Zen Faulkes

It’s well known that finding reviewers is increasingly difficult. Yet I often meet researchers—especially ECRs—who’ve never or rarely been asked to review but would like to. Is that you? Natural History Notes are the perfect place to start. Aquatic & terrestrial ecologists welcome—get in touch!

I'll be speaking at an upcoming webinar with Bitesize Bio on expanding the reach of conference posters. If you're interested in designing more effective posters, feel free to join us: events.bitesizebio.com/expanding-th...

Check out this AI Tattoo pain chart. And stop eating with your groins. Use a fork like a civilized person.

Diao, L., Motani, R., Jiang, Dy. et al. A fully marine stem amphibian from the Late Triassic of China. Nat Ecol Evol (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Everyone who liked this post is old. Everyone else is just puzzled by what this might be.

Our First Nations traditional territory maps are progressing. We're likely a week away from completing our alpha build. This will replace the Native-Land.ca territory maps, which went offline earlier this year (though they have other maps still online). It'll go online at knowledgekeepr.com

Corporate flunky: “I have good news and bad news. The most popular president in decades was taking about us, and it’s gone viral on socials!” Cheesecake Factory CEO: “And the bad news?”

Meanwhile, this is listed on etsy as "hand needle felted" It is fu**ing levitating 😠

“Why are peers and/or teachers not available and should we do something about that?” Yea. Yes, we should do something about that.”

Film and TV distribution. I can see a Bollywood movie the same week it opens in Delhi. I don’t have to bug my parents to send me VHS tapes of Doctor Who because it was playing in Canada with no IDEA when or if it would show in the US.

A TV series that would be worth revisiting because its themes are in tune with the times: Alien Nation (1989-1990). It’s all about immigration and paranoia about immigration. (Also, way better than the movie that preceded it.) Not sure if it’s streaming anywhere, though.

Do any of you know of fellow academics who have told you, “I use LLMs to write my reviews for journals because they do a better job than I could have done”? Asking because someone on LinkedIn thinks that attitude is rampant among academics. #AcademicChatter

I was talking to students just this week about how an ultra rare bone disease (fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva) went from identifying the mutation that caused the disease in 2006 to a treatment (Pasatru, a monoclonal antibody) being approved by the FDA a few months ago (2026). Fund research!

Breed is not predictive of an individual dog's behaviour. doi.org/10.1126/scie... #subskeet

They judged whether AI 🤖 performed better peer reviews than humans by asking... Wait for it... a DIFFERENT AI! 🤖 🙃 (They spot checked the AI judgements with 10 papers assessed by 3 former editors.)

If you ever suffer from imposter syndrome,look at how experts posted human genome information at NCBI: #SpellingMatters #Genomics #devbio #evodevo 👫

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

all the trouble of making a nice edition of my boy and then you put the wrong kind of whale on it?? like how many more whale facts did you need him to put in this thing

🦀

You know how Adobe offers to summarize long PDFs? Welp, AI summaries have hit our chemistry labs, students do not see ALL the directions (and some summaries are dangerously wrong), disasters are being narrowly averted, and students are upset with their INSTRUCTOR for the experiment not working.

We recently hosted researchers from Georgia Southern University's Freshwater Ecology Lab at the Longleaf Stewardship Center. Their team is currently working on a survey of crayfish diversity in the Coastal Plain of the Altamaha River Basin, which hasn't been comprehensively surveyed since the 1980s.

‘Wildwood’ director Travis Knight on AI: “A pencil is a tool. A paintbrush is a tool. A 3D printer is a tool. A digital capture is a tool. AI is not a tool. AI can go fuck itself.”

How long will "glacial" stay in the language to describe something slow moving?

These are paper-shaped objects and (per some of the comments) are best treated by reporting to arXiv and preserving that space for people who are contributing to all parts of the scientific ecosystem, which includes not only writing papers, but also peer reviewing, training young scientists, etc

RFK Jr’s unethical experiment on African babies is officially canned, thanks to public backlash driven by Stand Up For Science 🎉 ✊️ 🧵 🧪

Hello Skywalkers! NEW: Altmetric now indicates if a piece of research has been retracted, and (if available) why. Long-requested, and finally here, our Details Pages now flag prominently the retraction status and retraction reasons.

Try our new retraction feature out for yourself! 1) Publish a fraudulent study* 2) Wait for the inevitable retraction 3) See your name in lights right next to "Retracted" on our details pages. Awesome! *not Awesome at all. Please don't really do this.

'The irony should not go unremarked: we are promised machine-learning systems that can drink deeper of the pool of human knowledge than any human ever could, while at the same time other machine systems are dumping huge loads of swill into it.' www.science.org/content/blog...

interestingggg.... paper on the arXiv tonight of a new planet candidate found with and written up entirely by AI, including the caveat, "The author has not independently checked the analyses and does not have the expertise to verify every technical detail." arxiv.org/abs/2610.28575

BREAKING: Major shakeup in NSF leadership. Brian Stone, who has been performing the duties of NSF director since April 2025, is retiring on Dec. 31. Rebecca Keiser, who has been acting chief of staff, is also retiring, Oct. 31. Unclear who will replace Stone, since O'Neill's nom hasn't moved.

"An auto repair shop had brakes fail on 161 cars that came in for service. Can mechanics who repair hundreds of cars a year be expected to keep oversight of such matters, or do automobile makers need to design better brakes?"

This is a heist. cen.acs.org/policy/resea...

Absolutely. We cannot identify fakes so we have to watermark genuine data. End to end. It’s our only hope for survival.

Interesting bit from my piece today: YouTube says it removed 95% of deepfake takedown requests in the first half of 2026 through its likeness detection program. I don't believe YT has publicly disclosed this before. www.theverge.com/report/10119...

Figures should inform, not persuade. But can they be engaging? We argue that yes @natureportfolio.nature.com and explain 7 ways to for engage visually and reach audiences effectively and efficiently. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #DataVisualization 🧪📊 PS October = Breast Cancer Awareness 🎀

I MUST GO! MY PEOPLE NEED ME!

42% of Americans with cancer deplete their life savings within two years. Breaking Bad was a documentary

Hey educators, tidyplots.org is great for teaching students data visualization because it is 🕊️ Free and open-source 🚀 Easy, intuitive and fast 💾 Loaded with demo datasets 🏆 Embracing best practices 🌈 Beautiful #rstats #phd #dataviz #education

Never thought I'd have to say this but there's an inherent joy in working hard at something, slowly getting better at it and taking pride in the results. And you'll find that other people will be impressed by the results of your dedication too, in a way they will not be impressed by your AI shit

Go to your camera roll and search "boat" and then post a picture of a boat you like.

BREAKING: Texas is considering selling a state park to Elon Musk, per sources. (Gift link).