Notices by Albert Cardona (albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz)

@neuralreckoning @elduvelle

The paper:

"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition", Luo et al. 2025
https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/99047v2

Quite the poster child for why at @eLife we support publishing papers that we consider important and yet nonetheless label as incomplete: the questions are worth asking, the discussion has to happen, the suggested experiments need to be voiced out and aired, to prompt someone to take them on to the lab.

#ScientificPublishing

@neuralreckoning @elduvelle @eLife

Can't agree more. Scientific publications are the means for scientists to talk to each other in a formalised way, and not at all as a way to accrue points towards career advancement or funding. Let's retake that original purpose from the choking grasp of the bean counters.

Margaret Atwood:

"She was lucky in her parents, a foresting entomologist father, Carl, and tomboyish mother, Margaret, both from Nova Scotia. Carl’s work on insects meant that the family spent half the year in the bush, at times without electricity, running water or a telephone. They’d camp in tents or shacks by a lake while Carl cut down trees to build a wooden cabin. Young Margaret – Peggy to everyone – loved the outdoors; she learned to fish, canoe, beachcomb, pick berries, delight in birds, insects, mushrooms and frogs. At summer camp, in her teens, she was known as Peggy Nature."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/nov/03/book-of-lives-margaret-atwood-autobiography-review

#MargaretAtwood

@jonny I'd explain the choices of academics from them being busy and not willing to read hundreds of papers by as many applicants to grants/positions/promotions, rather than cowards. The comfort, the ease, the simplicity, and for some, the beauty, of relying on journal prestige for evaluation instead of doing the actual work of reading the proposals and the scientific papers, and caring about the methods and the discoveries, not the pedigree, or the number of publications, or the journals they are published in. Takes work, also skill. And impartiality, integrity, and a certain detachment. All tall orders.

The day a scientist publishes great work in a blog post – or a preprint, is almost the same – and gets a job or a grant from it is when we'll know the future has arrived, and it's a matter of kindling it so as to extend to everyone else.

#academia #ScientificPublishing

@johncarlosbaez

Internet Archive Europe:
https://www.internetarchive.eu/

@internetarchiveeurope
#InternetArchiveEurope

Life finds a way: algae alive at -15C in Arctic ice:
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/09/extreme-life-arctic-ice-diatoms-ecological-discovery

The paper:
"Ice gliding diatoms establish record-low temperature limits for motility in a eukaryotic cell", Zhang el al. 2025
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2423725122

#Arctic #algae #diatoms

A strong argument for progress in tackling climate change is economics. From business opportunities in renewable energy to ... home insurance policies skyrocketing:

"In 2025, approximately 6.1% of homes in the United States, valued at nearly $3.4 trillion, face severe or extreme risk of flood damage."

"In 2025, approximately 18.3% of homes in the United States, valued at nearly $8 trillion, face severe or extreme risk of hurricane wind damage."

"In 2025, approximately 5.6% of homes (worth $3.2 trillion) in the United States face severe or extreme risk of fire damage, and nearly 39% of these high-risk homes (worth $1.8 trillion) are in California."

https://www.realtor.com/research/climate-risk-2025/

#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming

@ChrisMayLA6 The green transition is a great nice-to-have, but what the railway does is to liberate: to not ever having to think about transport at all, knowing there's reliable, frequent transport to just about anywhere, anytime. Having lived in Switzerland I can't ever let go of that feeling of complete and utter freedom of mobility. A car is a pale shadow in comparison.

@johannes_lehmann @Ruth_Mottram

My house in Cambridge was built with walls two bricks wide, in a two parallel, one across pattern. No cavity, and no insulation. Had coal-burning fireplaces at every room (unused but leaking cold air) and radiators heated form a gas furnace. Energy rating E.

We added 10 cm of a dense modern material to the walls, mostly wood pulp as far as I know, and changed the windows to double or triple glass panel. And replaced the heating with an air-source heat pump. Energy rating A+.

