Huh. Even the hail is deadlier in Australia. www.instagram.com/reel/DQUCYT4...

This is the end-point of extractive AI. First get people to upload everything, then suck everything out of it, then get AI to generate all the answers. I wonder how this cycle continues. (If it means Chegg can't continue the cycle…paint me so sad.)

And just like that... they're ending support for Scantrons. The only place left for your #2's are down the toilet...

My my this hurts 😅

My quote of the day How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg. Abraham Lincoln

This reads like an April Fool's joke. The first author in this "Sh-index" doesn't even get full credit for the paper. It's bad enough negotiating author order without these weightings! "Google Scholar tool gives extra credit to first and last authors" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Someone told me they got started as a flip-flop salesman. "SR?", I asked, but I was just kidding (JK!). #jokecircuit

Does #SharePoint do anything right? Government contracts prop up this outdated enterprise platform, giving it far more market share than it deserves and putting govt security at risk. "Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws" www.csoonline.com/article/4074...

The captcha's at every step are also a bit much! Are they really worried about an AI attack of automated unsubscription requests? The amount of effort they've gone in to making it hard for people to avoid their spam. Is this really CAN-SPAM compliant?

This is egregiously evil, #Samsung. First, you force me to manually enter my e-mail to opt-out of a marketing list. THEN you make me confirm over e-mail via passcode. Remarkable!

I'm recruiting PhD students for the Barker Lab @uofa-eeb.bsky.social We study plant evolutionary genomics - polyploidy, hybridization & machine learning for genome evolution. Work with Selaginella, Xanthisma, Brassica & more. Funding available via CAMBIUM Fellowships. Reach out if interested! 🧬🌵🤖

When you are geolocating at the protest based on inflatable animals

In case you ever wondered why gold looks so different than silver and aluminum, take a look at this thread. The color of wedding bands all comes down to the marriage of special relativity with quantum mechanics ("relativistic quantum chemistry"). 🧪 🧵 👇

Fun Unexpected Elements (@amsterdammed.bsky.social) show about gold. I was waiting to hear the famous factoid about gold's yellowy color being one of a prime of "relativistic quantum chemistry", but it never came! They even talked about relativity in the Q&A, but no "reflections" on gold.

This study featured in @theconversation.com focuses on raw lesson plans generated by author prompts. But accountability for lesson-plan quality will fall to instructor who prompted AI, not AI itself, and instructors will likely iterate. AI is a tool, not a person. theconversation.com/ai-generated...

👇👇👇👇 (via @martinmbauer.bsky.social)

Interesting trivia related to Diane Keaton. She was born Diane Hall but changed her name to avoid collision with another Diane Hall in equity registry. It's interesting that she became so well known for her role as Annie Hall, returning to her birth name.

Giant betelgeuse has a tiny companion star smaller than our sun. Surprising to see a binary pair with such a ~17:1 mass ratio! #Betelbuddy 🧪 www.universetoday.com/articles/bet...

The geology professor in the office next to me got me a banded agate that was cut as a sphere making it look like Jupiter! It’s awesome. 😎

Great PhD opportunity with an excellent supervisor: Quantify traits of tree species across the western US to determine how tree populations and forest communities will respond to drought and fire. plant-traits.net/lab-openings/

Some would argue that the matching problem on top and the multiple-answer problem on the bottom should receive the same score, but #Instructure does not. Rather than choosing one convention for how to score them, #CanvasLMS decided to just use two different conventions...

UChicago Microbiology is searching for tenured or tenure-track faculty working in host-pathogens interactions, viral and bacterial pathogenesis, and emerging infectious diseases. Come join our vibrant Department! microbiology.uchicago.edu Apply here apply.interfolio.com/174404

Weevils aren't known for being noisy, but some do indeed chirp like some of their insect cousins. A new study examines the acoustic signals of soybean weevils to shed light on how they signal each other for mating or emitting distress calls.

And look at this graphic abstract….. 😱🤯

After that speech, I just feel so bad for the winner of #FatBearWeek...

Rob Lennox and I are hiring a PhD student based out of Dalhousie to study the movement ecology of imperilled Atlantic mackerel starting in January 2026! In collaboration with DFO and @oceantracking.bsky.social Please share widely!!!

Flu and COVID -- no issues getting them at Arozona Walgreens without a doctor's Rx. Both covered by major insurance.

For those very disappointed in the news about the #NSFGRFP yesterday (2nd year PhD students excluded), don't forget to look into #NDSEG, which is actually a little better fellowship but just requires connecting to a DOD theme. 🧪 ndseg.sysplus.com/NDSEG/about/...

We're not raising prices on everyone else! No, actually we're saving YOU more through your legacy bundle arrangement! MORE SAVINGS! Lucky you!

New from Jenner et al. in TREE -- Rethinking venom as an allomone, with potential "for unifying the field of venomics with the fields that study invertebrate–plant interactions and sexual conflict." 🧪 "What is animal venom? Rethinking a manipulative weapon" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Kimmel's ratings will be huge Tuesday night www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/d...

Could make it difficult for H-1B holders to get back to the USA to avoid possible penalties from the Friday proclamation. Al Jazeera: Delays continue to affect thousands as cyberattack hits Europe's airports www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/...

Transgender people are owed a retraction and apology from @wsj.com. The lie has already become canon to millions and it seems the least they could do.

It's like a Lenz's Law but for transcription factors. "As such, TFs are predicted to have an innate property that buffers physiological or genetic perturbations to the promoter to maintain a steady level of regulated expression. We demonstrate this buffering across all TFs studied."

Our campus is reviving their chapter of the Society of Women in Marine Science. I've offered to help fund raise for them. Anyone want to contribute? Even a small amount can help at this point, they are starting from zero. Venmo JenBiddle302 with a note "SWMS" ;) TIA!

I thought it was weird that a Google Home in my kitchen was playing Nirvana the other day (it normally has NPR on). Then I realized that ~30 minutes earlier I accidentally activated it and told it to "Nevermind"...

Cripes, the things we humans can do when we look up to the sky instead down into the depths of hatred and internalized bigotry. The whole goddamned cosmos is out there waiting for us to understand it, but we're too busy trying to make life miserable for others on this isolated speck of dust.

Found this (new?) setting in the Course Accommodation settings in #CanvasLMS. I can understand giving students more time, but randomly dropping an incorrect answer from all multiple-choice questions?! How does someone determine that THIS is the right accommodation for anyone?

This is a fascinating paper about how the brain uses real-world information when interpreting images that you might otherwise think are the same. That said, I am distracted by thoughts about data augmentation techniques in AI (often rotation) and how different AI brains are from real brains...

A bit of a cop out of a fortune...

If you watch the latest episode of Wednesday, you might get Zombie by the Cranberries stuck In Your Head, In Your Head, ...

Holling's Adaptive Cycle -- with more competition and scarcer resources, you get less diversity, less generalization, and high specialization and INTER-institution dependencies. This might make short-term sense, but it leads to more fragile systems unable to innovate and weather situational changes.

In case you might be interested in the intersection of AI, honeybees, and sleep. 🧪

But then how will... America... get... ONLINE???!! #AwOL "AOL is finally shutting down its dial-up internet service" | AP News apnews.com/article/aol-...

For World Honey Bee Day, #ASU put together a nice piece on some bee-inepired #AI work that a team of us from ASI SCAI, ASU SOLS, and UCSD Health are working on to improve the way machines learn over long periods of time. #bees #ML news.asu.edu/20250812-sci...

AI puts preprint servers to the test. It's too bad the community has screwed up peer review. Scientific dissemination in any form seems doomed. "AI content is tainting preprints: how moderators are fighting back" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Small update: NSF source confirms that new funding opportunities at the agency are currently frozen, which is what the EO dictates (until a new review policy is implemented). Source is hopeful the freeze will be lifted in the coming days though.

Excited to share new #program, STEPS, which can simulate #dynamics of the E. coli Long-Term Evolution Experiment (#LTEE) or other microbes in serial transfer regime. telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2025/08/12/s... STEPS developed by @devinmlake.bsky.social, Zachary Matson, Minako Izutsu, and me.

So true! (and only en dashes sometimes are spaced; em dashes are never spaced!) xkcd.com/3126/