Excited this piece with excellent colleagues is now out! We examine implications of geopolitical turbulence in the world for the GEP research agenda @yixiansun.bsky.social @matpaterson.bsky.social direct.mit.edu/glep/article...

📣 call for papers for a special issue for Frontiers for Environmental Archaeology 🏺🦟 🐜 💀 🌍. Topic summaries/abstracts due May 20th. The topic is nice and broad so if you have an idea, please reach out. #archaeology #insects #entomology #multispecies www.frontiersin.org/research-top...

In "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" news, we are all hostages in the world of CO2 fans' disingenuous motivated reasoning 👍

📣 call for papers for a special issue for Frontiers for Environmental Archaeology 🏺🦟 🐜 💀 🌍. Topic summaries/abstracts due May 20th. The topic is nice and broad so if you have an idea, please reach out. #archaeology #insects #entomology #multispecies www.frontiersin.org/research-top...

Following ban of 'milk' as a term I fell into a small rabbit whole of the concept of milk as we understand it in Europe. 🧵

Excellent explainer of Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) & Atlas Network by Gareth Hutchens, ABC. #Auspol www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

Very happy to see that the UK can produce its own boneheaded agricultural nomenclatural protectionism after leaving the EU. Makes you proud.

A nice riposte to the cult of scaling

Now open access: Archaeology for Today and Tomorrow. www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon... #archaeology #openaccess

Researchers from @ucl.ac.uk analysed + mapped data on which global regions are getting wetter, which drier as the climate changes. We've loaded this map onto our website so you can investigate what's happening in your area via this link: watershedinvestigations.com/find-out-wha...

Not a single day in 2025 was cooler than the 1991-2020 average, on a global scale. @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social

Friends, Claudette Colvin—the 15-year-old who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in March 1955 & joined the federal case against bus segregation that went to the Supreme Court — died today at age 86. But there are lots of myths and mis-impressions about her. A short corrective thread:

There is abundant empirical evidence that refutes the production /land equation. Whereas the belief in intensification tends to rely on modelling of optimal scenarios along limited variables.

Bringing the drama of a Caravaggio to asparagus 🫡

buttons coming back, shitty door handles slowly being made illegal, now just make cars small again and we’ll be getting somewhere

Finally met the Big Prawn 🦐

New paper out in Ecology Letters! Led by Ennia Bosshard and Chris Kaiser-Bunbury, we show that proximity to natural habitat doesn’t consistently support pollination in tropical smallholder farms. Landscape complexity matters more than distance. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🌍 African #savanna science is heavily skewed: 46% of studies come from just 2% of #ProtectedAreas. Using the new ADSPA geodatabase, this work identifies five #bioclimatic groups and reveals major research gaps across underrepresented savannas. 🐘 🔗 doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

I've been thinking about disability and vulnerability in urban food systems recently and just caught up with this gem. For what is a very rich discussion this was also a fantastic primer for anyone thinking about disability. Highly recommend.

AI is a climate issue. AI is a climate crisis.

Collapse of key Atlantic current could bring extreme drought to Europe for centuries, study finds. @swinda.bsky.social That's an under-appreciated impact of #AMOC shutdown, of particular concern given the recent results showing much higher likelihood of this. 1/2 www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

Great article. Food, IP, colonialism, so many themes. www.theguardian.com/food/comment...

For context, total crop output revenue in the UK is about £10 billion. Losses in 2024 due to heat and drought were £600 million. Pretty bad. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Migratory behavior may come and go throughout the deep history of an animal species. Do Africa’s Mass Animal Migrations Extend Into Deep Time? www.sapiens.org/archaeology/...

New post by me on #MITPressReader @mitpress.bsky.social On the 100th anniversary of the #ScopesMonkeyTrial the ways we depict #evolution can still give an erroneous progressive view (that evolution leads to humans or ‘increased complexity’). thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-our-pictu...

Interesting arguments here about persistent stress for humans in industrial societies - but misses out on highlighting all the weird health outcomes in human history that have been downstream from culture and society onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This was already demonstrated over half a century ago with the banning of DDT. Why are we on repeat here? share.google/tX0kljiyYfOn...

2 months ago I was speaking with a Neanderthal specialist and they brought up extinction. I put it to them that if Neanderthals and humans were mixing and their DNA is present in Eurasian ancestry, is extinction the right word? share.google/uVHOfFdQ6tPP...

If you thought drop bears weren’t terrifying enough. DROP CROCS.

Definitely fine and no dangerous precedent or cascade of effects could occur from this www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2...

Oh, I love this. A new species of sea anemone was discovered recently that parks itself on top of a hermit crab shell like a hat. It seems to feed partly off the crab's faeces, but it also excretes a hard shell that extends the crab's home. In return, it's carried around the seafloor like a king.

For people interested in food systems and policy interactions, or if you just love Sankey diagrams, myself and colleagues from CSIRO made an interactive dashboard for Federal policies in Australia. foodsystemhorizons.org/insights/pol...

US used coffee breaks to personally threaten negotiators in global climate talks on shipping: “They went from delegation to delegation . . . threatening them. Telling them to go back and speak to their capitals, warning what would happen if they didn’t change their minds,” the diplomat said.

If climate policy had a “best buy,” it might be methane cuts Global methane mitigation has a benefit–cost ratio >6:1, even before accounting for near-term climate feedbacks A strong case: it’s among the most efficient levers in climate policy www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Useful new paper www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Glad to report that nature is returning for the undergrads.

We're doing Nikolai Vavilov again but this time the whole biosphere is at stake.

Marshall McLuhan said "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence" - foods and food tech are likewise disruptive technologies that shape environments around them.

Baking was critical to the Lower Kingdom. It allowed the stationing of large forces to counter tribal raids into the fertile Nile region. Bread production on that scale required advanced yeast filtering through linen bags. If hadn't been for cotton-tied dough, they'd been harried long time ago.

Climate change is a major risk for food inflation but economics may be a more immediate risk in many cases. www.ft.com/content/b5d7...

Multispecies tern

This is a really interesting paper led by the brilliant Alex Bertacchi using isotopes to understand landscape use by ancient foragers in Malawi. I had a very minor role in the fieldwork back in 2019. Good science can take a long time 🏺 www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Oh oh (redux) ... ‘This is bad news’: Australian tropical rainforest trees switch in world first from carbon sink to emissions source. Researchers say carbon emissions change in Queensland tropical rainforests may have global #climate implications. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

How is this repeatedly made into a policy issue - by *all* parties - when the blunt fact of the matter is that grown adults who are obliged to pay for their own education, and relentlessly pursued to repay their loans, should be able to study whatever the fuck they want.

What does a healthier diet look like for us and for the planet? The new EAT-Lancet report is out today. With less food waste, better farming shifting diets with 2/3 more fruit +veg+nuts & much less meat we can cut food emissions in half & protect water & wildlife. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

US capital is more interested in power and control than it is in profits, otherwise we would implement more profitable policies like UBI and a 4 day 32 hour work week.