This is a huge effort, and an essential resource for anyone studying captive ape behaviour. Congratulations to all involved! 🦧 🦍 🧪

An underwater photo of the Orion vehicle heat shield. It’s a domed, tiled structure in shades of blue-green, with lighter streaks from re-entry. It has an eye-like marking on the lower left.

NASA claims this is an underwater photo of the Artemis Orion heat shield after its recent return to Earth.

But then why does it have one baleful eye staring at me? What does it know/want??

www.nasa.gov/missions/nas...

I'm so honored to have received this award in memory of Frans de Waal for my PhD thesis! His work (and briefly working with him) truly shaped my scientific thinking and research.

@mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

black and white lino print. four figures in dark hooded robes stand in a small boat; one facing forwards with a bormal beak. one facing towards us with a single eye in their forehead. one facing away from us. one facing away with a three-part beak. the water is just squiggly lines. underneath in a frame text says “we’re coming to help”

they’re coming to help

A page of an ebook headed ‘This is just the beginning’, followed by links to a number of social media sites for Penguin books, including Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.

Finding this at the end of @naomialderman.bsky.social’s superb book Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today felt like a bit like satire. Her cautions against endless, overwhelming information haven’t reached the Penguin marketing department 📚

What do we love more than chunky orca babies? Chunky AIRBORNE orca babies! Check out these spectacular shots of 2-year-old T46B2B "Takaya" taken a few days ago in Port Susan, Washington by Bart Rulon of @pugetsoundexpress.com.

Congrats to all the Locus finalists, including @premeemohamed.com for best collection for One Message Remains. Go read it! 📚

A European common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) wearing a pair of red and blue 3D glasses. They look cool as fuck. Their arms are reaching out and they have a sandy striped pattern

A European common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) wearing a pair of red and blue 3D glasses swimming just above the ground. They look very cool. They have a yellow sandy beige colour.

A European common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) wearing a pair of red and blue 3D glasses sitting on the ground. Their two centre arms are raised and reaching back while the other limbs rest on the ground. They have a grey colour with brown spots. They look extremely cool.

A European common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) wearing a pair of red and blue 3D glasses reaching for a projection of a shrimp. They look pretty cool. They have a sandy brown colour.

In 2019, scientists velcro'd 3D glasses to European common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis)

They didn't do this just to make them look cool as fuck, but in order to study their vision. Using a 3D theatre made for the cuttlefish, they were able to test if cuttlefish have stereo vision (they do!)

A female kakapo on a nest facing the camera, with a young chick in front of her. Credit: Andrew Digby

This year's #kakapo breeding season has been the biggest on record:
- 256 eggs (252 in 2019)
- 148 fertile eggs (116 in 2019)
- 105 eggs hatched (86 in 2019).
It'll be 2+ months until we know how many chicks will fledge (73 in 2019). There are currently 95 alive. #conservation #kakapo2026 #birds

This 2024 paper from Jen-tse Huang makes a start on LLM shame. Although they prefer ‘guilt’ as the guiding term.

LLMs show appropriate guilty responses to prompts. But without ongoing memory I don’t know how a shamed LLM instance can learn to change its actions. Or why a military would allow it to!

🐟+🐚 =🏠 Shell-dwelling cichlids are true underwater architects, instinctively transforming empty snail shells into protective nests. New research shows: They improve with practice, remember what they learned, and adapt to unusual conditions.

🔗 Press release: www.bi.mpg.de/news/2026-04...

a complex biosphere in vivid color in an illustrative style inside a circle and outside all white with shadow, with suggestion of complex ferns and other vegetation; art by rogan brown

Thrilled that my first new short story in several years, "Constellations," about astronauts crashlanding on a distant planet, has been published by the @technologyreview.com. Acquiring editor Rachel Cortland. Art by Rogan Brown. Free link to avoid the paywall: ter.li/r3tbrsgr

I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸

We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto.

The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.

Just got the lovely news that our article on why female capuchin monkeys 🐒 on Jicarón island do not use tools (see 🧵below) is in the top 10 most-cited articles published by the American Journal of Primatology in 2024 @wiley.com #TopCitedArticle #openaccess

An insect that cooperates like bacteria | PNAS An insect that cooperates like bacteria

Read our perspective piece on a brilliant new piece of work out in @pnas.org studying public goods in an insect. Congratulations to the team! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @caritalindstedt.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social

Me judging myself every time I snack when I should be writing

the antidote to AI foolishness is intellectual seriousness seven principles for creative people (and everyone else). it's not *difficult* but you have to *use your brain and think about it*

A long piece this week on the various kinds of AI foolishness I have seen lately. Tl;dr: in your professional life, do not use technologies in which you have no expertise and with which you have not engaged critically?! It’s not that complicated?!

open.substack.com/pub/naomiald...

The Earth, a blue marble with swirling white clouds. A chunk of tan-colored land can be seen. I’m pretty sure it’s Northern Africa and a bit of the Iberian Peninsula. At opposite poles of the globe are thin green lines that match the curvature of the earth and extend for about 5% of its circumference. If my geography is correct, the Northern Lights are nearer to the bottom of the image and the Southern lights are near the top. A small bit of shine from the window of the spacecraft can be seen in the middle of the image.

The Northern Lights from a different angle.

The Earth seen from the Artemis II.

Time for giant bugs again

MODERN giant bugs

Huge giant terrifying bugs with transit passes and laptops

NASA logo

NASA's live feed on the Artemis launch is here, and it's just started broadcasting:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_U...

I don't anticipate much happening for a while - the launch is currently scheduled for 11:24pm UK time. But keep an eye on the feed and share the link.

The rare Orkney Vole is on the rise! 😍

you can listen to my interview about The Amazons of Themiscyra and Wonder Women set to music by Scottish composer Erland Cooper for BBC's Cities of the Imagination:
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/792rp...

Great method to measure hierarchical organization in nut cracking, one of the most complex types of animal tool use observed till now. See how the chimpanzees at @taichimpproject.bsky.social are doing this. For videos visit our youtube channel www.youtube.com/@taichimpanz...

Pigeons laying their eggs in Saw traps is now my go-to example of how evolution works with what it's got, and is absolutely not planning ahead or "designing" towards a goal

Like how could a dinosaur have foreseen needle nests

What better way to start my lecture on the evolution of language? Thanks Joan. @harvard.edu

Screenshot from the 2023 Barbie film of Allan, played by Michael Cera, standing awkwardly on a beach.

New report of a wild sperm whale birth shows humans & cetaceans aren’t so different 🐳 🏖️

“The adolescent male (Allan, whale #6088) was consistently avoided, as indicated by predominantly negative attention metrics despite several attempts to interact with the group”

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Tomb of the Eagles, Orkney Explore the Tomb of the Eagles, a 5,000-year-old Stone Age tomb on the dramatic cliffs of Orkney’s South Ronaldsay.

'We bought a tomb' sounds like the start of a horror film, but it's actually the start of a great day out! Orkney's famous Tomb of the Eagles is now wholly community owned, and in one week we're re-opening for our first big season since COVID.

Wednesday 1 April at 10am. Not an April Fool's joke 🏺💀🎉

New OA paper @royalsocietypublishing.org: What can we learn from bonobos and bottlenose dolphins about the evolution of between-group cooperation?

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Lovely collab with @lirsamuni.bsky.social Martin Surbeck and Richard Connor.