Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 3d

You're asking a lot but it was apparently in spring
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring - Nature

Examination of fish that died on the day the Mesozoic ended reveal that the impact that caused the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction occurred during boreal spring.

www.nature.com

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 10d

which character is the PhD student?

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 10d

Certified Financial Planner? College Football Playoff? clear flooring polyurethane?

Reposted by Kale Sniderman

Oded Rechavi @odedrechavi.bsky.social · 22d

"I don't need another productivity app"

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 16d

This is excellent. We just need another 50 or 100 similarly minded billionaires. Though taxes are more accountable and probably yield less idiosyncratic outcomes

Bob Patalano @robertpatalano.bsky.social · 17d

This is exactly what billionaires should be doing. Gabe Newell, cofounder of Valve who helped create Half-Life and launched Steam, is funding the construction of a state-of-the-art research vessel designed for scientific exploration of the ocean.
🧪🐠🦈🐬🌍

Inkfish and VARD signs contract on steate-of-the-art research vessel - VARD

We are pleased to announce that we has signed a contract with the US based research organization Inkfish for the design and construction of one of the most modern research vessels the world has seen. ...

www.vard.com

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 16d

Fairly clearly this bombshell:
The phylogenetic position of the Yunxian cranium elucidates the origin of Homo longi and the Denisovans | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The phylogenetic position of the Yunxian cranium elucidates the origin of Homo longi and the Denisovans

Diverse forms of Homo coexisted during the Middle Pleistocene. Whether these fossil humans represent different species or clades is debated. The ~1-million-year-old Yunxian 2 fossil from China is impo...

www.science.org

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 16d

Clearly this result is model-dependent: those raw skulls are indeed quite distorted, and your phylogenetic analysis is based on a virtually reconstructed skull. How sensitive are your conclusions to model parameterisation or model assumptions?

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Reposted by Kale Sniderman

Elad Nehorai @eladn.bsky.social · 19d

Happy Rosh Hashanah y'all.

Illustration of three people standing on a hill beneath a huge orange sun. Large black text at the top reads: ‘It’s a Beautiful Day to Yell At God.’ One figure raises their arms and shouts ‘WHAT THE FUCK?’ while another says ‘COME OUT! WE JUST WANNA TALK.’ Bold text in the corner says ‘FACE US YOU COWARD.’

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 20d

On the money as usual. It is actually bad

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Reposted by Kale Sniderman

Mae Saslaw @oneorseveral.bsky.social · 24d

Has anyone written an R package or script with plottable data for all the Milankovitch curves? Wouldn't that be so convenient ⚒️🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 24d

Wouldn't it be. Keep us posted

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Reposted by Kale Sniderman

Graciela Gil-Romera @gilromera.bsky.social · Sep 7

Follow me into #PALARQUE ’s coring campaign in the Cape Region I'll be posting here this week! Co-led by my friends & almighty palynologists Saúl Manzano & Lynne Quick, the project explores fynbos Holocene & Anthropocene dynamics in the #Cederberg mntns., N Cape Region. Part of my 💜 belongs here! 1/

Five people stand in a row on a terrace with a stone balustrade, smiling at the camera. From left to right: Saul Manzano, Graciela Gil Romera, Luke Aurilis, Juan Ivars and Lynne Quick. Behind them rises Cape Town’s Table Mountain, lit by the soft colors of dusk. The group looks relaxed and cheerful, dressed casually in jackets, sweaters, and trousers. The city spreads out below the terrace with rooftops and buildings visible in the fading light.
Author: Jill Quick

A wide view of Cape Town at sunset, framed by two iconic mountains. On the left rises the flat-topped Table Mountain, while on the right stands the conical peak of Lion’s Head. Below them, the city stretches out with clusters of houses and buildings nestled among green hills. The sky glows in soft shades of blue, purple, and gold as the sun dips behind the mountains, casting a tranquil light across the landscape.
Photo by Lynne Quick.

A dense cluster of Strelitzia plants, also known as bird-of-paradise flowers. Tall, narrow green leaves rise upright, while vivid orange and blue blossoms peek through, shaped like birds in flight. Sunlight filters from the upper left, and trees and a building appear in the background.
Photo by Graciela Gil-Romera

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 29d

Which are more painful, desk rejections or rejections following peer review?

Oded Rechavi @odedrechavi.bsky.social · 29d

If manuscript rejections arrived fast, instead of after >6 months, they would be 10 times less painful

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Sep 4

Die back and apparent recent mortality of Eucalyptus macrorhyncha (red stringybark) in the Mullum Mullum valley, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 🧪🌿.

several individual Eucalyptus macrorhyncha trees with crown dieback

a Eucalyptus macrorhyncha tree that appears to have recently died, retaining fine twigs but leafless

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Sep 1

Angiosperms "kindly" facilitated change-management workshops for sullen Gnetaleans and Cheirolepids 🧪🌾

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Aug 30

I remember my dad jumping with joy as he brought in the morning newspaper with the all-caps headline, "NIXON RESIGNS". I miss him terribly but he'd be rolling and rolling in his grave now

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · Aug 28

I miss my dad, but the list of things I'm glad he didn't live to see started with Sandy Hook and has grown every couple of weeks since

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Aug 28

It's a central part of the MAHA playbook
www.compactmag.com/article/the-...

