Kale Sniderman

"the algorithmic university might be unsustainable, but that doesn’t make it anomalous, so much as exemplary. It is entirely compatible with a carbon economy that can’t continue and yet somehow does." theconversation.com/friday-essay...

The water had just dried up and left these Isoetes sp. in the dry! I imagine they would have been getting ready to release spores! Amazing little non-flowering plant!

Absolutely

Luxury consumption of phosphorus and calcium. It's an outrage and it should be stopped

This is why exponents were invented www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New Article: "Extreme greenhouse warmth triggered the two major floristic turnover events of the past 120 million years" rdcu.be/as2QWt5eukua Extinctions/emergence of flowering plants, gymnosperms & ferns were concentrated in the 2 warmest intervals of the past 130 My. #PlantScience

Though just barely - *Maastrichtian* fruit eaters, which is maybe kind of unsurprising

Cretaceous fruit eaters www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Paleobotanists, come be our colleague at the wonderful Yale Peabody Museum! apply.interfolio.com/194803

Actually here is the freely readable version rdcu.be/a842YdGP66ba

Over the past 120 Myr, most evolutionary change in fossil spore-pollen floras (floristic turnover: both extinctions & originations), at high- & low-palaeolatitudes, is concentrated within two periods of extreme warm climate. Cooler eras are comparatively uneventful.🌱🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pterostylis pedunculata (maroon hood), Erskine Falls, Otways (leaves speckled with silt) 🌱🧪

Bogong Moths are deservedly getting all the attention but we are in serious Utetheisa pulchelloides season – the heliotrope moth – with clouds of white moths rising from the ground everywhere as we walk along in the bush (this photo is not mine, of these flighty fellas) 🧪

Recursive self improvement likely outcomes #73 pbfcomics.com/wp-content/u...

The animals have had enough and they're fighting back abcnews.com/US/biting-ra...

Proteacidites punctiporus in action

What is so weirdly deficient about this town square, that the blogpost below has less than a dozen likes?

Turing test v. 327

I may gently correct @doctorow.pluralistic.net's geophysics projections but the Enshittocene is the only post-Holocene -cene worth two cents

I acknowledge that 500 years of thermodynamics is a lot to ask the public to digest, @doctorow.pluralistic.net, but sea level is unlikely to have stabilised 500 years from now (eg see Turner's Fig 5) agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... m.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqC...

*Of course* it was 'unlawful' in any meaningful sense; *of course* it was a crime against humanity,; *of course* Britain is obliged to provide restitution www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-i...

Annals of paleoecology: shifting baselines

As once-extinct diseases sweep through America, sickening, maiming and killing, the wild lunacy of anti-vax superstition grows ever more difficult to excuse.

It's surely not just me that finds that GPT's Luna is a bit of an idiot, lacking executive function altogether

The database will surely be as boring as batshit, but this is a great initiative to help us understand which sediments do, or don't, preserve fossil pollen 10.1016/j.revpalbo.2026.105710

Totally spesh

Very fine Quaternary stratigraphy

Amidst the world's troubles it is soothing to split firewood and feed longicorn beetle larvae to the old chook

possibly the most interesting use of this meme I've seen. But does CO2 care, if it goes into and out of glycine? Shouldn't the indignant face be the leaf, or more directly the chloroplast, angry that its duplicitous enzyme servant is double-timing with O2, not giving all the goods to the leaf?

The set of cultural touchstones that Ezra Klein assumes his listeners are familiar with is essentially infinite but somehow does not include dialectical materialism

The Matuyama-Brunhes reversal doesn't get much love outside of science, but when it does whoo boy www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

"Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well."

"Australia may soon face unprecedented conservation decisions, from relocating native species & gene-editing invasive pests to deliberately creating ecosystems better suited to the conditions of the future." @ausjbotany.bsky.social #AusJBotany #OpenAccess Read more: www.scimex.org/newsfeed/wha...

a diamond of a leader

Lamentation (flipped, detail), by Gerard David, 1515-23, 📸 by Roberto Schmidt

Isn't this wonderful Whoops! Most arXiv papers contain information never meant to be shared www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Is it ominous that fewer people are starting PhDs, or that only ~5% of PhD graduates find an ongoing academic position?

all true www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

herbarium collections as unique archives of the health of pollinator-plant mutualisms

Catering plans, maybe 1989

The assignment operator in R (<-) is vile and should be banished. It is needed constantly but is morphologically almost identical to <= (i.e. less-than-or-equal-to, ≤). It would be hard to find a smaller visual cue to carry such a large semantic load (though of course '=' just sows more confusion)

calcium-cemented neoliths are interesting objects for inhabitants of the Anthropocene to ponder, but their Myr-scale preservation potential is approx zero if they don't find their way into the deep ocean or a subsiding basin: i.e. they are fated to be surface ephemera aeon.co/essays/the-s...

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

When the facts are against you, attack the experts. 
When reality is against you, attack the facts. www.politico.com/news/2026/06...