Teaching about lichen & found this marvellous exhibit on my walk across campus. So many species to ID!

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

I can accept the conflation of intestines and stomachs (your gut microbiome primarily lives in the intestines, but people regularly pretend all digestion happens in stomachs) But not “microbes are plants” lol

Thanks to @drkatemarvel.bsky.social for speaking with me this morning about why she decided to leave NASA, the work she was doing, her concerns about federal science and also what gives her hope. 🧪

Told my child the 4 gen zalpha humors are dopamine, oxytocin, cortisol, and serotonin. I have decided these are warm/dry, warm/wet, cold/dry and cold/wet so dopamine= yellow bile, oxytocin=blood, cortisol=black bile, and serotonin=phlegm. Child actually accepted this call out.

Google is going to rewrite your website whether you like it or not. www.forbes.com/sites/joetos...

Madness

Are you a student in archives, museum studies, or information studies? Do you know one? @saa-snap.bsky.social, the Students section of the Society of American Archivists, has two calls open—poster proposals and committee nominations. 🧵

Molluscs are so good at coming back from the dead 🥰

The total annual emissions from the gas-fired power stations *just to run Grok* will, once operational, be greater than the total global GHG footprint of all global streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ (208bn hours) 🧐 ketanjoshi.co/2026/03/02/m... greenly.earth/en-gb/leaf-m...

Everybody who tried to argume with me about the water and energy consumption of "AI" abd data centers can go jump in a fucking lake. While they can still find any.

"the decline in [academic freedom in] the United States has been more rapid and pronounced, particularly in the last year. It has deteriorated by 50% from 2015 to 2025 and is now evaluated as moderate autonomy by country experts" academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Check out this new JGE paper by Kobayashi et al. (Including @taorminalepore.bsky.social, I'm not sure if others are on bsky) Neurodivergent perspectives in geoscience: Reflections from the development of paleontology museum educational materials ⚒️🧪 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"A chief cause of Japan’s Fukushima accident, investigators found, was the cozy relationship between the country’s industry and oversight body, which opened the door for thin safety assessments and inaccurate projections overlooking the possible impact of a major tsunami." This is a bad bad road

Happy #TaxonomistAppreciationDay! Please support biodiversity science by citing taxonomic literature & acknowledging museum collections. Here at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, our Invertebrate Paleontology collection houses millions of specimens, including ~10k type & figured specimens 🧪

The TL;DR version is that: There are so many new species that awaits discovery, please support taxonomists and our work by hiring us, funding us, and citing us, especially those from the Global South!

On #TaxonomistAppreciationDay I want to highlight some of the recent new species that I've described along with colleagues, many are from the global south where much of this diversity is from (and still awaits discover). First up, two species of herb gall wasps and a parasitoid from Sichuan, China.

Happy to see that @nagtgeo.bsky.social has posted the newly adopted statement on supporting JEDI work in geosciences. grateful to have worked on this with @taorminalepore.bsky.social and the rest of advocacy committee, following prior work by the diversity committee. ⚒️ nagt.org/nagt/policy/...

Happy Taxonomist Appreciation Day! Taxonomists are the folks who discover and name new species, identify species, and document the diversity of life on Earth both past and present. Learn more about why taxonomy and natural history remains a vital part of science in the era of big data in our paper🧪

🪸🪼🦈 Happy Taxonomist Appreciation Day! 🐋🐙🐚 @marinespecies.bsky.social celebrates this day by releasing its annual WoRMS Top-10 Marine Species. In 2025 alone, almost 2600 new marine species were described. Find out the top-10 of newly described species in 2025 👉 🔗 www.vliz.be/en/news/ten-...

A few weeks ago CBC reporter Sheena Goodyear reached out to me for comment on the new Spinosaurus paper. I said I couldn’t, because of Epstein connection Nathan Myhrvold’s involvement with it. We got to talking about how paleontology - especially dinosaur research- remains hostile to women. 🧪

A lovely feature ahead of #taxonomyday #taxonomistappreciationday tomorrow featuring friends Melanie Mackenzie and @drtimohara.bsky.social at Museum Victoria www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

Here is a graph with dollar amounts of funding committed. The curves look very similar to those based on the number of awards.

