Yuchen

Fay-Ai

Here’s another edition of “annoyingly poorly-taken zoomed-out bird photos in Singapore”

Spot the two hill mynahs (Gracula religiosa)

a man in a black shirt and black pants is walking through a dirt field . ALT: a man in a black shirt and black pants is walking through a dirt field .

Brings to mind this

What was your expectation?

Awesome stuff - how are you dealing with the ontology issues?

Or trying to open some kind of portal for some lovecraftian horror…

Then again students could just copy paste the whole instruction set as a prompt and copypaste the answer… there’s no winning if the student isn’t interested in effort.

Some prof went goblin-mode on AI. I thought this is actually a pretty great idea to 1) force students to at least read and comprehend the equation, 2) understand LLM prompt-response stochasticity and 3) disable student non-critical copy-paste tendencies.

I thought this is actually a pretty great idea to 1) force students to at least read and comprehend the equation, 2) understand LLM prompt-response stochasticity and 3) disable student non-critical copy-paste tendencies. Then again they could just copypaste the whole instructions for an ans…

Langoliers on the miniature scale

Seriously, you should read this 🧪🐦 it's so interesting

Writing Resources Writing is a huge part of any career in science, and for many writers – no, for most writers – it’s a daunting challenge. But it’s not a challenge that you have to tackle alone. That’s a lesson I w…

Your occasional reminder that I keep a curated list of resources for scientific writers that I find helpful - books, blogs, software, all kinds of things. Here it is:

Hurrah the fungus gnats are finally OUT!

Bats Hunt Migratory Birds - Little, Big Science For years, scientists found only clues suggesting that bats prey on songbirds—for example, feathers in bat droppings and bird wings discovered beneath hunting grounds. But the full picture was missing...

Looks like Batman killed and ate Todd, and the Joker wasn’t even involved. This is macabre!

www.lbscience.org/en/2025/11/2...

トゲアリトゲナシトゲアリ Thorny thornless thornthorn…

that’s the Japanese vernacular for some chrysomelid leaf beetle Hispines (=bristly).

Makes sense since they’re species with spines within a group that generally are spineless (Agonita? Gonophora?) within a group that ARE generally spiny…

Aaaannnd a student replied to me with this. I’m more upset than I need to be with this.

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4) breeds in the felled host for its next macabre cycle. The paper says “entomopathogenic” - I’m confused on how to classify them. As parasitoids (immatures that kill host internally during development) or as predators (free-living adults targeting prey for food)?

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3)slither into host bodies (likely through a spiracle, YUCK!) to release a cocktail of symbiotic pathogens that then kill the host.

This is some high tier assassin specialist build right there- like a Zerg Roach Corpser build that targets air units. Nature’s stranger than science fiction!

Electrostatics facilitate midair host attachment in parasitic jumping nematodes | PNAS Jumping can be hazardous for entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs) as those that fail to attach to an insect host face death by predation or starvation...

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
How amazing is this! These entomopathogenic roundworms:

1) can coil their bodies to jump up >20x their length

2) use their -ve electrostatic bodies to home in on flying prey (which generate +ve potential)

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Those are some really beautiful long big pedipalps…😍

There’s a genus of cylindrotomid crane flies named  𝘓𝘪𝘰𝘨𝘮𝘢. Largely distributed across the Northern Hemisphere.

About 10(?) described species.

None of them named nuts.

Yet.

What an opportunity.

#diptera #tipuloidea #cylindrotomidae #ligma