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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 10h

"Cosplaying" and "larping" are real activities done by real people, and using these terms as slang for "pretending to be someone you're not, for political purposes" does indeed alienate those of us who take part in these activities.

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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 15h

I’m just going to start calling out people who do this.

All support to AAUP, but this petition does not mention the fact that the loyalty oath requires universities to discriminate against trans students and students of color.

AAUP @aaup.org · 1d

NO LOYALTY OATHS IN HIGHER ED!

Trump's attacks on our universities are an attempt to consolidate power. This loyalty oath directly undermines our right to academic freedom & goes against every democratic principle our country should uphold.

Please click below, sign, & share.

#DefendHigherEd

University Administrations: Reject Trump's "Loyalty Oath" Compacts

The Trump administration is trying to blackmail schools to let him and his unqualified bureaucrats run our schools. They want to dictate what schools teach, who they admit and hire, what researchers s...

actionnetwork.org

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Shenglai @shenglai.bsky.social · 1d

The 2021–2025 North American #H5N1 outbreak evolved through successive lineage replacements and each new reassortant virus outcompeted its ancestor (😯😯😯), and the Prairie Pothole Region (Minnesota and Dakota area) is the hub for spreading.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Spatiotemporal reconstruction of the North American A(H5N1) outbreak reveals successive lineage replacements by descendant reassortants

Phylodynamics show the reassortant progeny of Eurasian H5 clade 2.3.4.4b and American LPAI viruses outcompeted their ancestors.

www.science.org

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · Mar 15

One of the amazing things about science is we will never run out of mysteries.

Take "Naturwissenschaften (2003) 90:495–500", which performed a survey of 10,000 dinosaur fossils for evidence of tumors in the bone.

I was prepared for yes, no, but what I wasn't prepared for was:
"only in hadrosaurs."

It's a black and white paper header for a short communication, and I've copied the text below. Please stop reading if you don't want the literal copy to be read to you.
"Naturwissenschaften (2003) 90:495–500
DOI 10.1007/s00114-003-0473-9
SHORT COMMUNICATION
B. M. Rothschild · D. H. Tanke · M. Helbling ·
L. D. Martin
Epidemiologic study of tumors in dinosaurs
Received: 16 June 2003 / Accepted: 29 August 2003 / Published online: 14 October 2003 Springer-Verlag 2003"

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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 1d

Really wish that all the academics rightfully denouncing Trump’s coercive “compact” for universities would mention the fact that it would require universities to viciously discriminate against trans students and students of color. Academic freedom is important, but it’s not the only value at stake.

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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 2d

I don’t rubber duck my code, I goldfinch my code

I hold an American Goldfinch stuffed toy in front of a monitor and mechanical keyboard

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 8d

That's quite the chart annotation.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A chart of "Major concerns of PhD candidates." The top text says, "Financial pressures top the list of concerns faced by PhD candidates, but concerns differ among the sexes. Those studying in the United States rank the political landscape as their main worry." The chart shows that in the full survey, political landscape is the biggest concern for about 20% of students (a bit higher for women than men) but there's an annotation saying "In US PhD students, this rose to 64%". Overall, the highest-rated concern was financial pressures at around 40%.

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Rebecca R Helm @rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · 14d

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 🧵)

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Marshal Hedin @mhedin.bsky.social · 15d

let me share a little story about a remarkable wasp that I encountered yesterday in our local deserts

I stumbled across her, and scrambled to get a few crappy photos .... but then realized that she had a burrow, perhaps a better photo op was possible ??

here she is at her burrow entrance.

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Kelly Bodwin @kellybodwin.com · 21d

"How many of you have opened RStudio, one of the most advanced data science IDEs ever created, to add two numbers?" - Jonathan McPherson at #positconf2025

😆🙋‍♀️

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Mike Henry @onlyveesaz.bsky.social · 24d

Monsoon Morning 🌵⛅️

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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 24d

When I designed Desaparecides, my larp about the fascist regime in Argentina 177-83, I built safety into every part of the game, not just check in and debrief. This is the effort it takes to write games on difficult themes responsibly.

