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Which are the most important migration sites and how are breeding, moulting, staging and wintering locations linked? Forty-four authors have collaborated to bring together ringing, colour-ringing and GPS tracking data in a paper entitled Site-level connectivity identified from multiple sources of movement data to inform conservation of a migratory bird. The analysed data relate to … Continue reading How are migration sites connected?
The 2024 Ibis paper, recommending that the Slender-billed Curlew should be classified as Extinct, tells a sad tale. We now know that, by the time that the Slender-billed Curlew Action Plan was published in 1996, it was already too late to save the species. Resources expended thereafter largely only served to document its extinction. As … Continue reading Learning lessons from Slender-billed Curlews
A dedicated team of Scottish bird ringers has been studying breeding waders in northern Norway since 1993. One of the focal species of their fieldwork is the secretive Broad-billed Sandpiper, an unusual taiga wader which nests on low-lying tussocks embedded in floating mats of sphagnum moss. By wading through mires to access the nests, the … Continue reading Broad-billed Sandpiper: Now a Red-listed wader
With more demands upon the space that is currently occupied by breeding waders, from developments such as wind turbines and monoculture forestry, conservationists are often asked to assess the potential effects of landscape change. Do passive acoustic devices have a role to play in impact assessments and how well do they perform when compared to … Continue reading Counting breeding shorebirds using listening devices
Every wader researcher knows that their actions can have negative consequences for the birds they are studying. Given that most shorebird species are in trouble or causing concern, conservation science is a tricky balancing act between ‘need to understand’ and ‘disturbance’. In this context, it is always good to see published papers that measure the … Continue reading How do wader chicks respond to being handled?
More in science
My post last week clearly stimulated some discussion. I know people don't come here for political news, but as a professional scientist it's hard to ignore the chaotic present situation, so here are some things to read, before I talk about a fun paper: Science reports on what is happening with NSF. The short version: As of Friday afternoon, panels are delayed and funds (salary) are still not accessible for NSF postdoctoral fellows. Here is NPR's take. As of Friday afternoon, there is a new court order that specifically names the agency heads (including the NSF director), saying to disburse already approved funds according to statute. Looks like on this and a variety of other issues, we will see whether court orders actually compel actions anymore. Now to distract ourselves with dreams of the future, this paper was published in Nature Photonics, measuring radiation pressure exerted by a laser on a 50 nm thick silicon nitride membrane. The motivation is a grand one: using laser-powered light sails to propel interstellar probes up to a decent fraction (say 10% or more) of the velocity of light. It's easy to sketch out the basic idea on a napkin, and it has been considered seriously for decades (see this 1984 paper). Imagine a reflective sail say 10 m\(^{2}\) and 100 nm thick. When photons at normal incidence bounce from a reflective surface, they transfer momentum \(2\hbar \omega/c) normal to the surface. If the reflective surface is very thin and low mass, and you can bounce enough photons off it, you can get decent accelerations. Part of the appeal is, this is a spacecraft where you effectively keep the engine (the whopping laser) here at home and don't have to carry it with you. There are braking schemes so that you could try to slow the craft down when it reaches your favorite target system. A laser-powered lightsail (image from CalTech) Of course, actually doing this on a scale where it would be useful faces enormous engineering challenges (beyond building whopping lasers and operating them for years at a time with outstanding collimation and positioning). Reflection won't be perfect, so there will be heating. Ideally, you'd want a light sail that passively stabilizes itself in the center of the beam. In this paper, the investigators implement a clever scheme to measure radiation forces, and they test ideas involving dielectric gratings etched into the sail to generate self-stabilization. Definitely more fun to think about such futuristic ideas than to read the news. (An old favorite science fiction story of mine is "The Fourth Profession", by Larry Niven. The imminent arrival of an alien ship at earth is heralded by the appearance of a bright point in the sky, whose emission turns out to be the highly blue-shifted, reflected spectrum of the sun, bouncing off an incoming alien light sail. The aliens really need humanity to build them a launching laser to get to their next destination.)
Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities. The post Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations first appeared on Quanta Magazine
A tour of interesting developments built in the last two decades
Is that immigrant high-skilled or do they just have a fancy degree?
Everything, apparently, has a second life on TikTok. At least this keeps us skeptics busy – we have to redebunk everything we have debunked over the last century because it is popping up again on social media, confusing and misinforming another generation. This video is a great example – a short video discussing the “incorruptibility’ […] The post Incorruptible Skepticism first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