Great to see finally published by Misha Whittingham @deathandtaxa.bsky.social the magnum opus on the heteromorph ammonites of the Vancouver Island! With new genera and species. 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

If you want more understanding about f this case and why it is so dangerous as it is now law to say wearing black at a protest makes you a terrorist bsky.app/profile/harm...

Yeah this is 100 percent accurate as of this court decision. This is so incredibly dangerous and will be used so widely now it really is hard to fully comprehend how badly this appears it is about to go. bsky.app/profile/tris...

It's me, sitting on my couch doing my little crosswords and communing with lock-picking trash pandas everywhere 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/racc...

Cornell had a lot of nerve sending me 14 emails and 2 phone calls asking for $$ yesterday. I am not even going to publicly state what shenanigans they got up to this week impacting me, but someone needs to tick a "do not contact until we believe human rights/education are important again" box

New York State has officially adopted new regulations for the teaching of climate change across the grade span! Congrats to my CRETF colleagues who have worked so hard to make this happen, and congrats to all New Yorkers! www.nwf.org/Home/Latest-... #climateeducation #teachclimate

This is Gordon Gee. He’s mentioned in the Epstein files in connection to his being a member of Leslie Wexner’s board. Which is a completely inappropriate relationship given that Gee was Ohio State’s President & Wexner was OSU’s biggest donor. But Ohio State doesn’t follow rules or norms of behavior.

The rarest of the rare! This holy-grail dream fish is a larval-stage #monkfish, aka #goosefish. Shot in the wild, using scuba, while diving at night over water several thousand feet deep, several miles offshore from Kumejima, Okinawa. #larvalfish #blackwater #gug #deepseafish

It's Trilobite Tuesday! Proetid trilobites survived in the world's seas for almost 200 million years, beginning in the early stages of the Ordovician & lasting until the end of the Permian Period. The specimen pictured—the proetid Warburgella—comes from Malvern, England's Silurian Period exposures.

The people who push back on silence-as-protection moves are usually the people with the least job security, which remains wild to me. Maybe we should use tenure to do something good?

You ever write something and there are so many parts you hope people engage with that you can't figure out which ones to quote? I'll do a wee thread on the 3rd, and final, essay from my Red Scares series www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

NEW: The bad news about international-student enrollments at American colleges just got worse. An exclusive @chronicle.com analysis of just-released State Department data shows new visa issuances in the summer of 2025 dropped by more than a third. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Most research may have underestimated coastal sea-level height across the world by an average of 0.3 m, according to a study in Nature. In some areas in the Global South, these levels may be up to 1 m higher than previously assumed: spklr.io/63320EDBy0 #Geoscience ⚒️

Pacific Ocean Floor by MARIE THARP, Bruce Heezan, and Heinrich Berann, *as published in* the National Geographic. There, fixed it.😉

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is planning to widen the shipping channel leading into Port Everglades, blasting through a coral reef and dredging up sediment that could smother acres of coral, federal scientists say. https://wapo.st/4r7kRAU

⚒️ #WavyWednesday

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

“The fact that Ellis was flagged for her name change alone suggests the state of Kansas is intensely monitoring transgender citizens.”

It's Trilobite Tuesday—and we have new research to share! On the left is a 3D scan of Lonchodomas chaziensis babies that are about the size of a grain of sand. The accompanying photo on the right shows an adult specimen of the closely related species Lonchodomas rostratus.

Texas AG Ken Paxton has declared that it is illegal for mental health providers and therapists to treat trans youth. It means that trans youth will be denied access to any mental healthcare that isn't conversion therapy. Paxton also threatens parents of trans youth with child abuse investigations.

When Putin needed pretext for creating "The Red Web", Russia's authoritarian system of online censorship that effectively bans LGBTQ speech, he did it through the EXACT same moral panic about social media and kids that liberals and many leftists are spreading today.

the incentives here are so obscenely terrible that the entire thing should be illegal by default “I am sabotaging negotiations because I stand to make piles of money on Polymarket” is absolutely in play, what a horrifying clusterfuck

Hey look! If you've been using AI to shortcut everything in your life and suck the soul out of your creativity, good news for you: you're now complicit in making it popular enough that the US Government has co-opted it for mass murder. Good job, everybody.

In case you’re just waking up, the U.S. has teamed up with Israel overnight to start an illegal war of regime change, apparently on a presidential whim with no involvement of Congress, and they are already committing horrific atrocities.