New paper - What could the next 20 years of wildlife tracking look like. Our horizon scan, out today in Proc Royal Soc B, maps out 28 innovations to unlock movement ecology's untapped potential. wildlabs.net/en/article/o...
Dr Urska Demsar
@udemsar.bsky.social
Associate Professor. GIScience, Movement Analytics and hiking/walking photos.
Absolutely insane footage of rock avalanches currently sweeping across the entire south face of the Matterhorn, as filmed from Cervinia! 🔥😱 📽️ Via @meteovalledosta
1. 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.
The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science
As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...
arxiv.org
UPDATED STORY! Google has paused a tool that allowed users to briefly create deepfake AI satellite images with the click of a button. www.npr.org/2026/07/31/n...
Google pauses AI satellite images, after fears of deepfakes in the sky
Journalists, human rights advocates and open source analysts recoiled in horror at the initial decision: "The opportunities for abuse and disinfo are literally boundless," said one.
npr.org
El Nino thread! 🌊 My Key Takeaways: 1. This event is well on its way to being a very strong event rarely seen in the last 75 years. 2. Right now, it's most likely not the strongest on record. 3. The warming of the nino3.4 region due to climate change does not add to El Nino strength!
Cairngorms wildfire update: Police Scotland have declared a major incident. The village of Nethy Bridge is now being evacuated. Areas around Loch Morlich / Glenmore also remain closed.
Sorry for #ISBE2026 attendees who couldn't get into my talk. See our preprint below to find out more about our recent analyses, + my recent book chapter (drive.google.com/file/d/1g0eO...) Reach out if you're interested in our awesome BLE tags (besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....).
Low‐cost animal tracking using Bluetooth low energy beacons on a crowd‐sourced network
Animal tracking has opened the door to address many fundamental questions in ecology and conservation. Whilst historically animals have been tracked as a means to understand their large-scale move...
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Samuele Ramellini@sramellini.bsky.social · 2w ago@isbe2026.bsky.social, our new preprint is out! If you're interested in seasonal biases in ecology, check it out! Or, come and talk to us! @damienfarine.bsky.social will present this tomorrow morning at 11.30 (room Rome)! doi.org/10.32942/X2K...
A lovely afternoon on the cliffs getting a few more snaps of the Atlantic Puffins before they head back out to sea until next season! The buffeting winds allowed me to capture some arial acrobatics, including one that passed just over my head! #puffin #seabird #birdphotography #nature #wildlife
📢 Once more for the people in the back: - Most [more than 95%] of archives have not been digitized. - Most of humanity's knowledge and memory is *not* reachable by LLMs. - Believing that AI can provid you with comprehensive, definitive, "intelligent" results is folly.
Jesse Locker@jessemlocker.bsky.social · 3w agoGiving myself a headache in the archives
*NEW* on the @rorinstitute.bsky.social Substack: Technopolis’s Anete Vingre uncovers the secret of the success of an FWF grant scheme designed to promote high-risk, innovative research. open.substack.com/pub/research...
Funding high-risk research
What changes when the funding rules change?
open.substack.com
New paper! We simulated foraging trips of Northern gannets at Bass Rock to decipher what information individuals use to keep returning to the same foraging patches. Memory was the strongest driver, but it wasn't the whole story. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1186/s404... 1/5
We're especially interested in applicants with backgrounds in wild animal behavioural ecology and microbiome science. Plenty of opportunity to look at social and environmental transmission of both host-associated microbes and AMR. careers.exeter.ac.uk/vacancies/10...
Postdoctoral Research Associate / Fellow in Cornwall | University of Exeter
View details and apply for this Postdoctoral Research Associate / Fellow vacancy in Cornwall. Postdoctoral Research Associate / Fellow (1017) This UKRI- funded full-time post is availab...
careers.exeter.ac.uk
Sea Surface Temperatures around the UK and in the Mediterranean are some >5-6°C above where they should be for the time of year. A rather severe & potentially catastrophic marine heatwave developing as a result of continued heatwaves.
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. #climatecrisis #auspol www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/the-gra...
The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most ...
lyrebirddreaming.com
Science almost invariably involves teams and collaborations, no more the lone scientist imagined from history. But, that doesn't stop a leader being lonely. Today's post is some musings on that subject: Team working and loneliness occamstypewriter.org/athenedonald...
Team Working and Loneliness | Athene Donald's Blog
occamstypewriter.org
Incredibile SO2 plume of the latest #Etna eruption seen from #space. The #Copernicus #Sentinel5p image on July 7th shows the long travel of SO2 crossing the #Mediterranean and reaching Northern #Africa. #volcano #Sicily
🐦🌙 Happy to see this big collaborative paper out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We address a seemingly simple question using geolocator data collected across many species and individuals: how much of bird migration actually happens at night? www.cell.com/current-biol... A short🧵
1000 evaluators given identical resumes & told candidate used AI. Only difference on resumes was candidate’s name: Emily vs James. Study found women using AI are evaluated as less competent than men who use AI...To evaluators, women’s AI use signaled inability, while men’s AI use signaled initiative
David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · last mo.Women’s use of AI is perceived as a sign of incompetence, while men’s use of AI is seen as an indication of initiative. 🤦🏻♂️
From 36,000km up you can see a heatwave happen. This video tracks land surface temp across Europe during last week's record heat, as the ground baked under one of the most intense, widespread heatwaves the continent has seen. Green turns to orange, then deep red 🔴 as the heat takes hold. [1/3]
A lot of media coverage of the ‘AI’ reading of the Herculaneum scrolls really fails to understand what’s happened here. There’s no language processing happening, the AI/ML is not trained on a corpus of texts or language. It can detect ink to see shapes. HUMAN EXPERTS are then transcribing the text.
When reality surpasses fiction! Top: fictional forecast for August 2050, broadcast by French TV in 2014 to warn about the consequences of global warming. Bottom: Real French forecast for yesterday, June 22, 2026.
Really pleased to see this paper out! We show that collective intelligence emerges in wild birds, using radar traces from flocks of migratory hirundines. Many wild social animals might benefit from similar processes, but we could also see Allee effects as migratory populations decline.
Joe Morford@morfjoe.bsky.social · last mo.The WISDOM OF CROWDS emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds! Excited to share our work published by @aaas.org in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia...
I found this neat tool that lets you generate text and images just from your ideas. It's really good!
Heat and humidity are building through this week 🌡️ Temperatures in the south are likely to peak on Wednesday and Thursday with heatwave criteria likely met through the week 👇
In this sense, I've always sort of hated the "standing on the shoulders of giants" trope in science. We are standing on a mountain of sand. Every grain holds the whole thing up. Thousands upon thousands of experiments, discoveries, reports, case studies, theses, etc all go into every "discovery"
This is the whole thing. Basic, wonky, weird, non-applied, whatever you want to call it, science is usually the eventual foundation of everything you know as "technology" or "medicine". It's not even a case of "if they succeed" - the investment is in the voluminous incremental advancements
John Schwartz@jswatz.bsky.social · 2mo ago"Right now, in some underfunded lab, a scientist is chasing a question that sounds pointless.... No one can say if they will succeed. But a century of experience says that funding people to do this work is a good bet. If we stop making that bet, we will pay for it in cures no one will know to miss."
Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good
Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show.
nature.com
Scientific journal editor here: If you're invited to peer review an article and you can't do it, please just click "no." That tells me "this person can't do it, I should invite someone else." Otherwise the system waits 3 weeks to tell me that you didn't respond and I should invite someone else.