It’s almost like green energy is the only way forward and a handful of oil barons are doing everything in their power to keep that from happening so they can get even richer at the cost of literally everything else in the world.

A central function of AI is to allow the ruling elite impunity for doing terrible things. The machine did it! It fired you! Not me! It apologized! Creators and owners of A.I. tech must be held liable for the damage they cause, or the tech will further fray the threads of an already failing society.

"I don’t know why my fellowship was terminated. I suspect that it has something to do with studying a species that doesn’t fit the binary of what we expect to see in nature, with completely different males and females." @carlzimmer.com profiles my wonderful coauthor @jjinsing.bsky.social Gift link.

Corrupt tech billionaires are buying power to tilt the world in their favor. Even the co-founder of Y Combinator is saying it. ⬇️ The radical death cult rising from Silicon Valley venture capital is metastasizing rapidly. It's an existential threat to democracy and humanity.

There's just enough shell left of this snail for a novice (me) to identify it. Mesomphix cupreus from Rockbridge Co, VA. Its common name is the copper button, and is quickly becoming one of my favorite snails.

They're up! come grab a couple shrews. I promise they look better in person than my crappy photos. ko-fi.com/s/3696021c0e

In this in-depth interview Billie Jean Sweeney — a former editor at The New York Times — details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, why this was directed from the very top, how some staff pushed back and the immense damage done by the NYT legitimizing bigotry.

To add: @andrewjohnston.bsky.social wrote a great blog post about his photo stacking system, which you can read here: www.insectid.org/post/focus-s.... It's more expensive, but you get better results! I'll be adding this link to my post, since I forgot earlier.

Welcome to the year Twenty X-ty Six.

I've been asked recently about my microscope & photography set up, so I finally wrote it up! Learn more here, or just enjoy some nice photos of animals I've found in the leaf litter of Appalachia: www.derekhennen.com/blog/2025/12/31/photography-of-millipedes-centipedes-and-other-leaf-litter-critters

They're going to *throw out* one-of-a-kind NASA archives?! Not even a year since the Inauguration & we're already at the 2nd-time-as-farce version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

Here I got you another photo collage of a Tanaupodid mite! I even added a scale bar! Minute little bulborbs crawling around the wintertime leaf litter. I collected this one from leaf litter in the woods behind my old elementary school in southeast Ohio.

Check it out, I found a sandworm from Arrakis in my leaf litter from southern Virginia. (It's a snipe fly larva in the family Rhagionidae.) Check out those beautiful silver tracheal tubes!

Now is a great time to buy Helicon Focus if you need image-stacking software! I use it all the time for my bug photos taken through a microscope and it's the best. They're having a sale now and you can buy a lifetime license! www.heliconsoft.com/helicon-focu...

THE DAY CARES ARE LOCKED BECAUSE YOU MADE A GENERATION-LONG EFFORT TO MAKE IT AS EASY AS POSSIBLE TO KILL THE CHILDREN INSIDE THEM YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING GHOULS

We cannot succeed at providing effective science-based conservation without you! We hope that, if you are able, you will make a year-end gift to help protect wildlife in 2026. THANK YOU for your support! 💖 xerces.org/give (for a 2025 tax deduction, get your donation in before midnight ET!)

Metroid Prime Windows XP theme

being a part of this has given me a lot of hope. But i object to the people involved being labeled “activists”. They’re just neighbors. “Activist” is only ever applied to leftists as a way to make them seem less normal. These people are normie AF. www.startribune.com/inside-the-o...

Another night of photographing winter active mites, what a thrill!!

Only one month left to finish my edits, and then the book is off for copy editing and out of my hands… if I fall off the radar over the next few weeks, this is why! 🧪 The US publication date has been announced as 1st Sep '26, available for preorder here: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/779567...

It's Tanaupodidae season! These large (~2 mm), winter-lovin' mites are only out now, so go look under your local logs, leaves, and boulders to see the mammoth mites near you! I've gotten them in all my Berleses since Dec 16 (all two of them). www.inaturalist.org/observations...

