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?" 🧪🌒🔭

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 🙏

Should be challenged in court

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... 🧪

This open letter to students at Georgetown university is extremely good medium.com/center-on-pr...

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 🧪

Better suited for a specalized journal

Tonight I'm reading a colleague's draft that is so fun and so creative and so subversive that it offers me some measure of reassurance that we will always be able to distinguish between the work of great scientists and the incremental-at-best output that large language models might someday produce.

In the Deserts episode of #BBC's new #Prehistoric #Planet Ice Age season, Ella Gilbert tells us that so much water was locked up as ice, and because “there’s only a finite amount of water on the planet”, so that less water was available for precipitation. This confuses a flux with a stock 🧪

And this, kids, is why we need Oxford commas…

I'm not sure there is a functional difference between hallucinate/fabricate/err, in this context. Regardless what you call their errors, LLMs no longer fabricate scholarly references so routinely as they did earlier. But that improvement hasn't sufficed to make them dependable research assistants

More mottled leaves in New Zealand forests. This is a flora that pretends to be suffering from lime chlorosis

Why the conspiracy of silence about mottled leaves in the New Zealand flora

2026 basically

As botanists and Plant Architects in Montpellier 🌿, his vision of forests 🌳 profoundly shaped the way we think about and observe plants. A giant has passed, but his legacy will remain a major source of inspiration, worthy of our deepest admiration and gratitude.

This is worth watching. It reminds me of the claim that DDT was "so safe you could drink it." Yet another example of industry recycling refuted claims. @kaurov.org @michaelscherer.bsky.social @davidho.bsky.social > www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw... >

🌿My two (botanical)-cents🔍 In this forum paper, I reflect on the value of plant-identification expertise and offer a few ideas on how we can better highlight the role of botanists and their knowledge. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

scholars should actually have read the articles they cite! Who knew?

😂

It is hard to overstate how critical @ncar-ucar.bsky.social is to climate science in the US and around the world. It's the beating heart of our field. Generations of scientists have trained there, and almost everyone I know relies on deep collaborations with NCAR scientists. It's end is unthinkable.

It’s simply not possible to overstate how important NCAR is to US and world science. We need to fight this with everything we’ve got.

The dismantling of NCAR should be the trending story on Bluesky, not the fucking Oscars leaving ABC for YouTube.

Superbly informative (and entertaining)

It may turn out this way; but there are competing forces at work, in which AMOC breakdown leads to increased rainfall over the Amazon; link.springer.com/article/10.1... 1/3

Very happy. A paper just out of the oven. It is a piece of work made possible only after many years of thinking about, and looking at, an old problem from multiple perspectives. And with the magical brushstrokes of our artists, Gabriela and Ariadna. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

doi.org/10.1016/j.hi... The Mismeasure of Neanderthals. Our latest paper, a critical review of Neanderthal iconography through time, with epistemological, paleobiological, ethical, and aesthetic contributions. Thank you for reading and for your comments.

🪏😱 We're digging up the best of Project 23! Hidden in the tar are fossils too small to see with the naked eye: pollen grains. These microscopic time capsules preserve clues about Ice Age landscapes, revealing what plants grew in ancient L.A. and how ecosystems shifted over thousands of years.

The second paper from my PhD has now been published ✨ This paper explores using a combination of fossil pollen and place-names to provide a broader record of past landscape change and the connections to anthropogenic influences in Leicestershire. Read the full article here: doi.org/10.1177/0959...

though it should be pointed out the ChatGPT was unaware until prompted that Borneo also has native Photinia/Stranvaesia and Raphiolepis species

Yep, LLMs make unbridled demands on power/water & are mega-plagiarism; but it's also useful to monitor where this is going. I have to admit to being surprised by ChatGPT's ability to generate appropriate criteria for evaluating plausible botanical source taxa for fossil 'Prunus' in lowland Borneo

This is horrific and exactly what those of us in Black studies, gender studies, women’s studies have been warning our colleagues in the sciences about. Their seeming neutrality will not save them.

I would like to see a curve of the proportion of each regional flora occupied by woody taxa with opposite-decussate leaves 🧪🌿

Well if you attended a scientific congress in, er, a white nationalist police state, this is the preparation you'd expect.

An amazing accomplishment, the 670 kyr long high Andes Lake Junin vegetation record www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🌿

😂😂😂

this is far from over - bonnie prince billy www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON4T... (nice lullaby)

This cleverness fails for earth science papers generally, where the last author is often someone barely involved in the study, and the lab head is often 2nd author. Biologists continue to assume their conventions = science conventions

For those in Australia who prefer/need the old Bureau of Meteorology website, it can still be accessed via reg.bom.gov.au (for now).

"I don't need another productivity app"

This is excellent. We just need another 50 or 100 similarly minded billionaires. Though taxes are more accountable and probably yield less idiosyncratic outcomes

On the money as usual. It is actually bad