Plenty of these fascinating Earth Tongues in Loch Ard Forest, Trossachs 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Apparently the little white dots are another fungus growing on them (Hypomyces papulasporae) #Fungi #FungiFriends

Mainstream media today

After a miserable trapping session, I had nothing to photograph, but the answer to that problem was at the top of a ladder. All I had to do was rescue a Red Underwing caught in a spider's web under the roof overhang of my house. Do something good for #Leptember. ✔️ #teammoth #mothsmatter #moths

A thread-waisted wasp, Eremnophila aureonotata, perched on leaves of White Snakeroot in our backyard last Friday, September 5, on an overcast afternoon. Likely sleeping, and easily approached. Leavenworth, Kansas, USA.

Back to catching Italian wall lizards (Podarcis siculus) in NY!

Many birds build nests. Beavers construct dams. And goliath frogs, the largest frogs in the world, appear to create their own meter-wide ponds by excavating sand, moving stones up to 2/3 their body weight, clearing debris, and piling some of it to form walls 😮 🐸 www.science.org/content/arti...

Timelapse of my painting "Capybara Under the Lotuses," painted in Procreate! #capybara #art #lotus #painting

An M.I.T. study found that 95% of companies that had invested in A.I. tools were seeing zero return. It jibes with the emerging idea that generative A.I., “in its current incarnation, simply isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be,” johncassidysays.bsky.social writes.

Great to see more innovation with eDNA this time looking at rainwater in tropical forests for greater insights 🌍 #TropicalEcology #TropicalForests #eDNA phys.org/news/2025-08...

this is genuinely baffling to me. $80k a year to help a professional writer produce one 800-word column a week?

Japan Post just announced they will no longer deliver mail to the United States, joining Germany, Austria, Denmark, Italy, France, and Sweden.

For the first time, I'm hearing lots of bug noises coming from backyard at night (like katydid noises). I absolutely stuffed my postage stamp sized backyard to the gills with many species of native plants. I can't say for sure that's why the bugs are noisy back there, buuuuut...

Not to belabor a "I told you so", but it's been clear for years that the whole "lab leak" discourse has absolutely nothing to do with a potential lab leak and everything to do with a broader anti-science agenda. I really, and truly, hope more scientists will realize this and take corrective action.

Centrist/Moderate is great branding because it implies reasonableness but there's nothing reasonable about stubbornly clinging to pro-business and pro-upper class politics when the country is falling apart. This is an ideology like any other, and it's a bad one

Ted Cruz Assures Texans He Working Tirelessly To Get Vacation Refunded theonion.com/ted-cru...

You can’t understand bird declines without also understanding insect declines. Grateful our work on insect-bird interactions was highlighted by Smithsonian Mag. If you love birds, think about whether your actions are helping the insects they need to survive. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

In all fairness, they are also building concentration camps with this money.

Gillibrand apologizes to Mamdani over ‘jihad’ comments - POLITICO So I am glad Gillibrand apologized but she should really do so publicly, not privately, given her smear against him was done publicly, on live radio in fact.

There is no greater distance between the facts on the ground and the political discourse than this fucking genocide. Thousands of people are being killed and starved! Children! No one meaningfully disputes this. Yet the only thing the media generates moral outrage about is the civility of protestors

Yes there is a years-long mass murder and starvation campaign taking place but did you know that a political candidate didn't condemn a phrase some random people used at a protest trying to stop it?

Yesterday I was so PROUD to stand with LGBTQ+ New Yorkers alongside my friend and our Democratic nominee for Mayor, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social!

TIRED: “learn to code!” WIRED:

Today's Exhibit of the Day? A colossal amethyst geode! At ~13 ft (4 m) tall & 9,000 lbs (4,082 kg), it's as heavy as 3 compact cars. Formed 135 million years ago, it started as colorless quartz—becoming purple after millennia of natural radiation, heat, & trace contaminants.

