Quicklinks: 27 February – 5 March 2023

Good news, Mexican wolf numbers are increasing! To be clear, that’s Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. They were reintroduced in 1998 and are now at 241 wolves!

Unfortunately, not everything is good. There’s a worry that biophobia, the fear of nature, could lead to less conservation of wild spaces. With many people living in cities with few green spaces and opportunities to interact with wildlife, nature seems strange, scary and not worth preserving. This is something we need to guard against.

In my previous postdoc, I worked with Professor Don Cowan. There’s a nice article about him and his work in Antarctica, where he’s shown that there is far more microbial diversity than was initially suspected. A lot of his work has involved microbial life in extreme environments, see also when I accompanied him on a field trip to the Namib Desert.

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Quicklinks: 20 – 26 February 2023

When I was a kid and visited rock pools, I’d always look carefully, hoping to see an octopus in the wild. It never happened. This would have been the dream!

This was one of the most incredible wildlife encounters I’ve ever had — seen while tidepooling on the Northern California coast. (Also please enjoy the look of sheer terror on my friend 😅) pic.twitter.com/dTz4ssqvEY

— E. Anne Chambers (@chamberea) February 20, 2023

This article looks at conservation and animal distributions and suggests that, maybe, we’re trying to save animals in the wrong places. Perhaps where animals are now is only where they have been pushed by human expansion, rather than being the best places for them. It shows the complications of dealing things in the real world and how our desire for a “correct” world clashes with the reality that the world is always changing. Conservation is important but what are you conserving and when is your conservation harming more than its helping? These sort of questions are not limited to animals but are also applicable to humans. It’s difficult to say who belongs where because human history is a history of migration. Who is “supposed” to live where will change depending at what time you choose.

Quicklinks: 06 – 19 February 2023

This time we’re doing two weeks together. Why? I got infected with covid and so all my plans and normal activities have completely gone out the window. It was not a particularly severe case though but it’s still been quite disruptive.

This week we’re starting off with an impressive picture of a snow leopard which was taken in Mongolia.

Best of '22: My favorite shot of the year, finally getting a wild snow leopard not only within decent range (previous viewings were 1-2km away), but in a fantastic setting. It's WILD, the shot isn't faked… and this will probably never happen to me again. 😉

(Western Mongolia) pic.twitter.com/0F9s44qyNb

— Max Waugh (@MaxWaughPhoto) January 11, 2023

Quicklinks: 23-29 January 2023

Let’s start off with a pretty cool cat fact.

Let’s learn a #CaturdayCatFact!

While a cat’s adult canines grow in, they go through a phase where each quadrant of their jaw has TWO CANINES! The adult tooth starts growing in next to the baby tooth, allowing the kitten to never go without the function… https://t.co/C3MbtGtA0x pic.twitter.com/CMuxp8S81r

— Ashley Reynolds – ashinonyx@scholar.social (@ashinonyx) January 29, 2023

AI tools like chatGPT are pretty cool. But they are not exactly reliable and, even worse, it’s difficult to know how reliable they are. When you hear a person you don’t know, you can look into what they do or what qualifications they have. With AI, it’s giving you answers which are a mix of all sorts of information; some true, some false. In the following Twitter thread, you can learn how it can construct that false information.

Why does chatGPT make up fake academic papers?

By now, we know that the chatbot notoriously invents fake academic references. E.g. its answer to the most cited economics paper is completely made-up (see image).

But why? And how does it make them? A THREAD (1/n) 🧵 pic.twitter.com/kyWuc915ZJ

— David Smerdon (@dsmerdon) January 27, 2023

Quicklinks: 16-22 January 2023

Let’s start off with something cute; wolves playing in the snow.

Swapped an SD card on Saturday and realized we got some dynamite footage of the Nashata Pack! Here is a snippet for some Monday morning zen…enjoy a few moments of a couple wolves being wolves in a snowstorm! pic.twitter.com/ebZRdz5akQ

— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) January 16, 2023

And here’s some good news for animals; New York became the 10^th US state to ban the sale of cosmetics which were tested on animals!

