Heatmap figure showing how relative disparity error changes across different trait models, ancestral state estimation approaches and fossil sampling densities

New preprint🚨happy to share work from my first PhD chapter, evaluating the ways in which we can integrate ancestral state estimations into disparity workflows, completed alongside @tguillerme.bsky.social , Gavin Thomas & @nhcooper123.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪

Tiny African fish caught climbing to the top of a 50-foot waterfall For over half a century, people in Central Africa have told tales of the fish seen climbing waterfalls, but these claims have never been officially confirmed. Now, these fish have finally been caught ...

Tiny shellear fish in central Africa scale a 50-foot vertical waterfall using suction cups and tiny hooks. This convergent evolution places them with some island gobies and Brazilian bumblebee catfish, who all do world class bouldering. 🐟🌍

phys.org/news/2026-04...

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

Mel Giedroyc dressed as Mary Anning during a comedy sketch.

Maisie Adam looking confused and asking ‘who?’

Mary Anning mentioned in Last One Laughing s2! (random but absolutely welcome)

What on earth. New depths of corruption

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

War Child 2020 .. Ralph Lawson In The Mix YouTube video by 2020Vision

Big up Ralph Lawson for going 20 hours (and 20 minutes) in the mix for @warchilduk.bsky.social . You can donate here: justgiving.com/page/warchil...

Scene from "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Look, I'm sure that Nolan's adaptation of "The Odyssey" will be fun, but I highly doubt it will be as good as the original.

Can’t recommend this enough, a hilarious take on all the idiosyncrasies of “extreme birding”

First time watching Apocalypse Now last night… 10/10 but why does FF Coppola make me wait 2 hours to reveal Kurtz only for Baron Harkonnen to turn up

University of Sheffield staff 'intimidated' by pay forfeit warning University of Sheffield to withhold pay if staff do not make up for teaching missed while striking.

Great to see media coverage of the hostile and punitive approach taken by management at @sheffielduni.bsky.social towards @sheffielducu.bsky.social staff striking to protect jobs. Threats and intimidation won't work. We're out until we win!
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

#Sheffield peeps, please help our friends in Nether Edge/Sharrow Vale. Comment on plan for new MacDonalds that would threaten local business, public health, & much more.🤮
@sheffgreenparty.bsky.social @sheffcitycouncil.bsky.social @helpsheffield.co.uk
planningapps.sheffield.gov.uk/online-appli...

When we said we don't intend to be concerned or disappointed by the Labour Government - we intend to replace them, we meant it.

Yougov have Labours lowest poll ever and Greens highest ever.

Keep going everybody.

Join.greenparty.org.uk

Mixes Digest 22: Remembering Optimo’s JD Twitch 8 enduring sets from the late Keith McIvor (plus links to 20 more)

I wrote a little about Optimo's JD Twitch futurismrestated.substack.com/p/mixes-dige...

Cooper suggests asylum seekers could be moved into warehouses instead of hotels – UK politics live Home secretary says government aims to ‘shrink the whole asylum system’ and is looking at ‘military and industrial sites’

When centrists adopt far-right rhetoric, they don’t make themselves stronger. They make themselves look inauthentic, legitimise the far right, and shift the political debate onto terrain defined by their opponents.
www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Call me crazy but I’m taking Guehi over Isak anyday… #LFC #deadlineday

Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 24th Aug 2025 An exclusive, I think: the story of Sheffield's first baby salmon for over 250 years. Plus more on how Sheffield could do better.

Salmon in Sheffield !!

Google Sign in is dunkin cereal milk gluten fr Al Overview +1 No, Dunkin' Cereal Milk is not gluten-free because it contains milk, which is a common allergen, and as a result, it is not suitable for those with celiac disease or gluten intolerance. However, coffee drinks, dairy milk, and non-dairy milks like oat, almond, and coconut milk are naturally gluten-free at Dunkin'.

In 25 years, every business school in the country will be doing case studies about how a long defunct company known as “Google” once had an unbeatable lock on online information retrieval and then started doing shit like this.

Alta Via 1 ✅
80km, 4000m elevation and 500 ciao’s later, one of the toughest but most rewarding things I’ve done.

Stoat in dense vegetation

Saw my first ever stoat this weekend… even got the photo to go with it so that iNaturalist believes me🤪

This doesn’t bode well

A twitter post explaining how you can “save PNGs to birds” by converting a drawing of a bird into a spectrogram then playing it to a starling who sung it back, reproducing the PNG.

Can’t wait to introduce bird-based storage into my backup system

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

The Greens now have nearly 200 more councillors than Reform.

This is not something you'd be likely to guess from all the copiously salivating media coverage of Farage & his crew of billionaire-backed far-right chancers.

Hamlet Hail to the Thief. So good.

"WE'VE ARRANGED A society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

Grand Theft Hamlet tonight, Hamlet Hail to the Thief tomorrow. A very tragic bank holiday weekend

Labour's disastrous plight is very easy to understand.

The people who run the party were good at one thing: smashing the left.

Destroying, not building, is their skill. They have no vision for the country. They're in power because the Tories imploded, and no other reason.