ICE *already* can't meet their detainment numbers without rounding up children, veterans, people born in the U.S., people with no criminal records, people at immigration hearings, plus academics and visitors with valid visas. So who do they plan to detain with >10x the budget? The answer is: you.

Berry Head quarry was alive with flying insects this morning: Scarlet Tigers, 4 on Hemp Agrimony. Ringlet, our first this year. Large Skipper, one of 6 seen. Gatekeepers now flying. We also saw: Marbled Whites, a Painted Lady and Meadow Browns.

the anti zohran mamdani coalition gains yet another close friend and associate of jeffery epstein

god damn he's cooking

Before #InsectWeek passes me by (working on an arachnid 😅) here’s a bug—a true bug, water boatman (Corixidae)—I made in bronze and silver, articulated to show that, surprisingly, these swimmers are good fliers! 1/2 #SciArt

this court says that allowing EPA to regulate carbon emissions is a "major question" that demands congressional debate. but allowing the president to, with a flick of the wrist, end a straightforward constitutional right is something that must be allowed to stand?

They’re planning on building a detention center for migrants in the middle of the fetid swamps of Florida. If you think this is something new, the first internment camp they sent me and my family to in 1942 was a barbed wire prison called Rohwer. It was located in the swamps of Arkansas.

Hope and solidarity won tonight, and will win again in November. Congratulations, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

Many years ago, when Bolsonaro was destroying Brazilian academia I tried to add a mild comment about it in the acknowledgements of a paper, just to be criticized by an US based editor for it. I can't help to think there is a lesson there that won't be learned.

Musk succeeded in destroying an entire sector of the American economy (international humanitarian assistance), and is trying to do the same to another (public lands management).

Oh time.com/7295195/ai-c...

If you love pavement pioneers - the toughest of the tough that eek out a living between the cracks in the concrete - you might like Urban Plants, a deep-dive into their extraordinary lives www.bloomsbury.com/uk/urban-pla...

Our very handsome resident big male #greenanole and some demure gravid females. #lizard #herping #nature #wildlife #photography #appalachia #southcarolina

people are getting disappeared, innocent men sent to foreign gulags, the civil service hollowed out, thousands left to die without foreign aid, and schumer is saber rattling about iran. these people make me fucking sick.

One more for the "WTF" quota... This lady has been legally in the U.S. for 50 years. She was detained by ICE in *February* when coming home from a trip to the Philippines and only just released last week. "It was horrific; it was awful, it is crowded—super crowded." www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...

Today is the LAST DAY to order a Biology is Bigger Than Binaries shirt! I'm sending numbers to the print shop first thing tomorrow morning, so get these shirts now or never. I can't store them in my house right now, so we're doing one big order! RTs extremely appreciated Squidfacts.bigcartel.com

“Gold standard science” 🫠

Shinnyo-en Lantern Floating at Ala Moana Beach on Memorial Day. Honolulu, Hawaii 2025.

Shinnyo-en Lantern Floating at Ala Moana Beach on Memorial Day. Honolulu, Hawaii 2025.

Shinnyo-en Lantern Floating at Ala Moana Beach on Memorial Day. Honolulu, Hawaii 2025. photo credit Joel Kiraly.

Right, *you are always trusting somebody*. You can't function totally independently. "Trust" isn't declining - it's getting reshuffled. If you don't trust Fauci, you trust RFK. If you don't trust the NYT, you trust Joe Rogan. "Do you own research" = trusting who created the research you find!

So…about AI’s energy use… “…to create a five-second video, a newer AI model uses ‘about 3.4 million joules, more than 700 times the energy required to generate a high-quality image’. That's the equivalent of running a microwave for over an hour.”

More than half of the National Science Foundation grants terminated since April fund programs that would help students train in science, engineering and math. Story by @katrinamillerphd.bsky.social Gift link: nyti.ms/3Shu4rt

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades www.nytimes.com/interactive/...