👾 Level up your data skills with DataCamp! Thanks to our on-going partnership with #DataCampDonates, GBIF is proud to offer free licenses to biodiversity data users to explore courses hundreds of online courses such as Python, GitHub, data theory, SQL and Power BI. 🔗 gbif.link/datacamp2026

SpaceX shares are down by half from their June peak as investors worry Musk may have oversold them on its future prospects.

Musk likely to face tough questions during SpaceX's first earnings call as a public company

SpaceX shares are down by half from their June peak as investors worry Musk may have oversold them on its future prospects.

bit.ly

My editor asked me to write about what happened to summer:

We launched a war on nature. Now we are in a climate warzone | Rebecca Solnit

Summer is not what it once was. We have been robbed of one of life’s great joys

theguardian.com

England received only 7% of the long-term average rainfall for July. Southern England, just 1%. Factoid: There has been a weather station in Kew Gardens for 155 years. This July was the first month ever to record 0mm of rain. Tomorrow, London will again hit 30C+ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

July set to be driest on record for England and Wales after relentless heatwaves

Climate scientist urges better planning as southern England had just 1% of long-term average rainfall last month

theguardian.com

Li et al. Shorebird loss increases soil CO2 emissions in coastal wetlands under restoration www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #ornithology

Shorebird loss increases soil CO2 emissions in coastal wetlands under restoration

Countries worldwide are increasingly adopting nature-based solutions (NbS) to tackle the challenges of global climate change. One recently proposed Nb…

sciencedirect.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

Exhilarated to share a 2nd @science.org cover article this month from our lab @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social! A collaboration with US & Mexico colleagues on the role of a Mexican biogeographic holding pen in shaping the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI)(1/11) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

OPINION: "[A] growing concern is in this so-called 'AI race' to build so many data centers. Will there be a nationwide or global financial crash in the aftermath? In such a scenario, only a couple major players may be left standing," Andy Gipson writes.

Opinion | Data Centers and the AI Bubble Are Financial Risks for Mississippi

Andy Gipson writes about his concerns with the data center industry and the expectations he has for artificial intelligence companies going forward.

buff.ly

Cool cool cool link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Closure of the Strait of Hormuz may trigger a bioinvasion super-spreader event - Biological Invasions

The ongoing conflicts in the Middle East are causing substantial humanitarian, economic, and geopolitical impacts and disrupting global trade. While the human and economic effects remain the focus of ...

link.springer.com

In recent weeks, there has been a remarkable surge in large, intense, fast-moving, and unfortunately in many cases destructive/deadly wildfires in multiple Northern Hemisphere regions spanning a wide range of climates & ecologies, but they all share one key commonality. [Thread]

Admirable clarity @science.org

David Roberts@volts.wtf · 2w ago

Whew, the editors of @science.org are getting real.

Whew, the editors of @science.org are getting real.

The Assault On Science Funding Continues

science.org

1. The new Trump / Kratsios plan for US science appears explicitly designed to destroy US universities. Diverting money to tech donors is probably just a bonus. Gift link.

Trump’s Plan for Science: More Money for A.I., Less for Universities (Gift Article)

Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s science adviser, proposed overhauling how the government funds research. Democrats said Mr. Trump’s actions had weakened science.

nytimes.com

Do humans and birds share an eye for design? 🐦🎨 For my Master's diss, I’m testing if we share aesthetic tastes with bowerbirds. I need 100 responses to finish! Visual, anonymous & under 5 mins. Link: exe.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... 🧪 cc: @scienseed.com #AcademicSky #SciComm

1/4 Please see our new paper just published in Global Change Biology: “Intensifying fire season aridity portends ongoing expansion of severe wildfire in western US forests”. 🧪🌍🔥

Intensifying Fire Season Aridity Portends Ongoing Expansion of Severe Wildfire in Western US Forests

Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests over recent decades. However, high-severity fire—fire that kills all or most trees—is also an important metric of fire activity given its d...

doi.org

Elon Musk's xAI has installed more than double the number of gas turbines than it has publicly acknowledged to power its Colossus 2 data center project, without federal permits, and the pollution is hitting predominantly Black neighborhoods the hardest reut.rs/4bIghEm

A couple days ago, they were deep in the reeds, like moving shadows with a hint of orange. But this morning one decided to explore and popped out of the reeds for just a bit. This is a baby Sora, and as it dashed to another reed clump, those little wings helped for balance! #Birds 🪶

🍁 Trees in Europe are increasingly dying prematurely. A new WSL study on French #forests now shows that it is not only extremely dry summers but #climate anomalies in general that are driving tree mortality – particularly warm and wet springs: www.wsl.ch/en/news/why-... @lsce-ipsl.bsky.social 🌍

Why Europe’s trees are dying

Deviations from the usual climate are causing trees to die prematurely. Even favourable growing conditions can have a negative impact.

wsl.ch

SpaceX's $1.75T IPO ties Musk's pay to building a million-person Mars colony. A sci-fi scenario has been encoded into an SEC filing. My new piece on materialized science fiction and the remaking of empire is now live.

