At least you live in the future!

Did you all feel it? We totally needed an earthquake on the night of the biggest blackout in SF history. 😳

M 4.6 - 2 km ESE of Berkeley, CA Link: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc...

God that was a big one. #quake

You spell Sicilian food like a local 💯

Fun to see my photo of this extraordinary mountain chicken from Peru featured on iNat 😍

New funding opportunity for Wikimedia-related research! Grants up to $150K available. Apply by April 16th:
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:...

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

FAQs from openRxiv.org

No, this is a new, independent non-profit organization with expanded leadership, a governing board, and funding. The servers are now run by this organization but they continue to operate with the same brand and nothing is changing for authors or readers. See the FAQs see: openrxiv.org/about/

Today marks the beginning of OpenRxiv, which replaces bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world's largest preprint platform for life and medical science
openrxiv.org/introducing-...
@openrxiv.bsky.social

Preprint sites bioRxiv and medRxiv launch new era of independence The popular repositories, where life scientists post research before peer review, will be managed by a new organization called openRxiv.

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

We did a thing

I wish there was a citation for this stat - this is mind blowing to me - "Already, a mere 10 percent of reviewers are responsible for 50 percent of all reviews." Not only is this not sustainable but has to lead to a very narrow perspective on the research. Wow.

We’re witnessing a Brexit-level instance of completely unnecessary economic destruction. A country that’s not hit by any shock, but simply chooses policy self-harm.

18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was just demolished by Musk’s team. It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 million.

A thread about 18F:

18f were a bunch of badasses who actually *did* make government more efficient in a way that actually worked. And they did it while also being good people who cared deeply for the work, for each other, and for the people that used it.

💯

Genus Diaphania Diaphania from Pueblo Rico, Pueblo Rico, Risaralda, CO on December 27, 2022 at 08:07 PM by Dario Taraborelli

Same genus as this Diaphania from Colombia? www.inaturalist.org/observations...

This hit so hard today.

These are jobs the private sector just can’t replace, these are people whose intimate knowledge of places and ecosystems, accumulated through years and years of service, just can’t be rebuilt. We’re collectively losing so much when they’re gone.

lovely

Great day today: uploading Data on Commons for one of the most iconic books in @biodivlibrary.bsky.social :

The Birds of America!
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categor...

+ a selection of nice birds

1/7 - green dots show images with species reconciled to Wikidata (via Flickr tags)

I have a piece half-done on the entire world of indirect costs. It's too big an endeavor to finish now, in the middle of the night, when this problem *that was always a live grenade with a half-pulled pin* is suddenly a topic du jour. Shit of a thing.

Here are some highlights.

Photo of a Southern Crag-Martin flying

Southern Crag-Martin (Ptyonoprogne fuligula fuligula). Western Cape, South Africa

A screenshot from Duolingo asking to translate the sentence “the government caused some crises”

Duolingo right now:

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025 by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Topics cdc, government, united states, dataset, archive Language English Item Size 98.5G An archive of all CDC datasets uploaded to https://data.cdc.gov/browse before January 28th, 2025. Excludes corrupt datasets and data not publicly accessible.

The entire archive of all CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025 has been backed up on Internet Archive.

Incredible work everyone. Science will never be silenced!

SciScore and bioRxiv Launch New Key Resource Tables for Preprints, Pioneering New Era of Reproducibility & Transparency Surfacing reagents and resources

SciScore and @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social Launch New Key Resource Tables for Preprints, Pioneering a New Era of Reproducibility and Transparency in Life Science Research world.einnews.com/article/7829... cc @chanzuckerberg.bsky.social

Stunning

Orange-breasted Sunbird (Anthobaphes violacea)

Orange-breasted Sunbird (Anthobaphes violacea)