I went looking for a setting to shut this off the other day as well only to be horrified that it doesn't exist. I do not want it, urgh!

Indonesia’s deforestation surges 66% in 2025 A sharp reversal after several years of decline, according to new data from the NGO Auriga Nusantara.…

Deforestation in Indonesia surged 66% from 2024 to 2025, when more than 433,000 hectares were lost, according to the NGO Auriga Nusantara.

The country reached historic low deforestation in 2021, when around 230,000 hectares were cleared. By Hans Nicholas Jong for
@mongabay.com:

There's so many! I hope that people record some of them again (in a publicly available data way)

Even in the super touristy islands of Bali and Lombok there are plant species which haven't been collected for over 100 years. Our new checklist highlights all the plants found in the Lesser Sundas (southern Indonesia and Timor-Leste) and nowhere else in the world.

I'm not sure if calling the Amazon a "man made feature" is right though, it's still a natural ecosystem, just more dynamic than the primordial unchanging wilderness we assumed it was

Yeah, it's so cool. It's known as terra preta if you fancy looking up more

Things that work: giant rocket, very precise math, orbital mechanics, cameras, iPhones

Things that don’t work: Microsoft Outlook, toilets, sat phones

Greyscale map of the Lesser Sunda islands (the island chain between Bali and Timor) with orange dots representing mapped herbarium specimen collections

New paper! A checklist of the plants endemic to the Lesser Sunda Islands (S Indonesia and Timor-Leste). For conservation we need to know where these plants are and if they are threatened, and we know so little about either. 51 species haven't been seen in >120 years!
doi.org/10.3897/phyt...

Greyscale map of the Lesser Sunda islands (the island chain between Bali and Timor) with orange dots representing mapped herbarium specimen collections

New paper! A checklist of the plants endemic to the Lesser Sunda Islands (S Indonesia and Timor-Leste). For conservation we need to know where these plants are and if they are threatened, and we know so little about either. 51 species haven't been seen in >120 years!
doi.org/10.3897/phyt...

Rose hip syrup is delicious, I once helped my grandmother make it from UK wild roses, but I never thought about roses having fruit cultivars, that's cool

Ooh hello 👋 I'll send you a photo of the Kew rose garden when it's in bloom. I don't know much about roses but I really love the smell of them.

While space is in the news: A City on Mars is a fun and accessible read about the biological (and legal) realities of humans space flight

This thread and the Zachary Taylor paper mentioned here are great reads (link in case you have access / can find elsewhere
doi.org/10.1016/j.ac... )

This is so, so well-articulated.

Fuel duty is *already* 34p per litre lower, in real terms, than in 2010

Its been frozen or cut for 15 years

Its cost the Treasury over £200bn in tax - and hugely incentivised people to keep using ICE cars and driving. It's favoured the richest

If anything we should be restoring it to 2010 levels

I think "you cannot kill me in a way that matters" every time I see a mushroom

I knew some of the stones had been put back upright, but not about the concrete

I'm sorry "live beaver cam"?!

We do senior author last

Yes I hate this as well for the reasons you say, but also they are often great lichen habitats (some species are rare and they're hard to identify)

Maybrat is in the central Bird's Head and the whole area is gazetted for logging. If they're finding undescribed mammals imagine how many plants / beetles / fish there are.

Marsupials previously thought extinct for millennia discovered in New Guinea The chances of finding one mammal species thought to be lost was ‘almost zero’ and finding two is ‘unprecedented’, biologist Tim Flannery says

"Two charismatic marsupial species that had been thought extinct for 6,000 years are alive in rainforest in remote West Papua."

Oh yeah this is super cool as both the pygmy long-fingered possum and ring-tailed glider were previously only known from fossils 🤯🧪🐀
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Way more educational than any earworm has a right to be (I love it)

"I asked Chat GPT and -" ok, I asked the exhumed corpse of Pope Formosus during the Cadaver Synod and he went "... ... ..." and then his jaw fell off and it was still a better answer

Thank you, I have been wondering about this since seeing the rock

oh yeah this is actually a really interesting case about not only who owns the data in these museums, but what happens when one government goes into a public-private partnership

the Belgian museum wants to digitise and openly publish this data themselves, but the private company maybe less so...

I know it’s intentional but we should stop calling everything AI, lumping useful machine learning techniques for science with large language models that tech companies are trying to cram into everything.

I think getting the right lane is a harder problem than they assume. It's not even a 'magic' type roundabout but Google maps absolutely cannot handle the two bridges roundabout in Bracknell.

TLDR; it is too early to stop doing taxonomic & natural history work and exclusively do meta-analysis; our existing datasets are highly structured & biology is weird. we shouldn't assume we already know enough to extrapolate a species' needs for conservation- we still need taxonomy & autecology

Congratulations!