albertcardona

albertcardona, 14 days ago to Trains

In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.

It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".

Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.

There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.

The upside is that it can be fixed.

#trains #EuroRail

albertcardona, 7 months ago to science

Not sure what those who advocate for the use of ChatGPT in scientific writing have in mind. It is the very act of writing that helps us think about the connections and implications of our results, identify gaps, and devise further experiments and controls.

Any science project that can be written up by a bot from tables of results and associated literature isn’t the kind of science that I’d want to do to begin with.

Can’t imagine completing a manuscript not knowing what comes next, because the writing was done automatically instead of me putting extensive thought into it.

And why would anyone bother to read it if the authors couldn’t be bothered to write it. Might as well put up the tables and figures into an archive online, stamp a DOI on it, and move on.

#ScientificPublishing #science #ChatGPT

albertcardona, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to science

If you are drafting figures for a scientific paper or presentation, remember that https://scidraw.io/ exists: a repository of free SVG cartoons for science.

#SciDraw is supported by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre – @SWC_Neuro

All content on SciDraw is shared under creative commons license (CC-BY) unless stated otherwise.

#inkscape #SVG #science

albertcardona, 4 months ago to random

Leslie Lamport, of LaTeX fame, is a very accomplished mathematician and computer scientist with a Turing award for his work on “fundamental contributions to the theory and
practice of distributed and concurrent systems”. He just published a draft of his new book:

"A science of concurrent programs"

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/science.pdf

True to his pedagogic approach to everything he does, "The book assumes only that you know the math one learns before entering a university." Even the appendices are fantastic. Can only wish I'll remain this lucid at his 82 years old.

#multithreading #maths #LesleyLamport

futurebird, 3 months ago to random

The more I learn about light pollution harms insects, the more I want to try to help... do something about it.

But I live in NYC. It feels like an impossible ask. A whole city devoted to making the most light pollution possible.

I strongly suspect that we'd see a greater variety of wildlife if we could dim the light a little.

Just using colors like red light can help. So can dark hours and motion sensors.

What if one day, as a treat, every New Yorker got to see the milky way?

pvonhellermannn, 5 months ago to random

Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.

Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities #AcademicChatter #neoliberalism

albertcardona, 5 months ago to Neuroscience

Loren Looger, legendary protein wrangler, who always generously shared their genetically encoded calcium indicators and more while still in development and unpublished, is asking for labs to co-write grants with him:

"Dear science world, I need help, please. If you like the tools and data we generate, and our shareware attitude, can you please co-apply for funding with us? It turns out that I'm terrible at writing grants, and we need $$ or else we can't make more GCaMPs, RCaMPs, SnFRs (we've branched out to neuromodulators and neuropeptides), FPs, viruses, tags, etc. We'll also make whatever you want, but we need $$ to do it. DM or email me, sooner is better. Sorry to be desperate, but we want to keep doing this, and I'm not sure we can."

https://profiles.ucsd.edu/loren.looger

#neuroscience #GCaMP #RCaMP #SnFR #ProteinEngineering #GECIs

elduvelle, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to academia

People who write #ResearchGrants: do you write about

1. projects that you’ve already almost completed (hiding the fact that they’re almost completed, so that you can use the funding for completely new projects), or
2. new projects that you haven’t really started yet (for which you might just have some preliminary data)?

Do you think 1) is unethical? Do you think 1) is necessary? Do you think 1) has the highest chances of funding? Please comment :)

#Academia #GrantWriting #Research

albertcardona, 1 year ago to ChatGPT

Donal Knuth poses questions to #ChatGPT. One of his comments: “It's amazing how the confident tone lends credibility to all of that
made-up nonsense.” https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt

#ChatGPT exhibits great eloquence yet fails fact checking spectacularly.

albertcardona, 1 month ago to random

Rewilding the internet:

"Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours."

"Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests."

"For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world."

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

By Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon.
@mariafarrell @robin

albertcardona, 4 months ago to random

Michal Olšiak, Czech sculptor, did it again. This time, giant sculptures of insects. Fascinating exhibition, wish I could go there.

Ants, flies, weevils, beetles, and more. The gallery:

https://www.idnes.cz/kultura/vytvarne-umeni/michal-olsiak-megabrouci-vystava-brouci-hmyz-modely.A240103_204921_vytvarne-umeni_kurl/foto/COC5ced1bb436_174616_3915720.jpg

(If a Czech native speaker could translate his wikipedia page to English or French or Spanish, that would be greatly appreciated: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Ol%C5%A1iak )

#MegaBrouci #entomology

Big statue of a mosquito with a red abdomen, engorged with blood.
Human-sized ant statues shown tending to aphids.

albertcardona, 9 months ago to random

#iNaturalist on the news:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-amateur-entomologists-insects-quebec/

And a letter to the editor emphasises:

"Such tools can impart a sense of wonder at the beauty, complexity and ubiquity of life, revealing unseen worlds in our midst. I have used iNaturalist to document more than 80 species of insects, including many important pollinators, in my modest fifth-floor container garden."

"Even as we depend on such insects for our survival, we also share our urban spaces with them, life finding a way in the most inhospitable places. It is a reminder that our built environment is also theirs, and that we are forever caught in their web of life."–Ryan Whyte

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/great-article-and-my-letter-to-the-editor-promoting-inaturalist/44007

albertcardona, 8 months ago to random

"Ocasio-Cortez attended Boston University, where she double-majored in international relations and economics, graduating cum laude." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez

And on an article denouncing the widespread misogyny that keeps women from being president of the United States, the interviewer refers to AOC as "a former restaurant server and bartender"🤦‍♂️

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/03/aoc-interview-2024-election-climate-democrat

albertcardona, 5 months ago to random

An inverse vaccine to combat autoimmune diseases. How did I miss this giant piece of news!

