The deadline to apply for PhD positions with me (or anyone in my department!) are coming up: Jan 7th. www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/study/postgr...

Which insect can grow larger than a mouse & has mandibles strong enough to snap a pencil in half? The titan beetle. At up to 6.5 in (16.5 cm) long, scientists think this enormous #insect is about as big as a beetle can get. It can be found in parts of South America. @AMNH #globalmuseum #Entomology

Exciting results for a new multistage #MalariaVaccine. Encouraging effectiveness data from a controlled infection study in an endemic area.

L'aventure a commencé lorsqu'un membre de la communauté a partagé des photos sur iNaturalist qui ont attiré l'attention car il s'agissait d'une espèce non décrite. Cette observation initiale a donné lieu à une collaboration qui a finalement abouti à la description formelle de l'espèce.

Something lovely for the weekend! The Dorestad Brooch, c. AD 800. This beautiful Carolingian brooch was found at the bottom of a well in the Netherlands in 1969! Gold inlaid with almandines, pearls, glass, and enamel. Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden 📷 AlexanderVanLoon www.rmo.nl/en/collectio...

I bet builders were the same in ancient Babylon too - give you a quote, do the work (late), then bill you for much more.

The Saint-Exupéry 50FF note had a security mark in the shape of a fluorescent purple elephant that had been eaten by a boa constrictor. Or maybe it was a hat. I have an unused note somewhere.

Time for the annual joke. “I’m back” “Oh yeah, what have you been up to?” “Narnia business” #lamejokes

Come and join me and my colleagues at the Department of Biology, #LundUniversity in #sweden! We have am open position as Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity. Apply here no later than February 11 2026: https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:848749/type:job/where:4/apply:1

Male Skate, ctenophore, & sea pen. @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 891. #argentiniandeepseeps #CONICET #MarineLife

Two images, one taken near perihelion, and again near aphelion showing the difference in apparent size (about 3% difference between them). A fixed optical system (Seestar 50) means the image scale is constant.

2/ ~old jk is best jk~

We’re here again. Grenada 1983. Panama 1989. Nicaragua clandestinely throughout the 1980s. The US “back yard”.

Hard to post any of the stuff I had in mind when this kind of thing is happening.

The problem is, if you're just a lay person googling a question or asking for a picture of a cat with a bird on its head, mostly you'll see GenAI stuff that seems fine. If you're a subject matter expert, the vast majority of GenAI products you encounter are absolute slop that wastes your time.

HiPOD mini: Ancient Channels or Valleys This image shows us an ancient channel, perhaps an ancient valley, on the surface of Mars. We can also see that the terrain is heavily pockmarked with impact craters. The scene is less than 5 km, or 3 miles, across. uahirise.org/ESP_076586_1... #Mars

I've been tracking the spread of nonconsensual deepfakes on X for more than two years. Here's a timeline of how Musk's leadership allowed the practice to flourish from a once-underground market to a viral trend, with little recourse for victims or legal enforcement. spitfirenews.com/p/grok-csam-...

Parker's piece nails why this matters. "Tech companies... would rather not answer for their products’ failures. Every headline that says “Grok apologizes” or “Grok admits” or “Grok says” creates a world where the chatbot takes the fall while Musk and his executives face no scrutiny whatsoever."

there are endless headlines about "grok apologizes" or "grok says it will be fixed" after it generated CSAM using pictures of minors and zero headlines about "grok being shut down" or "musk and xAI in big legal trouble" and I think something fundamental has broken here

quoting chatbots as official company sources shows that our tech reporters are not up to the task of understanding the basics of the technology they're reporting on

Giant moray #gili #giliislands #lombok #diving #scuba #trawangan #diveandstay #giliair #pets #ocean #sealife #marinelife #padi #morayeel #eel #moray

I never caught Chickenpox as a kid and was exposed to shingles when I was pregnant. Had to have antivirals to protect my baby from serious harm or death. Finally, I caught it when I was 37 years old, and I've never been so sick or experienced pain like it. Please vaccinate your children.

Several French government ministers have reported the unlawful production of sexualised material without consent to the police and prosecutors. The UK government, which published a high profile strategy on misogyny just before Christmas, has yet to say or do anything www.politico.eu/article/fran...

AI cannot take accountability. AI cannot be “sorry.” You have no control over the outputs of AI if you did not make it yourself, train it on very specific data sets, and create extremely rigorous control methods. Even then the safeguards are limited. The creators must be held accountable

I am now composed of equal parts of cheese, wine, various dried fruit cakey bready things and tea.

It’s snowing!! Yay!

Mpox is transmitted by sex, but is it transmitted by semen? We first need to know if the virus is actually replicating in the testes, so that’s what we set out to find, led by @akelvinlab.bsky.social Yep, there’s MPXV growing in those balls! rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/is-that-mp...

Great Smokies National Park. Seeker and I could spend a lot of time here. Also I found the world’s most unusual hillbilly golf.

Anna Boberg(1864-1935), Swedish artist who spent much time painting in Northern Norway, where she had a cabin and lived alone #WomensArt

Marsrise. Eat your heart out WIlliam Anders.

It's a Full Moon this evening and it looks absolutely fantastic, as it rises up in the East. Big and bright! Find out more about the night sky and beyond in a fun, interesting and very entertaining way at The Night Sky Show. Touring the UK in 2026 and beyond. Find out more: www.nightskyshow.co.uk

lmao jfc

2 things: 1) Joel is right here in that AI is a "restorative" nostalgia (from Svetlana Boym) machine, in that it produces a past that never existed & tries to drag it into the present 2) the crusade imagery is violent white supremacy (see next post)

BBC are starting to detail their process for verifying images in their reports now. I fear we have truly entered the age of 'AI until proven innocent'.

That’s quite the pivot from LeCun who disagreed vigorously (let us say) with @garymarcus.bsky.social on this issue for quite some time…

call me crazy but it really feels like “World’s Richest Man Creates AI Chatbot That Generates Child Porn” would’ve been a huge international outrage requiring a governmental crackdown not even 24 months ago

2 January 1916 | A Norwegian Jewish woman, Lilly Gedanken, was born in Kristiania (Oslo). She arrived at #Auschwitz on 1 December 1942 and was murdered in a gas chamber immediately after selection. --- ▶ The first two gas chambers created near Auschwitz II-Birkenau: https://youtu.be/Rr6lF75fDmU

ROV pilots filmed this giant phantom jelly, or Stygiomedusa gigantea, at 253 meters during an ROV descent to explore the Colorado-Rawson submarine canyon wall. #ArgentinianDeepSeeps

“Something or another”. I fear the worst.

Many fish like to live near a wreck #gili #giliislands #lombok #diving #scuba #trawangan #diveandstay #giliair #pets #ocean #sealife #marinelife #padi #fish #wreck

I will never apologize for a post

File under, we never quite know what's coming next. One of my favourite embassy reports. The UK ambassador in East Berlin reporting in after the fall of the Wall...

podcasts

This really struck me too about this biography. Over and over in his career when people asked Crick what he did for a living he would respond: "I read and I think"

Snowed in today, so only birding through the window. A day for coffee and chocolate biscuits.

OH WOW! A whole web page DEVOTED to SPONGE SPICULE Imagery ! #porifera #spongeThursday www.spicules.org

Jan 1: this is the year of new Me Jan 12: [eating shredded cheese directly from the bag] new years resolutions are a bourgeois construct for disciplining bodies into productive units for capital

Strong Earthsea vibes. Where’s Atuan?