sheardcat.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Earlier today I got existentially bored and opened up Duolingo Norwegian. I speak a tiny amount of Swedish (enough to sass one of my friends, plus basic tourist vocab), and I'm currently taking Finnish lessons...this is apparently enough to make my brain combust.

submitted 1 hour ago • 1 comment

Yikes, this is such awful behaviour on that editor's part. Also, ECRs: if your submitted manuscript has possibly vanished into the ether, please contact someone! Disappointing behaviour of humans aside, all sorts of odd technical glitches can and do happen! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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Did I get CALLED OUT yesterday by the BES for not adhering to the branding? Yes. Yes I did. 😅 Now fixed, and I even logged into our old Twitter account to fix that branding as well. 😂

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The program for Evolution 2025 is now live! Talk schedules for both the virtual and in-person meetings can be found here: www.xcdsystem.com/evolution/pr... @sse-evolution.bsky.social @systbiol.bsky.social @asn-amnat.bsky.social #Evol2025

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I did something like this at a scicomm event once -- as the presenter, it was super fun, and the audience seemed to appreciate?

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I have somehow managed to catch up on my editorial duties. The transition from handling 0-2 papers at a time to 5+ papers at a time has been...a lot, it turns out. (Am I caught up with my reviews, no I am not. I decline almost all review requests these days, but this one sounded fun...sigh.)

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This is an amazing example of de-escalation, with lots of fascinating sociolinguistics. (Also, I'm now truly fascinated by the phrase "my guy".) (Look I genuinely almost applied grad school for linguistics, okay? I'm easily distracted by language.)

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One of my favourite people lives part-time in Montreal, and they just told me about the existence of the Québécois phrase "ravioli chinois" (for dumplings). Mind. Blown.

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TIL that "ocean" and "sea" have different technical meanings. Is this a well-known fact that I just somehow missed? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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BioTime v2 is out!!🚨 - Explore the largest #database of #biodiversity time-series studies in the world. Now with more studies🗄️🔍👩‍💻, more species 🌱🦎🦇🐟🌳🐜🐚🪸🐀, more locations 🌐…just more! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Free to download, free to use! #BioTime #Macroecology #GlobalChange

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Fundamental constraints on vertebrate life history are shaped by aquatic–terrestrial transitions and reproductive mode www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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This recent paper by Freeman et al. is a beautiful use of eBird data, and demonstrates that abundance at range edges is unrelated to temperature change (in North American birds) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

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Flight ability shapes lacewing niche evolution www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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We have to break the narrative that forcing trans people into third separate but equal spaces somehow isn’t discrimination. It very much is discrimination

submitted 2 days ago • 13 comments

ooh, fun!

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The data that I'm currently staring at: this 72-cm long species weighs 49,201,675,985 kg. Me: ...no I don't think that's true.

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

Let's talk about these two department store owners: brother and sister Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld. From Newark, New Jersey. They are random people, basically. But in the late 1920s, with fascism taking over Europe, they made a choice that profoundly changed the world: 🧵

submitted 3 days ago • 67 comments

Again, we're running the 1st ever virtual international conference on vertebrate morphology (ICVM) this August 7-10: www.isvm-icvm.org/icvm-2025 Abstracts are due 26 May (12 days)! Of course you can just register and not submit abstract(s). ~3 days of great talks, posters, keynotes and more!

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Climate-Driven Body Size Changes in Birds and Mammals Reveal Environmental Tolerance Limits | doi.org/10.1111/gcb.... | @globalchangebio.bsky.social | #ornithology 🪶

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Driest spring on record. The grass is already turning brown. It’s May 14 🤷‍♂️ www.lbc.co.uk/weather/uk-s...

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Different traits shape winners and losers in urban bird assemblages across seasons | www.nature.com/artic... | Scientific Reports | #ornithology 🪶

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I think a lot about how the disabled and chronically ill represent ONE QUARTER of the entire US population (and likely more because ableism stops people identifying as disabled). We’re one 1 of every 4 people you see. Think about how hateful society has to be to make that many people invisible.

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

Since we are still talking about interactions, I worked with some ecologists a couple of years ago on measurement scale, interactions and interpretation issues. I think some problems arise from failure to distinguish prediction from inference, a chronic problem in ecology imo doi.org/10.1111/brv....

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

'The Emerald Sea' 4,427 images captured by Don Pettit are processed, graded & retimed to create this video of aurorae below ISS on April 5/6 2025 with music by Chris Zabriskie. Cropped and edited from 10m54s 4k original. Credit: Don Pettit / ISS / NASA / ESRS / Seán Doran

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

you might think N American species are getting common at their north range limit and rare at their south range limit as temps get warmer but you would be wrong new paper in GEB w/ @eliotmiller.bsky.social & Matt Strimas-Mackey, eBird Status & Trends ftw onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

amazing: since the 1950s, undergrads at Auburn University, in Alabama, have staffed a domain-general helpdesk anybody can call in between 7am and 11pm, central time, to ask questions on any topic. it's like a human chatgpt with fewer hallucinations great piece via @kottke.org

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

A couple days ago, people called him Robert. Those who knew him called him Bob. And now everyone is calling him Leo. See? We can adjust to new names. Sometimes they signify a change in destiny.

submitted 7 days ago • 3 comments

Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water. A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

submitted 8 days ago • 37 comments

Relatedly, truly, what happened to April? Like, I can see events on my calendar, and I remember attending them, but spiritually I think I'm still in late March. (And, like, March 2022, but that's a much broader point.)

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

I totally missed this last month -- mostly, posting so that I remember to read it in-depth later A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages, Khishigsuren et al., PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

I've never seen an Algae Crossing sign before!

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

He's pulling this shit in South Memphis? Fuck that. Comrades, when we talk about the environmental impacts of AI, this is the sort of thing we're talking about.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments