Dr Vanessa
LightNews LightNews
banner
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
Dr Vanessa
@hpsvanessa.bsky.social
19K followers 1K following 11K posts
historian of science, medicine, food, sport and exploration; other content generally but not limited to: my dinner, a weird bug, feminist beer 🏳️‍⚧️, complaining about bad parking. Latest book: tinyurl.com/HigherColder
I really dislike unsolicited advice.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
Dr Vanessa @hpsvanessa.bsky.social · Dec 20
NEW FOLLOWERS: you MUST have a profile pic (not neccessarily of yourself!) and/or a header image, a biog + a couple of posts or I'll assume you are a bot/troll/bad faith person and block you.
Please do the *minimum* to show you're not a scammer!
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
momoulton.bsky.social
Applications now open. Find out more at birmingham.ac.uk/gender-ma
MA in Gender and Sexuality. Black text on white background with photograph of two students. Text reads: 1st in the UK for graduate recruits, 63rd in the world for Arts and Humanities. Engage with urgent conversations around difference and equality and connect your research to challenges in contemporary society. Learn from leading researchers in areas such as queer and trans studies, feminist legal research, gender in arts and history.
January 6, 2026 at 4:05 PM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
Having one of those days where I've just realised that the person I've been researching around for MONTHS whose name is (f.ex) Timothy Hapsburg Smith, is inexplicably also known by the name 'Derek' and ffs give a historian a breadcrumb now and again.
January 6, 2026 at 3:07 PM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
maaikeverbruggen.bsky.social
Important scientific finding:

Human poop knives do not work

Thank you for your service, researchers

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Experimental replication shows knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work
The ethnographic account of an Inuit man manufacturing a knife from his own frozen feces to butcher and disarticulate a dog has permeated both the aca…
www.sciencedirect.com
January 6, 2026 at 12:10 PM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
caseynewton.bsky.social
The author of a viral Reddit thread alleging fraud at a food delivery company tried to back up his claim by sending me AI-generated documents. Today I'm publishing those documents in the hopes that it helps other reporter see what we're up against in the age of AI www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea...
The whistleblower, for his part, worked to amp up the pressure. He told me he had shared the document with other reporters, putting me into a competitive crunch. He asked when I thought I would publish. I asked him if he could point me to any current or former coworkers of his who could help me understand the document better. “Not really,” he said. By this point, alarm bells were starting to ring. I wondered if the employee badge the whistleblower had shared with me might have been AI-generated. While AI systems are notoriously unreliable at identifying their own outputs, Google Gemini can detect SynthID watermarks embedded in images that it produces. I uploaded the badge to Gemini and asked if Gemini had made it. “Most or all of this image was edited or generated with Google AI,” it said.
January 6, 2026 at 1:08 AM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
Super intrigued by the history (and related) academics who basically never write articles, only books and maybe the odd book chapter. Seems much more common in the US which I assume is a combo of tenure/REF pressures. I find they totally go under my rader 1/2
January 6, 2026 at 10:45 AM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
Anyway, just going to petition @deck.blue to somehow (allow you to choose interaction settings when you schedule a post is it even possible?!?!) because then I could set my default to something restricted and not have to worry about my Monday and Friday community scheduled posts being locked down.
January 6, 2026 at 8:15 AM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
How do you stop caring about reply guys? How do you stop wanting to say "no you misunderstand" or "that's not what I said" or "that's not the conversation we're having here" or "you need to learn to 'yes and' better" or "I literally wrote a book about this what is your issue".
January 6, 2026 at 8:06 AM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
mattweiner19.bsky.social
chat, should I respond to the CDC survey about immunizations? is it being run by scientists who absolutely need support against the villains, or am I handing over data to the villains?
January 6, 2026 at 1:56 AM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
hane.bsky.social
meme image of a woman and man in bed facing away from each other. Rene Descartes' head has been pasted over the man's head. the caption reads: her: I bet he's thinking him: yep, I am
January 6, 2026 at 2:27 AM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
mehr.nz
somebody at UChicago is feeding preprints to LLMs without authors' consent, in a research study

they have the gall to suggest to authors they've opted-in that they volunteer to evaluate the LLMs' suggestions regarding their own work.

