Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
@nickdhiggs.bsky.social
650 followers 280 following 100 posts
Marine scientist and VP for Strategy and Programs @templetonworld.bsky.social
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nickdhiggs.bsky.social
Conch 🐚 = “conk” 🤕
Cay 🏝️= “key” 🔑
Nassau📍= “Nah-saw” (not NAS’s-ow)
nickdhiggs.bsky.social
🇧🇸
Conch 🐚
Cay 🏝️
Nassau 📍
merriam-webster.com
What’s the word where you’re from that, when pronounced exactly as it looks, identifies a tourist immediately?
nickdhiggs.bsky.social
Maybe based on annual landings and frequency of observance. That seems to be the case in the BBC article: “with the average catch in Cornwall of roughly half a million individual lobsters landed each year, we should only see one blue lobster every two years”
nickdhiggs.bsky.social
What if quotes were also auto-pasted as a reply so could be read out in a thread. Would that work? 🤔
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
rebeccarhelm.bsky.social
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
jrowanbxl.bsky.social
This used to be an absolute plague in Brussels. Until the council said the companies were responsible for it and they'd start fining them. And then - as if by magic - the problem got solved, pdq.
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
dantheclamman.blog
Lucinid bivalves are chemosymbiotic, partnering with microbes which oxidize sulfide and give them food. How do they breathe in such a sulfide-rich environment? In their burrows, one end leads up to oxygen, while another set of branching burrows lead downward, mining sulfide (203)
A diagram from Blouet et al 2021 showing a lucinid in its burrow, one end heading up to oxygen, the other branched tunnel heading down to the hydrogen sulfide
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
templetonworld.bsky.social
Dr. Berry Billingsley ‪at Swansea University‬ is reimagining how classrooms engage with questions that transcend subject boundaries.

On @storiesofimpact.bsky.social‬, she discusses how to equip students to explore queries on life, the universe, and existence.

🎧 bit.ly/47BzVAL
Big Questions That Change How We Learn with Berry Billingsley (podcast)
Interdisciplinary approaches to learning are reshaping religious education and science classes in schools.
www.templetonworldcharity.org
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
brackenlab.bsky.social
This *Osedax* comic by @thefuzzyslug.bsky.social is just amazing! 🤩 #MarineLife #Invertebrate #SciArt 🦑🌊🐡
Comic featuring conversations between bone-eating *Osedax* worms feeding on a deep-sea whale fall: “Bone. Is. Forever.”
nickdhiggs.bsky.social
Second guessing myself now. Is that way everyone has smart watches - for continuous micro-updates?
nickdhiggs.bsky.social
Wow- I can’t imagine a world where you get notifications every time a new message comes in. I don’t know if I’ve ever had that turned on (def not for email) and assumed most people didn’t. Do you think it’s more common than not to operate that way? Genuinely worried about my staff now…
nickdhiggs.bsky.social
I think it’s a lack of awareness of external perception beyond one’s own discipline. I’ve noticed huge discrepancies in how people describe their at area of work between even different sub-disciplines.
nickdhiggs.bsky.social
Deepest know chemosynthesis-based ecosystems!
nature.com
Nature @nature.com · Jul 31
This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
nature.com
Nature @nature.com · Jul 31
This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
historyned.bsky.social
“Digital asbestos” is such a perfect descriptor! bsky.app/profile/katr...
katrinanavickas.bsky.social
Someone on here compared AI produced material as "digital asbestos " which in a few decades' time we will have to work out how to eradicate from the fabric of research.
historyned.bsky.social
From my own academic research, even pre LLMs there was a huge danger of zombie factoids that begin in a respectable publication by mistake and then get reprinted for decades because no one is backtracing to the original source. Once bad info gets into the system it can take years to clear it out.
nickdhiggs.bsky.social
This thread on storytelling from @toriherridge.bsky.social keeps haunting me…
toriherridge.bsky.social
Tucked inside this piece by @iandunt.bsky.social is a paragraph that speaks to a deep unease that has been growing inside me about storytelling, and how it’s power is divorced from truth (or maybe reality/fact is a better word).

iandunt.substack.com/p/you-dont-w...
A screen grab of a paragraph from Ian Dunt’s substack article “You don't want to read this.
And I don't want to write it.” Link in post.

The text reads:

The people of 1919 blocked out the Spanish flu just like we’re blocking out covid. Too painful? That can't be it. Wars are painful and no-one feels the need to block them out. But then, wars have a narrative. They have comrades and enemies. They have tragedy and perhaps even glory. The trouble with pandemics is that they're so meaningless. They have no storyline. They have no three-act structure. We are deprived of agency. Instead we have to sit there and hope it doesn't happen to us. Then if it does happen to us, we have to lie there and hope it doesn't worsen. It is an exercise in powerlessness and passivity.
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
toriherridge.bsky.social
“Data is like people. If you torture it for long enough, it’ll tell you more or less whatever you want to hear.”
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Nice, ultimately hopeful, article on the flawed field of behavioural science, with some pretty big clues about why the field has such problems: “A whole strata of academics became akin to rock stars thanks to their ability to explain why humans behaved the way they did”
Inside the scandal that rocked behavioural science – and paved the way for revolution
Five years after a widely revered study was debunked as totally bogus, Helen Coffey asks the experts whether trust in the sexiest branch of science has been irrevocably eroded – and how to discern bet...
www.independent.co.uk