@tdwg.org #TDWG2026 opportunity! contribute to this #digitalcuration #roundtripping topic at the conference and in the BDJ. @sharifx.bsky.social @nickynicolson.bsky.social @miketrizna.bsky.social @evomri.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy @aguentsch.bsky.social @njdowdy.bsky.social @cabbageleek.bsky.social

We'll do almost anything to avoid building actual trains.

"Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has said he is open to the idea that Claude may already have some form of consciousness, and company leaders frequently talk about the need to give it a moral character."

This is a sales pitch, and journalism that doesn't highlight this has failed.

Tony Blair calls for more North Sea drilling to protect against shocks of Iran war Former prime minister’s think tank says Labour should back Jackdaw and Rosebank oil and gas fields

Least surprising story of the day: fossil fuel lobbyist of two decades (who was PM before that), lobbies for fossil fuels

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Reposting here to see if anyone can help. @gbif.org @taxonworks.bsky.social @naturalis.bsky.social

Reading Notes Against Purity and Fear of a Dead White Planet

open.substack.com/pub/sadnewsl...

The Sith Lord of the Sea: Supergiant Isopod in the WoRMS’ Top 10 Marine Species of 2025 | Blog Supergiant isopod named after Darth Vader joins the prestigious World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) top 10 Marine Species of 2025.

🎉Happy Taxonomist Appreciation Day!

We're thrilled to see 𝘉𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘺𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘶𝘴 𝘷𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘪 featured in the World Register of Marine Species @marinespecies.bsky.social Top 10 Marine Species of 2025.

🌌🪐Meet the Sith Lord of the sea on our blog 👇

#TaxonomistAppreciationDay #marinebiology #taxonomy #biodiversity

Pentagon seeks more than $200 billion in budget request for Iran war That figure would far surpass the costs of the U.S. airstrike campaign to date and aims to boost production of critical weapons depleted in the conflict, people familiar with the matter said.

$200 billion could fund the National Science Foundation for 20 years.

Michael Mann: Yes, we can still stop the worst effects of climate change. Here's why. Opinion: State-of-the-art climate models show warming stops once we stop emitting carbon. That means there's still time to stop the worst impacts of climate change.

Please see this commentary I wrote for @livescience.com that summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding the "zero emissions commitment" (how much warming we expect once emissions decrease to zero). Our best estimate is that the ZEC is very close to 0C:
www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

great stuff by @davekarpf.bsky.social

"Journal articles aren’t social science. They’re just a unit of measurement. They’re how we keep score. Producing journal articles isn’t what we are actually meant to be doing — we’re supposed to be learning meaningful things about people, power, and society."

🆕 The @biogeneurope.bsky.social project - which now gives way to BGE+ - represented a landmark in European research collaboration, bringing together the #DNAbarcoding (@iboleurope.bsky.social) and #reference #genomes (@ergabiodiv.bsky.social) communities.

🔓 Grant Proposal: doi.org/10.3897/rio.....

U.S. Strikes in Middle East Use Anthropic, Hours After Trump Ban Within hours of declaring that the federal government will end its use of artificial-intelligence tools made by tech company Anthropic, President Trump launched a major air attack in Iran with the hel...

Wait, so did Claude tell them to bomb a girl’s school?!

"We want the murder software to murder accurately" isn't the absolution everyone seems to think it is. Anthropic is enacting a huge PR campaign and too many people are helping them

If you are interesting why these strikes happened right after we received news that the US-Iran talks went reasonably well though without breakthrough, Lord Ricketts has an excellent explainer.

🆕 Latest research in @dissco.bsky.social's #openscience collection illustrates a Machine Learning as a Service approach for quantitative analysis of #herbarium #specimens.

🌿 Subsequently, DiSSCO's models are used to calculate surface area of identified #plant organs.

