🤔Level 3: so we should make electric self driving bikes! - why drive themselves? What about regular bikes?
😨 Level 4: we will hand make the motors locally to save co2 on shipping! - that would be extraordinarily difficult... 😱 Level 5: yeah and they will just be powered by nuclear or fusion! - [I have to just walk out the room] - [DARPA starts writing checks]
✅️ Level 1: we need to reduce our carbon output - sounds good! ☑️ Level 2: Maybe we should get people to drive less - sure that's a really big initiative worked on by many community groups... 🤔Level 3: so we should make electric self driving bikes! - why drive themselves? What about regular bikes?
I find this to be the thing about the branding of "maker," that used to be just annoying, but we have seen how dangerous this mindset is of acting like everyone who can print a Yoda head is somehow a super genius who can solve all problems.
Digital Naturalism Laboratories@dinalab.bsky.social · 6d agoI used to get confused how tech folk can get behind the insanity of effective altruists, but then if you hang around a large concentration of "makers™️" you can see them so excited about some basic idea that can be ok, but then jump 5-6 logical steps to absurdity as if the first steps already worked.
I used to get confused how tech folk can get behind the insanity of effective altruists, but then if you hang around a large concentration of "makers™️" you can see them so excited about some basic idea that can be ok, but then jump 5-6 logical steps to absurdity as if the first steps already worked.
what we learned from #DinoCon - people like invertebrate weirdos, MORE INVERTEBRATE WEIRDOS! - MEDIEVAL WEIRDOS - if the t-shirt is stupid, double the amount (we are completely out of DON'T DO IT GRAMPA t-shirts) - we support women's rights and wrongs and will make a DON'T DO IT GRANDMA version
Check out this nice article by Hubert about our expedition with the Mothbox featured in @smithsonianmag.bsky.social (And reminder this cool project has been out of money for months now and needs help!) www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smiths...
A Mountain Expedition in Panama to Test New Insect Monitoring Technology
A new, jungle-proof automated light trap for insect monitoring documented in Methods in Ecology and Evolution and Integrative and Comparative Biology. The Mothbox is like a mammal trail camera but des...
smithsonianmag.com
If Biden had thrown Trump in the slammer we wouldn't be here. You can piss and moan all you want but J6 was history books shit and history books shit requires the President to do President shit. And he didn't. And now the guy who saved millions has to eat shit from a penis like Ron Johnson
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last wk.Ron Johnson claims the the "injection injured" are committing mass suicide
A 1% mortality rate plus "let 'er rip" equals Covid killing 2-3x more Americans than have died in every military conflict in US history combined
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last wk.Rep. Ogles: "Look, I don't want to play down the effects of the virus, but at the end of the day it had a roughly 1 percent mortality rate. We coulda gotten through this."
the litter sifter instructions alone are worth their weight in gold, but I'm also a big fan of the DIY aspirators
Sending Mike @spongymesophyll.bsky.social Ferro's DIY leaf litter sifter PDF to yet another colleague, frankly his whole site is a treasure and you should check it out www.spongymesophyll.com
