The coolest family from the coolest order (shhh…don’t tell the Bombus…😬)

J¡m Vaughn@jiminyspigot.bsky.social · 2w ago

Today's new friend: this northeastern hammertail (𝘌𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘢 𝘢𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘴), a species of robber fly enjoying lunch. Lots of folks mistake these for horseflies or preposterously large mosquitoes. But they don't bite unless threatened and are generally good for pest control!

We know that hot days lead to worsening health outcomes. Surprisingly, we have very little info on the fiscal impact these hot days have on government programs like Medicaid. In this new paper, we match over a million Medicaid records across nearly 16,000 U.S. ZIP codes to daily temperature data (🧵)

Why? Scrubs Scene

ALT: Why? Scrubs Scene

static.klipy.com

Second dissertation chapter just dropped at Ecology Letters! doi.org/10.1111/ele.70441 Across theory, stochastic models, and protist microcosms, we show how rising temporal autocorrelation drives predictable increases in extinction risk under warming (ft. coauthor @mtkummel.bsky.social!)

Temporal Autocorrelation Increases Temperature‐Driven Extinction Risk by Clustering Stressful Conditions

Extinction risk forecasting typically relies on comparing thermal tolerance data to predicted shifts in thermal distributions. However, changing temporal sequencing of temperatures may exacerbate the....

doi.org

Most statistical models focus on a single question: How does an explanatory variable affect the mean response? But environmental and biological systems are often shaped not only by changes in the mean, but also by changes in variability, skewness, thresholds, and the frequency of extreme outcomes.

The #Rstats development team receives some well-deserved recognition! "As part of the prize, the R team - who have thus-far been unpaid [for R work] - will get to split $1m (£755,000) between them." "The Oxford professor making sense of the world's data" www.bbc.com/news/article...

Prof Brian Ripley on developing R to manage the world's data

Prof Brian Ripley has spent the past three decades working on a computer software that analyses data.

bbc.com

Thrilled to share our paper showing that warming doesn't favor all pests... it's more complicated that & thermal traits don't explain the variation! Thanks to an amazing author team & Mia Lippey in particular for all her hard work. www.ucdavis.edu/news/scienti... www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Scientists Dispute Hypothesis That Climate Change Will Unleash Massive Ag Pest Populations

The widespread hypothesis that climate warming will result in unprecedented agricultural pest populations and cause food insecurity worldwide is oversimplified, according to a new study by a team led ...

ucdavis.edu

I've seen a lot of info for specialized audiences (e.g. scientists, non-profits) on how to comment on the proposed OMB rule change for grants, but less for the general public. So I made this one-pager that can be shared more widely. docs.google.com/document/d/e...

That’s not how we did it in the 60s when we eradicated screw worm the first time. Maybe we should read a book or ask an expert.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2mo ago

Brooke Rollins says DHS wants to put "AI on drones" to detect screwworm

For context, this is one hundred ninety-two thousand, five-year biomedical research grants. More than five years of complete funding for the entirety of the NIH for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, blindness, epilepsy, infectious diseases, etc… An entire generation of scientists.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In the last 18 months, Congress has given DHS $240 billion — a quarter of a trillion.

Excited to share that our paper, led by Matt Smith (@ IIT) describing how to create and use automated pollinator camera traps, AutoPollS, is now out in the world: doi.org/10.1111/2041... w/ @jamescrall.bsky.social @brianspiesman.bsky.social @jhemberger.bsky.social

dawg i am so sick of capital

Brandon Friedman@brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This is real

Real life view of facilities management responding to me asking for the cost of modifying/fixing anything in my lab:

dr. evil from the movie dumb and dumber is sitting in a chair .

ALT: dr. evil from the movie dumb and dumber is sitting in a chair .

media.tenor.com

It's good to be reminded these days that science, and scientists, still fucking rule. 🚀

In a sea of opinions about the role of LLMs in academics I offer my own. Apart from being harmful, exploitive plagiarism machines, LLMs rob us of the opportunity to experience the gift of friction in writing, which changes how we think. We must not give away that gift. doi.org/10.1002/fee....