🔓 See: doi.org/10.3897/rio....

it's not just that Mamdani is charming af (he is), it's that he is normalizing the idea that children are full members of society that we all share a collective responsibility for

FAIR digital twins for biodiversity: enabling data, model, and workflow integration - npj Biodiversity npj Biodiversity - FAIR digital twins for biodiversity: enabling data, model, and workflow integration

🌿 New paper: "FAIR Digital Twins for biodiversity"
Combining #DigitalTwins with #FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) addresses data fragmentation & model integration using #RO-Crate.
Thanks to co-authors & BioDT team! @horizoneu.bsky.social
📄 doi.org/10.1038/s441...

Some big diffs between citizen science observations (from iNaturalist) and specimen records (from digitised museum collections) - cit. sci records biased towards large inverts & exotic spp. Great MSc project with recommendations 🌏🧪@nzhymenoptera.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We need to focus less on charismatic species and more on where they live
->Scimex | #Biodiversity #Species | More from Lil Dr Glen EcoChat at BigEarthData.ai

Help the Biodiversity Heritage Library Take Flight After nearly two decades under the Smithsonian Institution, the Biodiversity Heritage Library needs to become fully independent by 1 January 2026. Help #GiveBHLWings this Giving Tuesday and support…

🌿 It’s #GivingTuesday! Help the Biodiversity Heritage Library take flight as we count down to independence on 1 Jan 2026. Your gift helps #GiveBHLWings – keeping 500 years of biodiversity knowledge open & accessible worldwide. #ILoveBHL 🧪 📖 🌏
💚 Donate now:

Glad to see mention of @orcid.org. FYI: @dissco.bsky.social is working on providing DOI to each digital specimen so attribution can be linked to specimen instead of datasets. Check: disscover.dissco.eu. Also digitalSpecimenID is now an approved TDWG term: github.com/tdwg/dwc/iss... 🪩 #FAIRdata

Oh! The irony 😂

Who and What to Watch as the World Gathers for COP30 Climate Talks The U.S. won't be at the COP30 climate talks, but dozens of governors and mayors will. Here's a guide to who at what to watch.

"A COP is a bit like a potluck dinner," @katharinehayhoe.com said. Each participant brings an offering to the table and "it's obvious who took the time to bake and who dug out the frozen chicken nuggets." 🙃

#COP30

also. Current tools do different things: GNVerifier=string matching, Wikidata=curated ID links. entity res does MORE. for : relationship graphs, ML from past decisions, network effects (like '10 specimens use spelling A, so specimen 11 with spelling B is likely the same'). Auto-resolution etc.

it's about the techniques enterprise/industry uses to solve these problems that we can learn/borrow.

Wikidata does mapping but that's different from entity res. Wikidata: 'these IDs are related/refer to this taxon'. Enterprise entity resolution: 'these messy records are probably the same entity' using probabilistic scoring. What I'm brainstorming (in my post) is that we need both.

Yes. Maintenance and sustainability always a challenge. So that is why I am trying to look at this from entity resolution instead of another global ID. Ideally there could be many types of these mappings. If banks and companies can do this with customer data why can’t we?? 🧐

One Species -> Many IDs: Applying enterprise "Entity Resolution" to Biodiversity Data Here's a crazy idea. What if we treat species identifiers in the biodiversity data landscape the same way commercial organisations treat customers? Hear me out.

Love to hear your thought on this. @rdmpage.bsky.social @dshorthouse.bsky.social @debpaul.bsky.social 🦉 I wrote a post on treating species identifiers with the same rigour as enterprise entity resolution. Not a new idea but we have to think about the scale. www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-sp...

A BMD survey gathers input to guide the design of project's online toolbox The BMD project is inviting Europe’s natural site managers to take part in a survey on the monitoring and analysis needs of protected and restored natural sites. The survey seeks input on biodive...

bmd-project.eu/news/new-sur... The @bmd-project.eu is inviting Europe’s natural site managers to take part in a survey on the monitoring and analysis needs of protected and restored natural sites. #Biodiversity #Natura2000 @eea.europa.eu

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!