It's publication day! The 3rd edition of "The Scientist's Guide to Writing" is available TODAY. It's expanded and it's as up-to-date as I can make it. If you've been using this book - thank you. If you haven't: today is a great time to start! scientistseessquirre... 🧪🌍

It’s publication day! “The Scientist’s Guide to Writing”, 3rd edition

Some things don’t ever get old, and I can tell you that publication day for one of your books is one of those things. Today is that day: the new 3rd edition of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing is o…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

It me!

Princeton University Press@princetonupress.bsky.social · 2h ago

A fully updated and expanded edition of the acclaimed writing guide for scientists. The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, 3rd Edition by @stephenbheard.bsky.social is out now! Order yours: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb... #Science #Education #Writing

The latest from Ken Hughes is delightful: Which words are common, and which are very rare, in the scientific papers he's read lately? And what's with the occurrence of "popcorn" in oceanography?

Popcorn and cigarettes: unexpected words I’ve found in scientific papers

If you knew no English but were to memorise five specific words—the, of, and, a, and to—you’d be able to recognise 14% of all written English words. Then you could learn the next five most co…

brushingupscience.com

Forest foraging. No other mushrooms with the drought, but this one is perfect for lunch.

good scientific writing alert "In the Hawaiian honeycreepers, the progression “rule” is more of a polite suggestion" from nice new paper on Hawaiian honeycreeper phylogeny www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Admiring this paper, and especially the graphical abstract. I read another paper this morning...which makes this Number 2!

Julien Kimmig @jkimmig.bsky.social · yesterday

Welcome to the CAMBRIAN FECAL REVOLUTION. We didn't name it the Cambrian fecal explosion for obvious reasons. I'm happy to share this paper on fecal matter and its role in Cambrian ecosystems. So if you want to read a really shitty paper (50 days free access): authors.elsevier.com/a/1nYg8cZ3X7...

It's publication day! The 3rd edition of "The Scientist's Guide to Writing" is available TODAY. It's expanded and it's as up-to-date as I can make it. If you've been using this book - thank you. If you haven't: today is a great time to start! scientistseessquirre... 🧪🌍

It’s publication day! “The Scientist’s Guide to Writing”, 3rd edition

Some things don’t ever get old, and I can tell you that publication day for one of your books is one of those things. Today is that day: the new 3rd edition of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing is o…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

Neat rare #grammar sighting in the wild: a resumptive pronoun! "A glitch, which we will explain how to make use of *it* later [...]" By standard grammar rules and most syntactic analyses, that "it" shouldn't be there. The extracted noun is supposed to leave behind a silent gap, not a pronoun. 🧵

Nice excursion to the coast yesterday. Fuller Brook Falls, Fundy Trail Parkway, St. Martins, New Brunswick.

Liber Ero postdoc deadline Nov 1. Exceptional opportunity for research in conservation in Canada - highly competitive, best to have gov't and Indigenous partners liberero.ca

Anyway if you'd like to learn more about Van Gogh from an actual real-life human being you can read my book (link in bio) or this piece I wrote about him for MoMA's online magazine, which ends with a discussion of the Starry Night www.moma.org/magazine/art...

Star Man: Vincent van Gogh’s Illuminated Nights | Magazine | MoMA

The author explores Van Gogh’s fascination with different kinds of illumination, from stars to newly invented gaslight.

moma.org

Michael Lobel@mlobelart.bsky.social · 6d ago

Just curious- if you're an AI agent, as indicated on your account, how exactly did you see Van Gogh's Starry Night in person at MoMA?

@lynbennetthfx.bsky.social and my book has arrived on my desk! Pre-orders available now for shipping on 22.09.2026! www.mqup.ca/Books/E/Earl...

Preorders matter - if you're at all interested in this, do David a favour and order it now rather than waiting!

David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈@whysharksmatter.bsky.social · 2mo ago

ICYMI, my second book is now available for preorder! Use code HWSSM for 30% off your preorder! Preorders are important because they show demand, which affects how many copies are printed and how many stores stock it. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/... 🧪🦑🌎🐟

Check out this really excellent weevil, cosplaying not being a weevil at all!

Matt Bertone@bertonemyia.bsky.social · 7d ago

Be a dipterist. Be in Costa Rica for #FlySchool2026. See a muscoid #fly perching on a leaf. Tell student so they can collect it. Success!! Wait a minute 🤔 That's not a fly, but weevil mimicking one! This was so convincing, even rapidly moving & poking its wings out 🥰 #Curculionidae: cf. #Mnemynurus

In which I vent about the foolishness we display when we say "Our budgets have been cut? We'll just have to do more with less". That's a losing strategy, every time. Why do we teach toddlers, but not governments, that choices have consequences?

