"I entered in good faith, working with the mining company to help determine whether or not deep-sea mining at Solwara I could be conducted with minimal harm to the marine environment. I exited convinced that there is no viable path forward for hydrothermal vent mining, anywhere in the ocean."
"The natural dynamics of the site present the possibility that the ecosystems it supports could be resilient to mining impacts. Solwara I already experiences natural disturbance. Perhaps it could endure a little unnatural disturbance, too?
It wasn’t a bad hypothesis, but it needed to be tested."
"When I set sail on the MV NorSky in the summer of 2008 to probe the depths of Manus Basin off the coast of Papua New Guinea, I believed in the promise of deep-sea mining..."
news.mongabay.com/2026/04/deep...
I miss these. The mint ones are trash!
A screenshot of an instagram story that says “you’re telling me a fat licked this bread?” Over a photo of a deleted gar and the heel of a baguette
@solomonrdavid.bsky.social check out this amazing felted gar!!! Handmade by local artists here in Newfoundland www.instagram.com/luckywormart...
Here's an awesome natural history humanities PhD opportunity, working with Cambridge University Library & our insect & archive collections here at @zoologymuseum.bsky.social, exploring the links between entomology, life writing & environmental change. Please share!
www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/initiatives/...
Capitalism tries to make products seem like necessities. But they aren’t. They’re products. This is marketing. And you can say no to bad products.
Every week I see a post like “well, Silicon Valley has built a dick-breaking machine. No matter how you feel about getting your dick broken, it’s our responsibility to integrate mechanical dick-breaking into our schools.”
Finishing off where #DOGE left off. "Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration.
Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing." www.nature.com/articles/d41...
A full disc image of Earth, as seen from the Orion Crew Module. The planet is a pale blue, swirling with white clouds and glowing slightly lighter blue in place from reflected light. At lower left, a large brown landmass is Africa, with Spain and Portugal with twinkling lights where the planet curves. At top right, auroras glow in a thin green glow, just barely separated from the planet's surface. Earth is set against the black of space (pic: NASA/R.Wiseman)
More context on this #Artemis II image:
* This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right
* The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon:
☀️🌍🚀🌕
"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."
This is so, so well-articulated.
The waternotcoal.ca petition is still moving forward.
Join us in protecting our drinking water! #ableg #abpoli #cdnpoli
The policy described would violate rules of international law prohibiting (i) the destruction of property without absolute military necessity & (ii) forced displacement.
The former is a war crime, the latter a war crime & crime against humanity. I discussed this with Reuters here:
reut.rs/4dStXyu
Free newsletter: The Subprime AI Crisis is here. I explore the disturbing parallels between the run-up to the global financial crisis and the heavily-subsidized AI bubble, and how Anthropic and OpenAI's rush to IPO accelerates the crisis further.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/
a blonde dude with lots of tattoos and jeffrey dahmer glasses looks moodily at the camera with a Very Cool t-shirt with a goth girl on it, surrounded by flowers. Underneath it says Plant Native Plants
A person with glasses in a lovely backyard and long brown hair wears a black t-shirt that says biology is bigger than binaries with a honeybee, lily, and clownfish on it
We have 2 cool shirts! I have to sell them out by early April for 2 reasons:
1) 5 of my family members are staying in the Skype a Scientist stockroom in mid-April 😅
2) I need to fund our mural project which starts the first week of April!
They're soft! They're cute! Get a shirt!
SquidFacts.net
A small price to pay for poorly written meeting summaries
For serious tho. We have a provincial holiday for St. Patrick’s day and St. George’s day and everyone in St. John’s gets the first Wednesday of August off to watch the boat races (Regatta Day), unless it’s too windy, in which case it is postponed until the following day.
"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.
Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice."
But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs".
Am I losing my mind?
If you are interested in doing high-impact, public-facing research ... Join Our Research Team! We are hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. socialmedialab.ca/2026/03/04/p... #PhDSky #AcademicSky #comsky
This was a fucking masterclass in interviewing.
Crucial for any of us whose work has become fodder for AI churn in this dystopian hellscape
but also just a hell of an interview for ANYONE on capitalism and exploitation, and what CEOs really think of you:
This is one of the most important issues with the global food system, yet it is often ignored.
Put simply, we don't actually grow much *food* in our farms around the world. Instead, we grow grossly inefficient animal feed and biofuels.
drawdown.org/news/only-ha...
"Nation-building! Something, something, Canada Strong!"
Employment and Social Development:
❌ 1,500 jobs
Health Canada:
❌ 942 jobs
Environment and Climate Change Canada:
❌ 837 jobs
Statistics Canada:
❌ 700+ jobs
Canada Food Inspection Agency:
❌ 542 jobs
#CdnPoli
China is winning because the US gave up. #DOGECuts
I got you!
@hormiga.bsky.social & related to my comment on your recent post about risk taking
As one of the authors of this thought I’d share a bit about how we got here and how you can do what we’ve done at you institution.
Over the two years I’ve been at the University of Edinburgh I’ve grown increasingly concerned by fellow academics uncritically using LLMs, especially OpenAIs’s ChatGPT.
Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."
