Dr. July Pilowsky
@pilowsky.me
I model infectious disease in wildlife using #RStats and #JuliaLang, and I design dance larps about intergenerational trauma. 🇺🇸 🇨🇱 🏳️🌈 they/she/he, eng/esp
I have uploaded my latest larp, which premiered at @makeascenemn.bsky.social , in fully boxed and playable form on my larp website. Enjoy! larp.pilowsky.me/project/the-...
The Language of Bones | July Pilowsky
Raise your monstrous ancestor from their grave with the power of dance, and uncover your past.
larp.pilowsky.me
In what may be one of Earth’s craziest forms of mimicry, researchers in 2023 reported a species of rove beetle that grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it. Learn more during #InsectWeek: https://scim.ag/4mM2aS9
Sexier in the city? Urban male great bowerbirds decorate bowers with human-made objects, creating brighter and more varied displays than rural males. Males strongly prefer human-made objects over natural ones, possibly boosting their appeal to females! shorturl.at/lcNY2 @royalsocietypublishing.org
Viruses are highly abundant in the oceans, but there is one place you won't typically find them: in global ocean ecosystem models... until now. Introducing "vDarwin", an explicit integration of viruses into the MITgcm/Darwin global ecosystem framework: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... a 🧵
I find it fascinating that folks like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are having 'Abundance' discussions about NIH while ignoring the pre-2025 state of play, self-critique of scientists, and the many ways in which American science is imperfect and yet (near) the best in the world (or was). 🧵
Opinion | What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’
nytimes.com
“Emperor penguins, the world’s largest and perhaps most recognizable penguin species, have joined the list of wildlife endangered by global warming, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced on Thursday… largely driven by shifts in sea ice levels and food availability”
Emperor Penguins Are Now Endangered, a New Assessment Finds
nytimes.com
tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world
Noam Ross@noamross.net · 4mo agoFor #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals. The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
Can rewilding save the planet? I gave my answer on BBC Radio's The Inquiry — and so did some of my colleagues. Tune in and see if you agree. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
The Inquiry - How can rewilding help combat climate change? - BBC Sounds
As rewilding initiatives grow there’s a concern some risk doing more harm than good
bbc.co.uk
'Cities alter the latitudinal diversity gradient of birds in North America' DOI: doi.org/10.32942/X23...
Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/
Jon Mellon@jonmellon.bsky.social · 6mo agoCase in point, @pengzell.bsky.social just sent me 5 papers proving that there’s not actually any evidence for a loneliness epidemic. My mind is highly changed
An example of how impacts of interventions can differ at individual and population levels, and are conditional on other events. Given a car hits you, the helmet helps. But mandating helmets could lower the # of bikes on the road & thus might increase the chance of getting hit in the first place.
Joe Noonan@joenoonan.bsky.social · 6mo agoThis is counter-intuitive: "It is clear that the benefits of cycling outweigh the risks, with helmet legislation actually costing society more from lost health gains than saved from injury prevention." theconversation.com/ditching-bik...
I decided to give one of my most well liked project a bit of a make over, and I wrote about it too! See how I updated the visuals of r-color-palettes emilhvitfeldt.com/post/r-color... #rstats
R Color Palettes Refresh
Total rewrite of R Color Palettes and new release of paletteer.
emilhvitfeldt.com
First evidence in Europe of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 infection in a dairy cow. Antibodies against H5N1 detected in a cow with mastitis and respiratory signs on a Dutch dairy farm at the end of December. A cat on that farm had died from H5N1. www.tweedekamer.nl/downloads/do...
This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.
Keung Hui@keunghui.bsky.social · 7mo agoTrump administration drops legal appeal over anti-DEI funding threat to schools and colleges. This leaves in place a federal judge's ruling that the anti-DEI effort violated the First Amendment and federal procedural rules. (Via AP) apnews.com/article/dei-... #ncpol #nced
Oooh love this. Easiest way to parallelise anything in #rstats. Just add futurize() to your favourite function call www.jottr.org/2026/01/22/f... Thanks @henrikbengtsson.bsky.social HT @rstats.blaze.email
Academics, just use this simple LaTeX macro and you can avoid maintaining a separate CV just for 2026 federal grants.
The red dot is a baby North Atlantic right whale trying to migrate up the east coast of the United states. The blue streaks are fast moving shipping vessels entering and leaving New York City harbor. One collision and the whale is dead. We need *mandatory* speed limits for these vessels! 🧪🦑🌍
This is a serious issue in my field. I am a researcher studying avian influenza and even I am not allowed to access flu sequences in GISAID.
Kai Kupferschmidt@kakape.bsky.social · 7mo ago“[P]utting data into GISAID is like dropping it in a mail slot in an unmarked building,” says @colincarlson.bsky.social. “It’s wonderful that there’s so much cool stuff in that building. It would be great if we knew who owned it, or who paid for it, or what they plan to do with it.” #IDsky 🧪
I use the NCAR supercomputers to simulate disease outbreaks in wildlife. The impact of this terrible move will spread well beyond climate change research.
Shenglai@shenglai.bsky.social · 8mo agoTrump Administration Plans to Break Up Premier Weather and Climate Research Center www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/c...
Wow. Grants might now be rejected/accepted based on a single outside review and no panel
Jeffrey Mervis@policyhound.bsky.social · 8mo agoNSF plans to streamline merit review to heal self-inflicted staffing wound www.science.org/content/arti...
My research on elephant conservation in the KAZA TFCA was featured by @mongabay.com in an article that argues for corridors, not culls, as a long term solution for Southern Africa‘s growing elephant population 🐘 news.mongabay.com/2025/12/corr...
Corridors, not culls, offer solution to Southern Africa’s growing elephant population
Since being collared in Zambia two years ago, a young bull elephant known to researchers as Z16 has walked nearly 12,000 kilometers, or 7,500 miles — three times the distance between New York and Los ...
news.mongabay.com
Tired: Publishing a ton of papers by breaking stories into small pieces and always shooting too high and working the way down the journal cascade Wired: Publishing complete stories in more substantial papers and submitting them to society journals, and not exploiting the peer review system.
Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...
I do prefer the term "community science" to "citizen science" but man does it make it hard to search for papers about monitoring communities as in ecological communities.
Applied to COVID-19 in California, the approach yields more accurate and more stable short-term forecasts than RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs, Transformers, and naïve baselines. 🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