"Synthetically glycosylated antigens for the antigen-specific suppression of established immune responses", Tremain et al. 2023 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-023-01086-2

Surely there are already clinical trials.

Sure beats the crude cyclophosphamide approach to killing antibody-producing B cells that are undergoing mitosis – a protocol I applied back in my PhD times to select for monoclonal antibodies against specific tissues.

#AutoImmuneDiseases #ReverseVaccine #Immunology #antibodies

albertcardona, 5 months ago to random

#Lichensubscribe #SilentSunday

davidho, 2 months ago to random

Is there a law that describes how the rapid growth in renewable energy is outpaced by the growth in the dumb ways we think of to use that energy?

albertcardona, 28 days ago (edited 28 days ago) to Neuroscience

The honeybee brain hosts over 600,000 neurons, at a density higher than that of mammalian brains:

"Our estimate of total brain cell number for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera;
≈ 6.13 × 10^5, s = 1.28 × 10^5; ...) was lower than the existing estimate from brain sections ≈ 8.5 × 10^5"

"the highest neuron densities have been found in the smallest respective species examined (smoky shrews in mammals; 2.08 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [14] and goldcrests in birds; 4.9 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [16]). The Hymenoptera in our sample have on average higher cell densities than vertebrates (5.94 × 10^5 cells mg^−1; n = 30 species)."

Ants, on the other hand ...

"ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number."

From:
"Allometric analysis of brain cell number in Hymenoptera suggests ant brains diverge from general trends", by Godfrey et al. 2021.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0199

#Hymenoptera #entomology #neuroscience #ants #honeybees

albertcardona, 3 months ago to random

Arcadia is innovating in publishing: witness this manuscript by @PracheeAC et al. 2023

"Phenotypic differences between interfertile Chlamydomonas species" https://research.arcadiascience.com/pub/result-chlamydomonas-phenotypes/release/6

Includes a methods-first approach, aiming at easing how the data was acquired and to make it reproducible. With figures that contain animations without being videos, feeling very natural to the medium (a webpage).

And importantly: no "authors", but "contributors", listed AT THE BOTTOM, in a table sorted in alphabetical order by surname, alongside the role of each contributor. Laudable, and clear. No more first-author last-author nonsense.

And love starting with a section titled "Purpose" and ending with another titled "Next steps". Explicitly embedding the work into the broader stream of science.

#ScientificPublishing #ArcadiaScience

futurebird, 1 month ago to random

Last night our cable internet box randomly died. It’s totally fried and must be replaced. This happened just as my husband got home from work, waking me up to tell me the governor of NY had issued a warning about power outages during the Coronal Mass Ejection (there was a big solar storm last night) — basically I thought the world was ending and put my laptop in the oven. (it’s a faraday cage)

I may have overreacted.

albertcardona, 3 months ago to uk

The amount of kids, all boys, in emergency room for head concussions from playing sports – it's scary. Mostly rugby. Why isn't this sport banned in schools yet? The long-term brain damage is well documented.

#UK

KorinnaAllhoff, 3 months ago to random German

🚨 New #preprint is online! 🚨

"Many weak and few strong links" seems to be a common pattern in many #EcologicalNetworks. We show that this skewness in interaction strengths can enable stabilising effects of network structure. It should hence receive more attention in #TheoreticalEcology and #EcologicalModelling, especially in studies based on random matrices!

(Btw, just in case you are looking for guest speakers, I highly recommend the first author, Franziska Koch! 😉)

https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.25.577181

albertcardona, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to climate

An act of resistance is to teach your own child to mend clothes, to shop seasonal groceries, to cook a meal, to tend a garden, to ride a bicycle, to observe the procession of the seasons, to dress for the weather.

Instead of buying new clothes, pick up ready to go meals, drive everywhere, keep a constant temperature on the house.

What a strange world we live in. As if we've taken nature for granted. And forgotten our past. And forsaken our future.

#EcosystemCollapse #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #RightToRepair

futurebird, 1 month ago to random

Cataglyphis lutea (UAE and parts of India) is a desert dwelling ant, the photos of this ant on iNaturalist caught my eye, since, like Leptomyrmex erythrocephalus (the Spider Ant of Australia), this these little ants fold their gasters over their mesonoma.

Very little is known about Cataglyphis lutea, shockingly little. I can't even find a mention of gaster folding in any of the brief descriptions of this ant.

This is why descriptions are not enough. 1/

(photos by Jonghyn Park and TimL)

A black ant with a red head and black dot eyes clamors over a rock on remarkably long legs. The antennae and legs are very long and evenly spread giving the impression of a spider (hence the common name) The gaster is folded over the mesonoma.

futurebird, 1 month ago to random

My mom was the head of a math department at a community college and I have fond childhood memories of the crazy mail she got. I think all math departments get this kind of mail. Basically people who think they've proven the Riemann hypothesis and such. She'd have me look for math errors in them because they always had SO MANY errors.

So, the idea of writing about biology scares me because I don't want to be "one of those guys" for some poor biology department head.

futurebird, 4 months ago to random

I just saw a sport drink labeled "3x the electrolytes!"

Talk about missing the point. The idea of a drink with some salts and vitamins to replenish you after sweating isn't totally crazy, although most of our diets have too much salt, the idea of a carefully balanced, tasty drink for after a sweaty run ... made a little sense at least.

You'd be paying for them to put in a little salt and potassium but not too much since then...

Clearly I'm overthinking this. More is better drink seawater.