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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 1d

Biology is much more complicated than most non-biologists can imagine. And AI is not going to change this anytime soon.
blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

We still can’t predict much of anything in biology

Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

blog.genesmindsmachines.com

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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

Frames @oxinabox.bsky.social · 4d

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious"

I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge.

We know exactly how LLMs work.

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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

SMBC Comics @smbccomics.bsky.social · 5d

Etymology humor will continue until morale improves.

COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaa
PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/c/ZachWeiner...
STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

3-panel SMBC comic update where a bespectacled woman states that "A" is the most versatile prefix as it can mean "towards" in Latin, "not" in Greek, and be an intensifier in Old English. Another woman replies that "it's aaaamazing," prompting the first woman to demand to know the quantities of A's used to determine if the comment was mean.

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Dr. Solomon David @solomonrdavid.bsky.social · 5d

Have you ever seen a baby gar eating?

This little Spotted Gar is about a week old and has started feeding on zooplankton (in this case brine shrimp/Artemia/ aka "sea monkeys").

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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

Dr. Solomon David @solomonrdavid.bsky.social · 5d

They do exist 👋

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Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · 5d

It feels timely to re-up this 🦋🦣

Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · Nov 14

Given the afflux of new science peeps here, and the lack of a similar increase of users at Mastodon, I'll post both here and there for the time being. Although I'm not convinced this place can escape the issues which affect any corporate owned social media pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/u...

Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

pluralistic.net

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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

FlyBase @flybase.bsky.social · 5d

There's an update on the state of FlyBase on the FlyBase.org front page. You can contribute to FlyBase at this link wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...
We express enormous gratitude to the people, labs, groups, and foundations who have already helped us.
#FlyBase #Drosophila

FlyBase Update – October 2025
The termination of the NIH/NHGRI FlyBase grant has placed the long-term sustainability of FlyBase at risk. However, thanks to the generous support of several key individuals and institutions, we are pleased to announce that FlyBase will remain operational through the coming year. We extend our deepest gratitude to Yukiko Yamashita, Cassandra Extavour, Hugo Bellen, Thom Kaufman, the Genetics Society of America / Drosophila Board, the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, an anonymous donor and the Wellcome Trust. We are especially thankful for a generous gift from Seemay Chou, Jed McCaleb, and The Navigation Fund. We also greatly appreciate the continued support from the broader Drosophila community – your donations and service fees have been vital in helping us stay afloat. Special thanks also go to Jessica Manning for her tireless administrative work at Harvard, to Ruth Lehmann, Hugo Bellen, and Paul Sternberg for advice and efforts, and to the Board of the European Drosophila Society for all their efforts. Sadly, we must also share that several long-standing FlyBase team members have recently moved on. We are immensely grateful to Susan Russo-Gelbart, Lynn Crosby, Gil dos Santos, Kris Broll, Victoria Jenkins, and TyAnna Lovato for their many years of dedicated service and contributions to FlyBase. Looking ahead, ensuring FlyBase’s sustainability beyond the next year – and successfully integrating with the Alliance – will require new funding sources. We kindly ask for your continued support:
• European labs: Please consider contributing to the Cambridge, U.K. FlyBase group
• U.S. and other non-European labs: Please consider contributing to the U.S. FlyBase groups
• Both U.K. and U.S. FlyBase are working diligently to establish an invoicing system. We appreciate your continued patience.
For more information on how to support us, please visit: Contribute to FlyBase wiki page https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase

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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 5d

As a theoretical cosmologist, I'm frequently asked "what is the benefit of the work you're doing for people's lives?" Nothing I work on makes money or cures disease.

There are a few different answers one can give, at various levels of "convincing" / "actually relevant to why the work is done."

1/🧵

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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

Richard Waite @waiterich.bsky.social · 5d

When you click the link it says you get free access with registration.

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Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · 5d

Thanks! I couldn't see this message from within my university network.
I had checked and saw it was copyrighted by The Lancet (not the authors as is usual for open access), & neither unpaywall nor google scholar found an open version.
So open-ish 😅.

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Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · 5d

Extremely interesting and thorough, a lot to read.
But is there an open version? Everyone should have access to this.

Richard Waite @waiterich.bsky.social · 5d

EAT-Lancet 2.0 report is out today, updating the influential 2019 report.

On my first read it seems to bring further data/evidence to support the big solutions for food/climate/nature: 1) improve productivity & env performance of agriculture, 2) reduce food loss/waste, 3) healthy/sustainable diets.

The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems

The global context has shifted dramatically since publication of the first EAT–Lancet Commission in 2019, with increased geopolitical instability, soaring food prices, and the COVID-19 pandemic exacer...

www.thelancet.com

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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

Richard Waite @waiterich.bsky.social · 5d

EAT-Lancet 2.0 report is out today, updating the influential 2019 report.

On my first read it seems to bring further data/evidence to support the big solutions for food/climate/nature: 1) improve productivity & env performance of agriculture, 2) reduce food loss/waste, 3) healthy/sustainable diets.