Jonaya Kemper @violetriotgames.bsky.social · 24d

Also I get it. Some folks don't understand the outcomes of games. Even the best of us fuck up. I know from experience. However, please I am begging you to read and ask questions of designers and look into what it means to take care of your players when they are playing on difficult themes.

Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

iNaturalist @inaturalist.bsky.social · Sep 4

Here, have some birds perched on appropriate/delightful signage. You're welcome. 🧵 ⤵️

1. Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus) by tysmith on iNaturalist

A black vulture sits on a sign that says "black vulture notice."

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · Sep 4

Is anarchist science possible? As an experiment, we got together a large group of computational neuroscientists from around the world to work on a single project without top down direction. Read on to find out what happened. 🤖🧠🧪

Diagram of how the "collaborative modelling of the brain" (COMOB) project started. Starting material lead to group research or solo research, coming together in online workshops (monthly) in an iterative cycle, finishing with writing up together. The diagram is illustrated with colourful cartoon blob characters.

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Jamie Heather @jamieheather.bsky.social · Sep 3

A nice reminder that even the most fundamental 'rules' of biology are basically just strong suggestions

Nature @nature.com · Sep 3

A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species

go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother

Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

go.nature.com

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Gregg Gonsalves @gregggonsalves.bsky.social · Aug 25

Some are embracing the fantasy that the cuts to #NIH funding will only have an impact here in the USA. As Nature reports, the NIH is the largest global funder by far and dwarfs the rest of the world’s funders of biomedical research.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How the NIH dominates the world’s health research — in charts

Abrupt cuts by the Trump administration to the US National Institutes of Health threaten progress in medical research globally.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Hannah Owens @hannahoish.bsky.social · Aug 25

Modellers take note!! This is a nice demonstration of the consequences of letting statistics versus a priori ecological knowledge drive predictive variable selection.

Luca Santini @lsantinieco.bsky.social · Aug 12

SDMs are powerful tools, but only if feed them with the right variables (be biologists, not blind programmers!). We show how data dredging approaches relying on the 19 bioclimatic variables can lead to misleading predictions & interpretation. Led by @giordanomancini.bsky.social
shorturl.at/Y2BpC

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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · Aug 14

v1.0.0 of CoinfectionSimulator.jl is out! I think I'm starting to get a feel for coding in #JuliaLang style. You can use this simulator to model multiple directly transmitted infections in a host population, including different disease types and interactions between them. github.com/japilo/Coinf...

Release v1.0.0 · japilo/CoinfectionSimulator.jl

This version is more Julian in structure, and uses abstract types to manage simulation parameters, host populations, and disease strains. The simulations are more broken down into a network of help...

github.com

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Elisabetta Canteri @ecanteri.bsky.social · Aug 14

🦌 NEW PAPER ALERT! 🦌

Our paper on wild #reindeer and #caribou is out in Science Advances! Thanks to the team: Eric Post, @nmschmidt.bsky.social, Stuart Brown, @noguesbravo.bsky.social and Damien Fordham that co-lead this research.

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Mismatch in reindeer resilience to past and future warming signals ongoing declines

Rangifer population dynamics over 21,000 years reveal that future climatic warming will cause losses that surpass safe boundaries.

doi.org

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

DGBassani @dgbassani.bsky.social · Aug 8

Except…

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · Aug 7

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Hannah Owens @hannahoish.bsky.social · Aug 7

TIL about Value-Supressing Uncertainty Palettes. This really has really started the wheels turning! medium.com/@uwdata/valu...

Value-Suppressing Uncertainty Palettes

The real world is full of uncertainty, but it can be tough to communicate that uncertainty. This is especially true for data visualization…

medium.com

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Nature @nature.com · Jul 31

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Michelle Wille @duckswabber.bsky.social · Jul 31

3 domestic cats in US consumed raw milk contaminated with HPAI = fever and neurologic signs; 2 cats died. Raw dairy a risk.
👉 wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky

Jonaya Kemper @violetriotgames.bsky.social · Jul 31

TTRPGS like most media often use gender, race and sexuality as fads rather than committing to uplift marginalized players and designers.

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