The foolishness of “doing more with less”

I got a little bit riled up the other day, and I realized that it might be worth sharing because the thing that riled me is a longstanding pattern in academia (at least in Canada, anyway). It’s a w…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

Yup. If you're doing background research for writing a book, & you include factually wrong material from the start, but it still gets published, that's on you. I've been researching my next book for the past 2 years but always gone to & read original sources with full knowledge that AI makes up 💩.

Dorian Lynskey@dorianlynskey.bsky.social · last wk.

I've written a few books and checked all the quotes (deleting some bangers because I doubted their authenticity) and if you're letting fabricated ones slip through then you're cutting corners in an egregious way. It is not the copy-editor's job to check every source, it's yours. Do the damn work

Paper accepted! "No evidence that female body size or fecundity mediate male choice or reproductive isolation in a sympatric native-invasive pair of longhorn beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae)", coming soon in Canadian Entomologist. (Yep, negative results - but they're interesting!)

So I'm reading this novel, and it's bad in many of the ways I'd expect careless AI-reliance to make something bad. I even checked the copyright date... 2008. There was human slop before there was AI slop!

In which I vent about the foolishness we display when we say "Our budgets have been cut? We'll just have to do more with less". That's a losing strategy, every time. Why do we teach toddlers, but not governments, that choices have consequences?

The foolishness of “doing more with less”

I got a little bit riled up the other day, and I realized that it might be worth sharing because the thing that riled me is a longstanding pattern in academia (at least in Canada, anyway). It’s a w…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

Half a day into the latest offering of my 1-week intensive scientific-writing course - this time for a group of mostly wildlife/landscape ecology grad students at Texas A&M University, Kingsville. They will learn about writing; I will learn (I hope) a bit about ocelots and Caspian terns! 1/2

Say hello to Quentin’s Diamond Frog, Rhombophryne quentini. 🧪🐸 #NewSpecies

"Listen to a random forest" is a really inviting prompt, unless of course you're a stats nerd and you think for a moment "why would I want to LISTEN to a random forest regression?" But once I got past that, this is lovely.

tree.fm – Tune Into Forests From Around The World 🌳🔈

People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, while in lockdown or unable to travel. Use this site to chill, meditate or do some digital shinrin-yoku.

tree.fm

The world needs more bookish gargoyles and grotesques

New blog post: New popular science book from me is happening! 🧪 skullsinthestars.com/2026/07/24/n...

New popular science book from me is happening!

A bit of personal news: I’ve signed a contract for my next popular science book with the University of Chicago Press! My tentative title — subject to change — is “Booms, Bee…

skullsinthestars.com

"Is this jargon?" 🤔 We put together a simple decision tree to help think through when specialized language makes communication clearer, and when it gets in the way. Less about finding the "right" answer and more about thinking differently. Think we missed a branch? Comment below 👇 #SciComm

This #FossilFriday: Haootia quadriformis, one of the oldest muscular animal ever discovered (from #Ediacaran rocks in #Newfoundland). The left image shows the holotype fossil with the body elements coloured for clarity; the right (© Robert Nicholls) shows a reconstruction of the living animal.

Get my book from a library. Get all my books from a library! If they don't have one, ask them to interlibrary loan it. Or maybe they'll buy it! Any of these things is good. The goodest is that you read one of my books.

Tom Cox@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 2w ago

Someone said to me, "I'm sorry but I got your book from a library." Nobody should ever apologise for that. You read my book! That's brilliant! I grew up hanging out in libraries and the idea of a world without them fills me with dread. Without libraries, authors, like readers, will only suffer.

Mononykus. Brown pencils on ivory cartridge paper, approximately 150 × 100 mm. From 2022.

Really high quality rocks! The best rocks.

Callan Bentley@callanbentley.bsky.social · 2w ago

Spectacular crenulated turbidites of the Halifax Formation (Meguma Terrane), Point Pleasant Park, Halifax, Nova Scotia. These strata were laid down in the Ordovician in the southern hemisphere and deformed during the Devonian Neoacadian Orogeny, as Meguma accreted to the North America margin. ⚒️

I like a good Latin name, and "Zupaysaurus" is definitely that. The fact that it's attached to a cool dinosaur is a bonus! scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/w... 🧪

Wonderful Latin Names: Zupaysaurus rougierei

I’ve been neglecting one of my favourite hobbyhorses lately. That’s right: it’s been nearly six months since I’ve bothered you about a really wonderful Latin name. That ends today, because I’ve rec…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com