The Bad Energy of Casey Means

For many years, it has been common enough to hear the refrain that large corporations are to blame for all of the world’s problems.

www.compactmag.com

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Aug 3

One of the truly compelling features of using an LLM as a coding tutor, rather than, say, asking human coders for advice at Stack Overflow, is that the LLM is polite, never complains about your failure to provide a reproducible example, and is uninterested in being an arsehole.

Oisín McGann @oisinmcgann.bsky.social · Jul 2

If you want to overlook the largest case of copyright theft in history, the abuse of workers in the global south, the vast drain on essential resources, the huge proliferation of scams using this tech and the tidal wave of junk ruining web searches, so you can code faster, I don't know what to say.

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Jul 30

by contrast, Decalobanthus peltatus (Convolvulaceae) belongs to a small (~20 spp) and recent Malesian/inner Pacific radiation of fast-growing vines. It probably arrived in Australia within the past million years or so

Decalobanthus peltatus, in cyclone-damaged patch of the Daintree rainforest, northeastern Queensland Wet Tropics

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Jul 30

the cycad Bowenia spectabilis (Zamiaceae), Daintree rainforest, Queensland Wet Tropics. Bowenia has been kicking around Australia since at least the late Cretaceous 🧪🌿

a specimen of Bowenia spectabilis growing on the forest floor of Daintree rainforest, northeast Queensland

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Reposted by Kale Sniderman

David Grimm @david-grimm.bsky.social · Jul 28

Crab-like creatures are famed for having evolved five times in evolutionary history. But anteaters have evolved at least 12 times--in half the evolutionary span. Cool story by @jakebuehler.bsky.social for @science.org

‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’ Odd animals arose at least 12 separate times

Findings speak to the dramatic impact ants and termites can have on mammalian evolution

www.science.org

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Jul 28

Decalobanthus peltatus (previously within polyphyletic Merremia) is a megatherm Convolvulaceae vine colonising cyclone-damaged Daintree rainforest (NE Queensland). Totally feral on Pacific Islands, esp where not native (no surprise). See George Staples' superb revision tinyurl.com/42dk4pe2 🌿🧪

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Reposted by Kale Sniderman

Michael Hauer @mickeymoosenhauer.bsky.social · Jul 25

If you haven’t read THE NATION OF PLANTS, a short book by Stefano Mancuso (2019)… you should!

WHETHER BURUNDIAN, ITALIAN OR ICELANDIC, humans are the most accomplished predators. Like a lion observing, sleepy and satisfied, the piece of the savannah that is its territory, with the serene awareness that no other animal can contest his sovereignty over it, the human race considers the entire planet as something under its exclusive jurisdiction. Earth, the home of life, the only place we know of in the universe able to host it, is considered by humans as neither more nor less than a simple resource; to be eaten, to be consumed.
Something similar to a gazelle in the eyes of an always-hungry lion.
That this resource might come to an end, putting at risk the very existence of our species, does not seem to interest us. Have you ever seen that science fiction film in which some really wicked alien species, after having consumed the

resources of countless other planets, swoops down on the Earth like a swarm of 'grasshoppers from space' intent on turning it into a wasteland? Those aliens are us. Only the other planets still left to be destroyed after Earth do not exist. We would do well to understand this as soon as possible.
The consumption of organic material produced by other living beings is typical of animal life. Not being able, as plants are, to fix the energy of sunlight autonomously, animals must rely on the predation of other living beings to ensure their survival. This is why plants are always pictured at the bottom of those typically pyramidal illustrations that we see everywhere bearing the name of the food pyramid, or the ecological pyramid, or the trophic pyramid.
Whatever the name, the concept is always the same.
There is a pyramid with plants, the producers, occupying the lowest level, and then proceeding upwards through the various trophic levels. First, the herbivores that eat plants, then above them the carnivores that eat meat, and then the omnivores that eat both plants and meat, and so on, until you get to the apex predators, who are at the top of the food chain.
I have always found these representations of plants as the lowest level of a pyramid to be rather ungenerous, not to say wrong. It would seem to me more correct that the top should be reserved for the organisms that produce chemical energy, rather

than those that consume it. I mean, in a car isn't the most important part the engine? All the rest is not essential. Well, plants are the engine of life, the essential part; all the rest is just car body.

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Reposted by Kale Sniderman

Richard Hull @richardhull54.bsky.social · Jul 25

This is a lovely article.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘Intrinsically connected’: how human neurodiversity could help save nature

Biodiversity is linked to people’s diversity, and nature lends itself to people who are different, says author Joe Harkness

www.theguardian.com

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · Jul 25

How good is this

Neil Pederson @yellowbuckeye.bsky.social · Jul 25

A friend just shared pix from one of my favorite and easily accessible pockets of large, and likely old, Yellow Buckeye trees in the Smokies. Also known as Aesculus flava, not only do they have some of the most wonderfully textured bark in the eastern US, we found 400+ yrs is not out of the question

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