river poems and mudlarking finds. today and tomorrow. 1pm.

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

Man I bought this was only a US problem! 😲 Our brilliant local library had a table where you could borrow books banned in other countries: looks like it needs a boost!

good citizens of West Yorkshire. there will be a book launch event for my new poetry collection p a u s e. @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social this evening 5pm in the School of English foyer, University of Leeds, FREE all are welcome. also available online: www.ticketsource.co.uk/university-o...

New study in @commsearth.nature.com highlights how #Arctic sea-ice ridges are biological hotspots in summer. Nearly 80% of ice algae biomass could then be in ridges. They've largely gone undetected because ridges are very seldom studied. Data was collected during the @awi.de MOSAiC expedition.

I'm a sucker for really good interactive science visualizations. Check out this one that lets you explore a map of the known universe. It's beautiful, engaging, and very well done. mapoftheuniverse.net

"How can one well-meaning scientist counter scientific misinformation? Or even a million? The other side is bankrolled by dead-eyed billionaires." My latest blog post #AcademicSky occamstypewriter.org/mindthegap/2...

If we learned nothing else from 2025, it’s that we shouldn’t take for granted that what we love will continue to be funded If people and libraries don’t buy a certain kind of book, publishers will stop investing in them That’s also one reason the library book bans are so scary

I once asked a bookseller at a large indie store how many people would have to buy a book for it to get the attention of the store buyer and cause an additional order and they said: Three.

"We believe that this incident is a deliberate targeting of committed young people who want to make our country a more equitable place." Britain continues its rapid descent towards fascism.

Reminder: generative artificial so-called intelligence is nothing of the sort. "Model trained to identify cats using stock images will perform well tested against stock images, not translate into effective cat detection in the wild." phys.org/news/2026-03...

TIL about a large number of operators/tools that can be used to make Google searches much more focused and productive 🧪 #philsci cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

Every year in spring, a lovely side of humanity shows in the form of a fish doorbell in Utrecht, Netherlands, but what is it and what does it do?  | Anna Schurer

My first paper had to be mailed to Stockholm, Sweden, and then mailed to reviewers around the world. Everything by mail! It was submitted, reviewed, revised, typeset, and published in 3 months. I feel bad for early-career scientists who can't find a single reviewer after 5 months. It's gotta change.

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work. This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public. Please spread the word. 🧵 1/4

#ICYMI our Ocean Tipping Points webinar is now available for replay! 🍿🗣️🌊 youtube.com/watch?v=pmz-... #COP30 #TippingPoints #Oceanscience

They all do this. And it feels like a reflection on the humans behind them, whose inflated careers are built on never admitting they don’t know the answer. The ‘smartest people in the room’ if ‘smart’ just means glib and facile, turning out lies with complete conviction.

This is a hugely important story: everyone concerned with learning and truth should read it. Presented with prompts about a lesser-known turn-of-the-last-century composer, an LLM produces a nice, clear readable evaluation of her Symphony No. 1 - which DOESN'T EXIST. Everything is made up. 😵‍💫

So, any other news yesterday? Anything important?

Yes, sectarian Muslims voting for a white female plumber from a party led by a gay Jewish man... Am guessing none of the other parties will learn the right lessons from this result for their own different reasons.

genuinely terrifying how it started: AI-generated topics (likely possibly OK, but not ideal to be the only way to organise, remember author defined keywords?) docs.openalex.org/api-entities... how it's going 👇🏼 www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

IPY-5 is approaching. And I am pondering, what is the purpose of IPY-5? Science diplomacy, and international cooperation, is of course vital, as we see renewed attacks on the autonomy of Greenland. The Antarctic Treaty is likely to come under increased stress as the climate changes, changing the ...

Aside from being hilarious, this is absolutely fascinating. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/t...

Plans for AI data centres suggest 50 gigawatts of demand — more than the UK’s national peak of 45. Alarm bells should be ringing. Are we powering genuine public good — or hype? The environmental cost could be vast. #ClimateCrisis #ArtificialIntelligence

Second plug for my brief weekend musings about the human cost of the recent UKRI grant pause #AcademicSky

I'm not at #OSM26, but I'd be at this if I was, and recommend checking this out if you are.

To Glasgow for #OSM26 where Lukrecia Stulic will be presenting on our data composition collaborations: ED23B-10: Scoring The Ice: Turning Data into Music. Hope to meet like minded travellers involved with the session: Art and Ocean Science: Creative Pathways for Understanding and Engagement

Our new paper on the future of the Antarctic Peninsula published today, showing how the various systems across the Peninsula will be impacted by different global warming scenarios. www.frontiersin.org/journals/env...

The future of the Antarctic Peninsula under three different scenarios - the choices we make today determine the future. Policy Brief with @granthamicl.bsky.social spiral.imperial.ac.uk/entities/pub...

Twitter is a cesspool that most of us have abandoned and @agu.org gets almost no engagement there, so why is the only sharing option on the #OSM26 website to that place?

Exploring Down Street Station, one of London's closed underground stations at alondoninheritance.com/under-london...

Massive boom in conference submissions (chock full of AI fabrications) due to LLM adoption is NOT "increased researcher productivity" It is research integrity failure, knowledge degradation, disciplinary suicide

This is wrong in just so many ways I can’t even count them. Maybe counting is hard because I’m trying to use that ruler!

If you would like to help put pressure on the @royalsociety.org to finally take meaningful action on this issue, you can politely decline their requests for your labour (eg invitations to review or to sit on their editorial boards or grant panels), and refer to the arguments in this blogpost.

Tonight's tawny visitation - both owls turned up, but the other one perched inconveniently behind a branch. Didn't stay long.

We paid thousands of dollars to make this open access for you to enjoy. Knowing the rate of air-sea gas exchange is critical for assessing the efficiency of marine CO₂ removal (mCDR). We assume we know this rate, but we really don't in coastal areas where mCDR is likely to be deployed. 🌊🧪

Every evening a pair of tawny owls has been settling in a birch tree in our garden for about 10 minutes or so around dusk. Only the one tonight, but a better photo than last night (a 4 second exposure...good job owls are good at sitting still!). @davidho.bsky.social

Solidarity with @unison.org.uk workers at the University of Bristol who are striking against a 3.4% real terms pay cut. Since 2009 higher education pay has lost around 28% of its value. It's time for University workers to be paid fairly.

Unfortunately, I think gen AI will be more like plastics: incredibly useful for a small number of applications, but pushed onto the masses in its least useful forms for the purposes of making a profit. The result will be an enormous impact on the environment.

You should never let your TBR pile fully deplete before buying more books. That’s like waiting until your kitchen is empty to go to the supermarket. - Michael

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

Congratulations to my youngest daughter, who in a school rife with drugs, cigarettes and violence, somehow cops a detention for reading a book

This should be obvious (although great to see a study showing it from anthropic). The question is, how valuable are these skills to society and to the individual workers? None of this is inevitable; we can choose where and whether to deploy AI tools

No idea yet what NERC funding is going to look like (other than not great), but I hope not this bad. It's widely accepted that the point the system becomes really inefficient is about 25% success rate. We're well below that already, but...2% funding rate is insane.

ILLEGAL SNOW ART

Startling that this is being broadcast in the absence of any public communications by @ukri.org The academic community has a right to expect to be told first hand what is happening with response mode funding and what the immediate future looks like www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

arXiv is not going to survive the wave of slop heading its way

Reviewing a scientific manuscript in which the authors acknowledge the use of generative AI tools to 'correct grammatical errors and enhance the clarity of writing'. Reader, it failed...badly.