I’ve seen this in quite a few places, it’s a piece arguing that PhD training needs to be reformed. Now I’m not saying that PhD training (or universities in general) are perfect, they’re not. There are many things that can be improved but I don’t think this article is on the right track. In my opinion, many of the sort of issues that the article talks about are neither failings of PhD nor university education but a failure of society and expectations. A degree at any level is not supposed to prepare people for jobs. It’s supposed to provide domain-specific knowledge while building general skills in critical thinking, research and learning. It’s up to employers to provide job-specific training. There is also a problem of credential inflation where even basic jobs now require a degree, no matter how unnecessary that is. Furthermore, while I fully agree that we should value PhD graduates and that they can help find solutions to various problems, I think framing that as a key role of PhD training is sorely misguided. I say that because we don’t need more solutions! Look at the biggest problem of today – global warming. We already have renewable energy options, we know how to build public transport, we know how to make food more sustainable, we know we can cut back on consumption. The problems are not scientific, they are political. There is no political will to make the necessary changes. Most other big problems, from Russia’s war in Ukraine, censorship, human rights, equality and so on, those are all political problems that we can, in principle, solve today.

Quicklinks: 9-15 January 2023

I did not forget! I’m just slow.

This was a bit of a surprise for me! France’s longest land border is with… Brazil! This is all due to French Guiana.

friday geography quiz: who does france share its longest border with?

bet you weren’t gonna say brazil

ht @simongerman600 pic.twitter.com/T9NDxcN1sx

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) January 13, 2023

This is just a cool tweet about vivipary.

In plants, vivipary occurs when seeds or embryos begin to develop before they detach from the parent. These strawberries are an example: they're growing tiny green leaves from the seeds on their outer skin

[photos: https://t.co/LD27hdZ62E]
[read more: https://t.co/Pymmdzu07j] pic.twitter.com/ubV6xRopzC

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 9, 2023

I would like to see humans and animals coexisting peacefully, so I was heartened to read about this couple that decided to let a bear keep hibernating beneath their deck.

Quicklinks: 1-8 January 2023

In the early years of my blog, I occasionally did a “quicklinks” post which just included links to items of interest and a brief description. I didn’t do too many and that sort of short interaction was later taken over by Twitter. In an attempt to boost my activity, if not full-length posts, I thought I might try doing a weekly set of quicklinks that I’ve shared on Twitter. It will not necessarily include everything I see and share there but, hopefully, the most interesting and informative links.

The Royal Society reports that Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, was born yesterday in 1823.

Alfred Russel Wallace FRS was born #OnThisDay in 1823. He independently conceived of the theory of #evolution by natural selection and his work prompted Charles Darwin to publish 'On the Origin of Species'. Wallace laid the foundations of modern biogeography. pic.twitter.com/IQNxoZuiAF

— The Royal Society (@royalsociety) January 8, 2023

I have yet to read the original article, but, apparently, ancient tools discovered in Brazil, which were previously considered to be evidence of some of the first humans in South America, were likely created by capuchin monkeys.

Commentary: The Moralbiont

Product concepts made with fungal leather (Image: Mylo)

This is the companion piece to my short story, The Moralbiont. It will discuss some of the references and science from the story. If you have not read the story yet, I would highly advise reading it first.

The conversation between Olivia and her grandfather about his thesis supposedly being covered in cow skin is a reference to a question from the Voight-Kampff test. In the Blade Runner franchise, the Voight-Kampff test is administered to those suspected of being a replicant, a human-like android lacking empathy. By monitoring the physiological responses to questions about shocking or repellent situations, you are able to tell if the subject is a real human or a replicant. I have neither seen Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner film nor read the original novel by Philip K. Dick but I did play the 1997 video-game which is where I became aware of the question.

Like my briefcase? Department issue, baby hide. 100% genuine human baby hide.