This should be done for easily more than half of all homes in the UK.
https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20221008_insulation.html

If, around 1900, all the effort, money, and thought that went into mining and transporting all that coal had gone into building houses with cavity walls and thicker windows, all of this mess would have been averted. Alas, a few fat cats wouldn't have become rich. Tragic. Time for the rich to pay it back.

#InsulateBritain #insulation

#Bloomscrolling #SilentSunday

@murdoc @Linux @stux

If it’s Android, it’s convoluted: enable developer tools, then there enable USB debugging, then plug to laptop via USB, and use adb shell to find apps that match facebook|meta|whatsapp|microsoft and then delete them. It’s not hard but it’s also easy to mess up.

To find the subject of my PhD in the garden pond at my very Cambridge college, that made my day.

Planaria, genus Schmidtea, swimming near the surface:
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/270690367

#iNaturalist #flatworms #planaria #Pembroke1347

@jonny Nobody gets blamed for hiring the cloud.

@DavidSD

More alarming: "about half of all CO2 from burning fossil fuels ever emitted was emitted over the last two decades or so" https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20210407_two_centuries_of_global_warming_warnings.html (and also: "Half of all plastics ever made were produced in the last 13 years leading to 2017".)

In other words, it's us, our very lifestyle, that contributed most of the damage. Not the people from the 50s, or the 60s, or the 70s, not even those of the 80s. But us, over the last two decades.

Hanna Ritchie runs the numbers: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

#GlobalWarming #CO2 #ClimateChange

@afewbugs Indeed. Have read enough scifi as a child that the fungal food factories of Trantor’s Mycogen district seemed inevitable, and living now my childhood’s future I am disapointed synthetic foods still fall so short of expectations. I love cheese yet I am appalled at the reality of dairy and meat production. As a biologist I am convinced there aren’t any conceptual barriers to manufacturing nutritionally excellent and pallatable foods, only engineering and cultural ones.

@afewbugs As a kid my sister asked our mom in which factory is milk made, and my mom, daugther of a farmer, took her to see a dairy farm. Came back horrified and didn’t drink milk for weeks.

Most of us have grown too detached from the land and food production. Working a tiny allotment is my own minimal way to keep my own kids grounded on the realities of food and farming.

Today. January 30th, I spotted a bumblebee, a solitary bee that could have been a large mining bee (Andrena), and a drone fly (Eristalis). In Cambridge, UK. Snowdrops, Crocus and other plants have been in flower for at least a week. Present-day England is trying hard to emulate the climate of the South-East coast of the Iberian peninsula.

#GlobalWarming #ClimateChange

@Daojoan

"The professional class likes to pretend they’re not part of this fight. Lawyers, doctors, engineers — they think their degrees and salaries put them on the other side. But they’re workers too, just with fancier titles. Their jobs can be automated or outsourced just like ours. Their debts can crush them just like ours. Their children face the same bleak future as ours."

Well said.

A fascinating read, and a challenge: get your life back, make it fill your day, bring it closer to friends and family. Be present. Be you.

Technology can help you, but it can also be – it almost for sure is – the problem. Reconsider your technology use and make it work for you.

https://therealists.org/2023/04/aligning-our-life-goals-with-our-technology-use/

Thank you @_elena for spelling this out so clearly. I too shall restart my morning pages.

@alex @sibylle Last summer I was visiting a friend who had been wanting to learn to do a potato omelette for some time, since I used to make them for their family. So I asked for eggs, and a child was sent to pick them up from the chicken coop. Then I asked for potatoes, and a child again was sent to dig them up from the garden. I had brought olive oil. The whole process, done slowly, was about 40 minutes. If we were to factor the costs in hours spent looking after chickens, potatoes, and even picking and pressing olives, the cheapest part would be my time cooking. Overall, the most expensive potato omelette any of us had ever eaten. Yet delicious and, in some ways, inexpensive, as every step was woven into a particular, and deliberately chosen, way of life.