Thinking like a mountain in the age of AI

Click on the article title to read more.

doi.org

Heading into conference abstract / presentation season, I 100% recommend Kathryn Langin's (@kangin.bsky.social) "Tell me a story! A plea for more compelling conference presentations". It's short, sweet, and not just for ornithologists. I can get behind every word! 🔒 academic.oup.com/condor/artic...

Protip: Those of us that have been doing this for a while can tell who hasn't put in the work. We won't ever tell you that, though. We just won't ever read your stuff or hire you. So go on and fill your boots, if you want. It's your tuition $

Derek Silva@derekcrim.bsky.social · 5mo ago

fuck this so much we are so not prepared for the mountain of dogshit “scholarship” about to flood journals everywhere

At ~$1 billion/day, the US has spent as much on the war in Iran in ten days as the entire FY25 budget for the National Science Foundation ($10 billion). Trump's FY26 budget request for the agency declined to $3.9 billion, due to a "realignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment."

🆕 BLOG POST There’s so much more to spatial downscaling today than classic LM or kriging. In my new blog post, I show how flexible and powerful GAMs can be for this task. #rstats #dataviz ➡️ dominicroye.github.io/blog/canary-...

Downscaling daily solar radiation in the Canary Islands with GAM

Researcher in climate science at MBG-CSIC

dominicroye.github.io

Rep. Brian Steil: "I flew home to my home state of Wisconsin, went to buy a 6 pack a beer, the clerk asked for my ID, confirmed it, and then I was allowed to buy the beer. I just think it's nuts that we protect our beer more than our ballots."

Can't wait for the measles or other nearly-exterminated-disease mascots to help normalize "natural immunity"

Ana Marie Cox@anamariecox.com · 6mo ago

How do you do, fellow carbon-based life forms?

All of this is fucking senseless. Minnesota did not have an immigration problem. Trump sent his Nazi thugs here because he's racist against Somali people and to own libs like Tim Walz. Now two Minnesotans are dead and Minneapolis is on the verge of going up in flames. None. Of. This. Was. Necessary.

Last week, the Trump administration cancelled >$2B in mental health + addiction treatment funds. Only massive, rapid pushback caused them to reverse the decision. But these programs remain at risk. So Grant Witness is now tracking SAMHSA grants. What found so far: grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0...

Grant Witness is tracking SAMHSA Grant Terminations – Grant Witness

grant-witness.us

I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

A PhD does not a universal expert make. Why must we hear from economists about dietary advice? Because they can do meta analyses?

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 7mo ago

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com The Trump administration's new dietary guidelines are "overall very sensible," Emily Oster writes in a guest essay. "This doesn't, however, mean that everything in here makes sense for everyone."

Happy new year! My all sky camera imaged the sky every 15 seconds and this picture shows what happened in the sky in 2025. It shows the length of the night and day with the hourglass shape, the monthly lunar cycle with the diagonal bands, the elevation of the Sun at local noon, and lots of clouds.

First ever evidence that multi-actor collaborative conservation produces biodiversity benefits (as far as I know) doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...

A paper published in Nature in September suggests a quarter of heatwave events from 2000-23 would have been near impossible without anthropogenic climate change. The paper also indicates that major carbon emitters are responsible for around 50% of the increase in intensity of these events. ⚒️ 🧪

Systematic attribution of heatwaves to the emissions of carbon majors - Nature

Climate change made 213 historical heatwaves reported over 2000–2023 more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed.

go.nature.com

This thread 1000x. And I have 0 patience for the "but there are so many problems to solve we need AI to help solve them all" argument. Since when has any *tool* developed by humans solved all of the problems we face?

gavin jones@ecologyofgavin.bsky.social · 8mo ago

I’m really concerned about early career scientists using generative AI in writing, because writing is how we think and reflect. There’s almost nothing *more* human than that, and to give that gift away to a machine is almost unconscionable to me

NSF - Forced reorg - POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements) - Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …) I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing. “Details matter” 🙃