Illiberalism Studies Program@illsp.bsky.social · last mo.

New piece! @alirizataskale.bsky.social on SpaceX's questionable valuation, and how science fiction is being materialized as a transformation of empire.

This is really great, with many quotable portions, but I will just highlight "making the rejection of democracy sound like futurism" is such an elegant way to describe the what's going on.

Ali Rıza Taşkale@alirizataskale.bsky.social · last mo.

SpaceX's $1.75T IPO ties Musk's pay to building a million-person Mars colony. A sci-fi scenario has been encoded into an SEC filing. My new piece on materialized science fiction and the remaking of empire is now live.

"A solar farm on a rewetted peatland is home to more types of bird than drained agricultural fields nearby, suggesting that land used for renewable energy can make money for landowners, lock away carbon and boost biodiversity at the same time."

Wildlife thrives in solar farm built on restored peatland

A diverse range of bird species has been recorded at a solar park on rewetted peatland in Germany, suggesting that combining energy generation with habitat restoration could benefit biodiversity, the climate and the economy

newscientist.com

HAHAHAhaha! they're making the world's biggest synthetic scum pond!!! The coating is a polyurea used inside pipes. It gels in about 3 seconds, making it non self-leveling. The texture is like an orange peel, the perfect substrate for biofilms. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/u...

Manager at Trump’s N.J. Golf Club Helped Plan Reflecting Pool Repairs

nytimes.com

The Trump administration has repealed the 2024 Public Lands Rule, stripping conservation of equal priority with industry across 245 million acres of federal land. Consequently, the DOI revoked a Montana grazing permit for 950 wild bison, ruling leases must prioritize commercial livestock.

Trump administration repeals rule that allowed bison to graze on public lands

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration recently repealed the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which established that conservation should have equal priority with industry when it comes to accessing…

mongabay.cc

The persistent low-frequency hum and vibrations from cooling systems, generators, and fans in data centers are causing people health problems such as sleep deprivation and anxiety. If we’re serious about scaling direct air capture for CO₂ removal, the sound impacts will be way worse.

The Cloud Has Sound: The Unrelenting and Unseen Cost of A.I. Data Centers

nytimes.com

For years, Microsoft had failed to fully explain how it protects sensitive information in the cloud as it hops from server to server. Given that and other unknowns, government reviewers couldn’t vouch for the tech’s security. It was approved anyway. (Published March)

Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.

A federal program created to protect the government against cyber threats authorized a sprawling Microsoft cloud product, despite the company’s inability to fully explain how it protects sensitive dat...

propublica.org

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

Images from the Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, where police deployed tear gas against residents protesting the police killing of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. Courtesy Action News 5: www.actionnews5.com/2026/06/16/c...

Ashton Pittman@ashtonpittman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Kohen Wiley, a 1-year-old child, is dead after a Mississippi police officer shot into a car and killed him. Family members say his mother was holding him in the passenger seat. The officers were responding to a shoplifting call over a box of diapers at the Senatobia Walmart.

The $18 billion spent on subsidies for solar manufacturing by China since 2000 is half of what the US has spent on subsidies for oil every year since 2000. There is no starker illustration of how badly US industrial & energy policy has been bungled. #EnergySky #ClimateSky #GreenSky #EconSky

Wasting China’s solar panel surplus is madness

Clean power is within our reach — yet factories sit idle

ft.com

New research examines Waymo's California robotaxi trips btw Aug 2023 and Dec 2025. Conclusion: 46% of miles driven involved no one inside the car. That's 40 million miles of deadheading, with Waymo vehicles using road space w/o transporting a human. doi.org/10.32866/001...

1/7 🎉 Excited to share our new paper, out now in Geophysical Research Letters! We looked at something underexplored in the extremes literature: the spatial footprint of extreme precipitation (EP) events across the US over the last ~45 years. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Climatology and Trends in Spatial Scales of Extreme Precipitation Over Land in the Contiguous US

The distribution of US daily extreme precipitation spatial size is logarithmic, and large-area events dominate trends and climatology Large-area extreme precipitation events tend to be more inten...

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com