The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems

The global context has shifted dramatically since publication of the first EAT–Lancet Commission in 2019, with increased geopolitical instability, soaring food prices, and the COVID-19 pandemic exacer...

www.thelancet.com

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Reposted by Marc Robinson-Rechavi

Vincent J Lynch 🐘🦣🦥 🦇🐋🐢🐍 @devoevomed.bsky.social · 5d

In which my critical commentary of @itiscolossal.bsky.social's #DeExtinction #DisInformation campaign sadly merits a subsection; debate is essential for scientific discourse, it should be heated, never be personal; I'm grateful for @embopress.org coverage; sunlight is the best disinfectant. 🧪 🌱🐋

Yehu Moran @yehumoran.bsky.social · 5d

My first ever non-peer reviewed science-related piece. Together with Howard Wolinsky and Holger Breithaupt @embopress.org

It's about how scientists critical of de-extinction are targeted by dark PR tactics: www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Scientists targeted by dark PR tactics: Several academic scientists critical of de-extinction projects have become the targets of anonymous smear articles and weaponized copyright infringement claims:...

EMBO Press is an editorially independent publishing platform for the development of EMBO scientific publications.

www.embopress.org

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Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · 5d

There's a version in an odd "preprint server" which allows "Limited to [Depositor and staff only]" 😠
orgprints.org/id/eprint/56...

Organic Eprints - How our diets drive biodiversity loss

orgprints.org

Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · 5d

Not many will "learn more" since it's published closed-access and I cannot find an open version anywhere (tried unpaywall and Google scholar). I question the commitment to change of people who don't make their studies and conclusions openly available.

IPBES @ipbes.net · 5d

Reducing overconsumption of animal products can significantly lower the biodiversity impacts of our diets, according to a study by Laura de Baan in Nature Food.

Learn more about the link between food systems and biodiversity loss:

How our diets drive biodiversity loss - Nature Food

Reducing the overconsumption of animal products can strongly reduce biodiversity impacts of diets.

www.nature.com

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doctor eek [free link arc] (alt decorative gourd season) @absolutely-not.bsky.social · 6d

i looked at the methodology for this and it is
a. sex addiction counseling group in texas did a surveymonkey and extrapolated the results to the entire us population which is the sort of research design that earns you an ff on an intro methods class (the extra f is for extra effort), and
b. p-hacked

The Independent @the-independent.com · 6d

Nearly a third of Americans have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI bot, new survey says

1 in 3 Americans have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI bot, new survey says

www.independent.co.uk

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Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 11d

It's past time for #scicomm to retire the “amazing find forces a complete rewrite of our evolution“ trope. There's now broad consensus in the field that human prehistory was complex & messy with many branches. The precise family tree is fiendishly hard to reconstruct, lots of uncertainties...2/n

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RM @dorsalstream.bsky.social · 6d

Can't decide whether I'm more jealous of insects, who have their skeleton on the outside and get to see it all the time, or of octopuses, who have no skeleton and are free of the hegemony of the rigid.

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Michelle A. Rodrigues 🐒 @marspidermonkey.bsky.social · 6d

We can remember Goodall’s accomplishments and legacy while recognizing that National Geographic created a narrative that erased the local people who contributed to her research. Her African colleagues deserve to be credited, not erased (10/10).

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Michelle A. Rodrigues 🐒 @marspidermonkey.bsky.social · 6d

While Goodall received her PhD in the 1960s, it was not until the 2000s that Ugandan Emily Otali became the first African woman to complete a PhD on chimpanzee behavior. The networks that facilitated European and North Americans researchers impeded the same opportunities for Africans (9/10)

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Michelle A. Rodrigues 🐒 @marspidermonkey.bsky.social · 6d

When we hear about a lone scientist who made groundbreaking discoveries on their own, it’s usually erasing the truth that science is a team sport, and field research builds on the local knowledge and expertise of the people that live there (8/10)

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Michelle A. Rodrigues 🐒 @marspidermonkey.bsky.social · 6d

What the narrative leaves out is the contributions of the local Tanzanians who assisted and facilitated Goodall's early research, as well as preceding and concurrent research. Nat Geo created a story about a lone white woman alone with chimpanzees, erasing the Africans that were beside her (3/10)

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Holly Bik @hollybik.bsky.social · 6d

Important thread!! The “lone genius” myth of scientists is always wrong, and western science often erases the knowledge and contributions of local and indigenous people. Be inspired, but don’t be fooled by the prevailing narrative.

Michelle A. Rodrigues 🐒 @marspidermonkey.bsky.social · 6d

As a primatologist, Jane Goodall was a huge inspiration to me. I admired the way she describes chimpanzee behavior with such detail and empathy, and she’s inspired so many people and advocated for chimpanzee conservation and welfare.

However, I'm dismayed at what her narrative leaves out (1/10)

Photo of Jane Goodall in the center, signing a book, with three women standing slightly hunched behind her. A very young Michelle is to the right, smiling.

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Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · 6d

Yes! Critical washing is the term which I was missing!
zenodo.org/records/1567...

Critical AI Literacy: Beyond hegemonic perspectives on sustainability

How can universities resist being coopted and corrupted by the AI industries’ agendas? Originally published here: https://rcsc.substack.com/p/critical-ai-literacy-beyond-hegemonic

zenodo.org

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Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · 6d

I especially appreciated this quote from another paper by a subset of the authors:
"Critical reflection cannot be reduced to a mere ‘check box’ before unleashing AI technologies in our daily life after all… Critical reflection without appropriate action is thus quintessentially critical washing."

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