I love this palaeoart. Follow the artist for an entire series 💙

Those who patiently tolerate my posts may wonder about my preoccupation with small details in nature/objects/textures Well there is the intrinsic aesthetic & beauty BUT mainly - looking at the small helps me cope with facing the - at times seemingly impossible - big issues

The student paper is often the only coverage of what's happening in Ann Arbor, a town of 125,000.

End-of-year preprint dump! A collaboration with @messorensen.bsky.social and German and Korean colleagues: "The phylogenetic context for the origin of a unique purple-green photosymbiosis " doi.org/10.64898/202...

Btw this is one of the biggest reasons why it’s not as easy as people think to start up independent newsrooms or just be an indie journalist on substack. If you are actually holding powerful and rich people to account, you WILL need legal representation. Not a matter of whether but when

No matter how beautiful a work of art or how compelling a novel or how spine-tingling a song, its value to me is that it was created by another human. A wonderful, flawed, beautiful human who was trying - agonisingly - to connect across the chasm of our individualities. Fuck AI charlatans.

📣 We seek to appoint a Chair (with rank of professor) within the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences. The successful candidate will be an outstanding scholar of international standing in the field. 🗓 Closing Date: 23 March 2026 Full details: www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/I/...

The regime has announced two proposed rules intended to make it extremely difficult (if not impossible) for trans youth to receive the healthcare they need. We expect robust legal challenges to these hate-filled proposals and are actively engaged with organizations on the frontlines of this fight.

No matter how beautiful a work of art or how compelling a novel or how spine-tingling a song, its value to me is that it was created by another human. A wonderful, flawed, beautiful human who was trying - agonisingly - to connect across the chasm of our individualities. Fuck AI charlatans.

I'm currently working on a novel and at the end of an average day, I'm wiped out. The sheer amount of analysis, synthesis, making of connections, layering of prose, deepening of characterization, supplemental research... all the mental work is intense and exhilarating. Which is just to say, fuck AI.

Another day, another news story on the catastrophic choices behind Future Nottingham. How many signs do we need that we're careening in the wrong direction? #StopTheCuts #SaveHE www.timeshighereducation.com/news/staff-f...

Here's a fun literary experiment idea for any paleontology writer who'd like to pick it up: come up with a couple of alternate filing systems for the various periods of life on Earth, and see how using them changes our understanding of the story

I bet they weren’t white.

I went to the American embassy today to get a passport card that I could carry in my wallet to show my citizenship in case masked men try to kidnap me when I’m in the US. Seriously.

Greta Thunberg arrested for holding a sign opposing genocide. When peaceful protest is a crime, democracy is in deep trouble. Happening under a Labour Government.

I keep hearing that folk who don't use AI will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to those who do I wonder how long before that flips completely, and there's a big market for people who still have basic creative and research skills

Being from the UK and a member of the late part of Generation X means having to live with the fact that every photo from your childhood resembles a still from a cultishly acclaimed but commercially disappointing folk horror film. ESPECIALLY IF THEY ACTUALLY ARE... www.tom-cox.com/some-photos-...

It brings me no pleasure to report that my beat — offshore wind power — skyrocketed to the top of new sites today. I just published a scoop about Trump's halt on 5 in-progress wind farms capable of powering 2.7 million homes. Here's a mega🧵 🔗 2nd post is a link to my scoop 🎁 last post is a gift

ESA/Webb's final Picture of the Month for 2025 features Westerlund 2 containing many of the Milky Way’s hottest, brightest & most massive stars. Located 20,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Carina Link for more info: esawebb.org/images/potm2... Photo credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA

I don’t mean to sound extreme, but I don’t think we should have torture camps for people with criminal records either.

White men are 30% of the population. They are also: - 98% of presidents - 90% of CEOs - 90% of billionaires - 80% of Congress Forever oppressed.

“Australia is being played, being used as a wedge and a shield. Its political class is being manipulated into prioritising a foreign nation’s narrative over its own.” theaimn.net/the-sovereig...

"He disliked the idea that loving nature required loving trees everywhere. Some of the world’s most diverse places, he noted, are open, windy, dry, and flammable. They do not look lush from the air. They reward attention on the ground." www.butlernature.com/2025/12/21/w...

"Bond’s work leaves behind an inconvenient lesson for an era of climate urgency: that speed is not a substitute for understanding, and that good intentions, applied without care, can erase ancient worlds as efficiently as neglect." A beautiful tribute to William Bond. Forever missed by many.

As someone who lives next to a canal and because of this, is now a huge canal nerd, this story is 🤯 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Doctors Without Borders urges Israel to let critical aid into Gaza as children freeze to death. "At least 13 people, including two-week-old and one-month-old babies, have died from winter weather and a lack of adequate shelter and aid – blocked by Israel" www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...

