The set of cultural touchstones that Ezra Klein assumes his listeners are familiar with is essentially infinite but somehow does not include dialectical materialism
Kale Sniderman
@muddypollen.bsky.social
Palynologist, paleoclimatologist, plant biogeographer | vegetation and climate history | fossil pollen
The Matuyama-Brunhes reversal doesn't get much love outside of science, but when it does whoo boy www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Politician’s claim Earth’s magnetic poles could flip if NT doesn’t use more groundwater criticised by experts
NT minister for trade and business Robyn Cahill makes scientifically inaccurate claims while pushing to make territory ‘datacentre capital of the globe’
theguardian.com
"Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well."
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.
"Australia may soon face unprecedented conservation decisions, from relocating native species & gene-editing invasive pests to deliberately creating ecosystems better suited to the conditions of the future." @ausjbotany.bsky.social #AusJBotany #OpenAccess Read more: www.scimex.org/newsfeed/wha...
Lab-grown meat, gene editing and extreme fire: Researchers' prediction
Lab-grown meat, gene editing and extreme fire: Researchers' predictions for life in the 2100s A major study has examined the deep environmental technological and societal challenges and sc
scimex.org
Lamentation (flipped, detail), by Gerard David, 1515-23, 📸 by Roberto Schmidt
Easy quiz. In what part of Australia was this photo taken? 🧪🌱
Isn't this wonderful Whoops! Most arXiv papers contain information never meant to be shared www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Whoops! Most arXiv papers contain information never meant to be shared
Passwords, GPS coordinates and private conversations have all been found in the metadata and source files of millions of preprint submissions.
nature.com
Is it ominous that fewer people are starting PhDs, or that only ~5% of PhD graduates find an ongoing academic position?
Prasad Jallepalli, MD, PhD@prasad.bsky.social · last mo.www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u... an ominous trend: graduate admissions are down 15 percent from last year, on top of an 11 percent decrease from the previous year we are destroying our seed corn
herbarium collections as unique archives of the health of pollinator-plant mutualisms
Vicky Temperton@7toucans.bsky.social · 3mo agotheconversation.com/preserved-or... Great new article from the Tiffany Knight lab, showing the power of herbaria to provide data from the past, here on pollination decline in orchids in Australia. 10 000 plant specimens were measured!
The assignment operator in R (<-) is vile and should be banished. It is needed constantly but is morphologically almost identical to <= (i.e. less-than-or-equal-to, ≤). It would be hard to find a smaller visual cue to carry such a large semantic load (though of course '=' just sows more confusion)
calcium-cemented neoliths are interesting objects for inhabitants of the Anthropocene to ponder, but their Myr-scale preservation potential is approx zero if they don't find their way into the deep ocean or a subsiding basin: i.e. they are fated to be surface ephemera aeon.co/essays/the-s...
The strange rocks that wouldn’t exist without us | Aeon Essays
Not natural, not quite unnatural, the strange new rocks of the Anthropocene stretch the boundaries of geology
aeon.co
When the facts are against you, attack the experts. When reality is against you, attack the facts. www.politico.com/news/2026/06...
Inside the campaign to discredit a key climate science report
An emerging field of research that can measure how much climate change has worsened individual disasters is under attack by friends of the fossil fuel industry. Billions of dollars are at stake.
politico.com
'The career ladder in academia is of particular interest as it is a “greedy” occupation due to its lack of substitutability among workers, long hours with increasing returns to productivity, and the importance of establishing and maintaining personal contacts.' Academia is a "greedy" occupation.
The lack of women at the top of the academic ladder is driven by unequal childcare responsibilities - LSE Impact
Motherhood, and the unequal childcare responsibilities that follow, explain a large share of the observed gender gap in academic employment. Sofie Cairo, Ria Ivandic, Anne Sophie Lassen and Valentina ...
blogs.lse.ac.uk
Why would a species of ocean plankton coil its shells to the right for millions of years and then suddenly, flip to the left? To find out more see Flipping Plankton in PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... by Bridget Wade , Paul Pearson, David King and Valeria Luciani
Suddenly this year, Australians applying for research grants that I'm reviewing are structuring components of their proposed research agenda around the notion of "work packages". Perhaps this is language promoted by a grant-writing consultancy?
The availability heuristic to my left, the availability heuristic to my right
THREAD: I’m going to share this thread here to clearly state my perspective on electric vehicles, car dependency and better cities, for all those who frequently ask me about it, including media, elected leaders and many others. Here goes. Please share it frequently if you think it will help. 🧵#EVS
I wrote a little thing about how we orient ourselves toward the moon, thinking with the work of @blmckean.bsky.social on neoliberalism "Who gets to decide what future generations will see when they look at the moon through a telescope? Will there be a democratic process for deciding?" 🧪🌒🔭
Desecration or Curiosity: Orienting Ourselves Toward Space
On Artemis, capitalism, and the logics of colonialism
news.chanda.science
Come join us! The University of Western Australia has two openings for Lecturers at Level B - one position is in Marine Biology, the other is for a Lecturer in Zoology. Both are teaching/research positions. Position descriptions are here: external.jobs.uwa.edu.au/en/listing/ Please repost 🙏
I got the rejection email today. I didn't have any luck with the Australian Geographic photo comp this year. No need for sympathy. I'm used to it. It's very competitive. Here's one of my unsuccessful entries. A yellow-tailed rock wallaby at Boolcoomatta Reserve.
An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements about "Generative AI" medium.com/center-on-pr... 🧪
An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements about "Generative AI"
An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements by the University about “Generative AI” Image source: Bibliothèque nationale de France Dear students, As you know, in …
medium.com
With no cold offshore upwelling system, the so-called mediterranean climate of southwestern Australia can just be broken by a whimsical tropical cyclone. It's almost as if ex-TC Narelle will track the warm Leeuwin Current down the WA coast 🧪