If you can't be bothered to actually write the peer review yourself why should the reviewee have to listen to it? Why write anything at all, ever? If you don't have enough time, fight for better working conditions instead of faking your work

Do I know any journalists interested in covering a story about a highway and the last population of a frog? Please message me

It's Tanaupodidae season! These large (~2 mm), winter-lovin' mites are only out now, so go look under your local logs, leaves, and boulders to see the mammoth mites near you! I've gotten them in all my Berleses since Dec 16 (all two of them). www.inaturalist.org/observations...

I took the week off I'm playing Fortnite wooooo

Color differences don't always indicate different species, example number 62,345.

Remember #mycophiles, keep an eye out for cute Peteserpes (left) & Pseudopolydesmus (right) millipedes when you are turning over logs to look for winter 🍄‍🟫. Also, put the logs back the way you found them after taking 📸 as they represent important overwintering habitats! @derekhennen.bsky.social

@invam.bsky.social collection, prairies, and AMF all featured in the awesome article Defunding fungi: US’s living library of ‘vital ecosystem engineers’ is in danger of closing www.theguardian.com/environment/...

We present: The Art of #InverteFest - December 2025 Edition A digital art book showcasing the work of 100 artists from around the world, in celebration of overlooked invertebrate fauna. Thank you to the artists who contributed to our book! Download: drive.google.com/file/d/1JCXz... #Art #SciArt

Speech has never been freer! Not performing for the president is now illegal.

NYT when a trans man wants to take testosterone: 😡😡😡😡😡 NYT when a cis woman wants to take testosterone: 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩

Found an incredible specimen of the Moth Urchin Fungus (Akanthomyces aculeatus) today in a hemlock ravine! Who doesn’t appreciate a good insect pathogen? #FungiFriends

DOGE’s goal was never efficiency, so of course it will fail those metrics. DOGE *succeeded* at traumatizing of federal workers in support of the Project 2025 agenda. It also successfully demolished American foreign aid (i.e., shift foreign policy) and stole untold data on and from American people.

look at how little effort it takes for someone on the conservative grievance circuit to destroy a life millions of college kids have half assed an assignment at the last minute, you eat the F and move on but the effort to push trans people out of public life will use whatever it can get

how about a little candy cane feather pede on this Christmas Day!

Day 24 and last of #Crustmas: Festive terrestrial isopods Happy holidays to all of you from the Museum en Voie d'Illumination exhibition from 2022 at the MNHN Paris

Anti-trans demagogue and fifth place swimmer Riley Gaines earned $470,000+ last year from a conservative non-profit. Notably, $420k was incentive-based. A neat little window into the way the transphobic grift is being compensated. I wonder what the per-post rate is?

Americans having to bootleg broadcast news about our government’s offshored concentration camp is a level of fascism that immediately precedes democratic societies dropping leaflets on us from weather balloons.

You can very clearly see why someone whose job it is to protect war criminals would need this pulled from the airwaves: It’s visible proof the Trump administration is operating concentration camps.

New Ant Lab video today about pincer wasps and a new research project. This one has some really cool, newly-filmed insect behavior in it! youtu.be/9osTBzQ0zbk

CBS paid the president of the United States millions in bribe money and now they censor news reports so it does not annoy him. I don’t know how much plainer we can put this.

party larva

This, plus it goes double for "uncharismatic" critters bc mostly noone has even gone to look so there's nothing to digitise yet ... and if we piss all our money into LLMs we'll never be able to know where, say, Kellia suborbicularis really lives - we'll just have an uninformed computer's best guess

The accurate explanation is that rich fascists bought out all the media they could and it is in their business interests to lie.

If you claim to be an 'academic' or a 'researcher' or similar and your position is that you should not have to read things and/or write things and you would like the plagiarism machine to do that for you then please step aside and let someone who would like to work in the field have your job.

“Once-unthinkable” here should be “in wild and blatant violation of the law and the US Constitution.” At NIH alone: The RIFs were illegal (as a judge, Illston, ruled). The grant terminations were illegal (Young ruling). The probationary firings were illegal (Alsop ruling). We must say this. 1/

🚨 Don't eat uncooked snake! Your eyes & lungs can be parasitized by pentastomids, which are a CRUSTACEAN. Adults lack so many features that they weren't believed to be arthropods at all until their DNA was sequenced (and sperm morphology, but that was not widely accepted). Yet, they are! #Crustmas 🧪

Rick Steves the GOAT