356 of #365Minerals 🧪⚒️ Mesolite: - A zeolite group mineral - Forms in volcanic rock cavities - Its name comes from the Greek word "μέσος/mesos" (middle) because its composition is between natrolite and scolecite #minerals #MineralMonday

2025 ‘more likely than not’ to be UK’s hottest year on record Met Office says temperatures are tracking ahead of 2022 after year of heatwaves and drought…and record wildfires www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

70 environmental defenders & conservationists who died in 2025 Environmental progress often depends on endurance, sustained over years, by people whose work mattered long before their names did. news.mongabay.com/2025/12/envi...

Get a load of this bullshit declaration from our racist, white-supremacist asshat clownshow at the DOJ. Nearly every public university and community college in California is a Minority Serving Institution. This is going to cause chaos and lawyers will get rich.

This is why your electricity bill has gone up ten fold. Please spare me the "It's here to stay", "Learn to use it or get left behind." Bla, bla, bla. Don't use it. Let the whole thing burn. abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory...

A recent global review published in Frontiers in Pharmacology found that of 367 medicinal plant species studied over the past two decades, climate change has reduced suitable habitats for 106 species. This article was first published by @mongabay.com. www.thexylom.com/post/traditi...

Read this from Ben Santer (very famous climate scientist for those who don’t know) about what NCAR means and what dismantling it will do.

This makes facially neutral policies--like poll taxes and literacy tests--that we know were adopted for discriminatory purposes legal. Organizations can now simply claim there was no discriminatory intent regardless of outcome. It's unconstrained institutionalized racism.

hard to overstate how bad this is for discrimination against everyone but white people. I'm saying we are undergoing a wholesale revision of equal protection and anti-discrimination law so that it only protects white people. Let me explain:

New research by Gomez de la Rosa, C., Vogt, K.A. et al. highlights the environmental justice challenges facing Indigenous & local communities in Tubará, Colombia, using the IPBES Nature’s Contributions to People framework to inquire about landscape change perceptions. ℹ️ https://ow.ly/o42n50XAvCu

I have one huge reservation about this: CO2 is a heavier than air gas, and if there's a catastrophic leak it can asphyxiate people—as in the Lake Nyos disaster of 1986, where nearly 2000 people died due to a limnic eruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster

Love these weird mossy agates 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🖤

Hydrogen does not directly warm the climate, but interacts with OH to extend the life of CH4. "More hydrogen means fewer detergents [OH] in the atmosphere, causing methane to persist longer &, therefore, warm the climate longer" phys.org/news/2025-12... Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bari gets a heavily promoted 60 Minutes story that would be bad for the Trump administration killed:

“Our story was screened 5 times cleared by CBS attorneys & Standards & Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Bari Weiss is the logical endpoint of corporate media. This is what happens when people who hate journalism are in charge of it. The only way journalism works is when it’s independent from the power it’s supposed to hold to account, which means ownership can’t have anything to do with those in power

From wildfire warnings to flood forecasts, NCAR's research impacts everyone in America. President Trump's attempt to dismantle it for political vengeance is beyond reckless. We will fight against this dangerous scheme every step of the way.

We are running our short course on Crime Fiction again in 2026. 8 weeks of evening classes @bristoluni.bsky.social. Join 8 university tutors sharing some of their favourite cold cases in detective fiction in an accessible but intellectually stimulating way: www.bristol.ac.uk/.../detectiv...

✨🌈 As a mage, here’s your seasonal reminder: one accepting adult can cut an LGBTQ youth’s risk of self-harm by nearly 40%. In a world full of shadows, be the one who casts healing light. Be the mentor, the guardian, the safe haven. Blessed Yule & Bright Solstice. 🕯️❄️🌈

I think everything in this thread is spot on, but the thing that most non-specialists miss is that individual historians are also the ones who decide there's even something to investigate! Based on their deep reading and expertise, they frame new questions to create new knowledge we didn't have!

Nothing to see here, just a right wing hyper-nationalist government going to their party’s youth event sponsored by a group with a martyred leader they’ve pledged to avenge, recruiting people to join their masked police force devoted to removing auslanders from ze homeland.

a big part of the issue surrounding the use of chatgpt/LLMs in academic research comes down to process vs. product. a lot of us know that the process of doing research matters because that's where intellectual work is done; but some "academics" and lots of techies only care about a fast product

Not a historian but like to research. The AI might summarize what I'm looking for, but it doesn't find what I'm *not* looking for. The book on the shelf next to the one I wanted. The insight in chapter 6 based on the quote I needed from chapter 4.