lol, lmao even. here is the invite and my reply
Dear Author, I am Honglin Bao (www.hbao.info), a data science PhD student in Knowledge Lab (https://knowledgelab.org/) at the University of Chicago, working on a study about “The Capabilities and Potential of AI for Automating Scientific Idealization: A Large-Scale Human-in-the-Loop Study” (under UChicago IRB25-1372). As AI plays an increasingly significant role in scientific discovery, this project aims to evaluate how far AI helps scientists extend their work in new directions – or if it is not useful in this regard. This is a research project – it has no commercial purpose. I will share the final draft, technical details, and aggregate results from scientists once the study is complete. We came across your preprint "Principles of music perception" and applied custom AI models on it in accordance with the terms of the preprint license, which generated five new extensions (i.e., ideas proposed by AI based on the same context as your paper). Our pilot study of 400 scientists (excluding you) indicates that around 60% found at least one of the proposed extensions thought-provoking and actionable. However, the remaining reported that AI only generates seemingly plausible but vague sentences. We solicit your help in evaluating whether you think AI is useful or not, since we believe you are the best judge of new ideas proposed from your own paper. No matter where you stand regarding AI and science: From principally believing that AI is prone to producing fake and morally problematic science to finding it useful, or something in between, we hope to receive evaluations that reflect a spectrum of views. The AI-proposed extensions are included in the survey link below. If you consent to review them and participate in the survey, we would appreciate it if you could do so within the next 14 days (it will take you < 10mins). If you do not consent, we will not use your research in this study. If you find these ideas valuable, you are welcome to purs… Please remove my data from your study. I want nothing to do with this — and I would also point out that if you had done appropriate background work in the selection of articles you fed to the plagiarism machine, you would have found that the preprint of mine you used is way out of date and has been updated substantially since it was first posted. ——— Samuel Mehr School of Psychology, University of Auckland and Child Study Center, Yale University Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!
January 5, 2026 at 10:55 PM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
"Evidence Based Policies" except where the evidence makes us do awkward things like have to talk about child poverty or food deserts and housing or suggests we fund school meals properly.
January 6, 2026 at 7:35 AM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
thatdocphoenix.com
Copilot already only existed to divert some of the ire caused by Teams
January 5, 2026 at 8:19 PM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
annmariewilson.bsky.social
Snow makes neighbors of us all.
a wintry bridge with bike tracks and footprints in the snow (human shoe, and coot feet).
January 5, 2026 at 7:59 PM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
hey so someone recommended a book to me on twitter & I said "no thanks I tried & didn't get on with it" & then the author replied(!) & to make it worse I knew them(!!) & it was a non-fic book about grieving a parent(!!!) = I was mortified. now it's going to be a movie & I can't escape the trailers
January 5, 2026 at 7:54 PM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
#histSTM 🗃️
alvesduarte.bsky.social Matheus Duarte @alvesduarte.bsky.social · 1d
I'm hiring 2 postdocs on my Wellcome project "How Did Infectious Diseases Become Wild?: Plague, Yellow Fever, and Disease Ecology in the Brazilian Hinterland (1920-1975)"

Department of Global Health and Social Medicine
King's College
3 years 01/10/26- 30/09/29
Deadline: 01/02/26
shorturl.at/KZ6Vh
Postdoctoral Research Associate | King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk
January 5, 2026 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
drcraigmc.bsky.social
The deepest confirmed fish observation occurred at ~8,300 m. I know the shape behind it is another fish’s tail, but my brain insists it looks like the foreground fish is wearing a party hat. #deepsea #marinelife
www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...
January 5, 2026 at 2:49 PM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
oh no I asked a rhetorical question without restricting replies what a rookie error.
January 5, 2026 at 6:39 PM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
hey so if the health and safety executive issue a formal notice of contravention and tell you you have to share this notice with your employees and you don't share it with your employees is that a bad thing asking for a friend or in relation to a totally hypothetical event obvs.
January 5, 2026 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
katjathieme.bsky.social
Hey there. This is an excellent response.
bashback.bsky.social BASH BACK @bashback.bsky.social · 1d
The Free Speech Union commissioned a "security" report on us, so we tested their security. Turns out - it sucks.

We've now published the names of everyone who has donated to a FSU fundraiser, along with how much they gave and to which campaign.

www.transbashback.com/fsu.html

xoxo BASH BACK
BASH BACK
www.transbashback.com
January 5, 2026 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
mcduff.bsky.social
Whenever people spoke about the harms and chilling effect on speech caused by the OSA, these guys were right in with "so you love child porn huh?"

Once again: there are no rules, there are no principles, there are no standards. There is just whatever these people want, forever.
adambienkov.bsky.social Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 1d
Cabinet Office Minister Baroness Anderson tells the Lords the Government will keep on using X.

"I still believe that X is an appropriate platform to use because I believe in freedom of speech..."

"It is incredibly important that there is a counter narrative on those platforms," she says.
January 5, 2026 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
gregjenner.bsky.social
If you missed it, series 11 of YOU’RE DEAD TO ME launched on Saturday with an episode about Roman Emperor Nero.

Our guests are the superstar double-act of Professor Mary Beard & Patton Oswalt

You can listen now in the UK on BBC SOUNDS, or it’ll be out on January 30th on all global podcast apps
The BBC You’re Dead To Me artwork is a humorous play on the Bayeux Tapestry. It shows King Harold with arrow in his eye, and William the Conqueror, born holding up a banner saying ‘New Series’ This image is Greg’s lazily-cobbled together montage of a marble bust of Emperor Nero flanked by photos of Professor Mary Beard and Patton Oswalt Beneath them, purple text shouts “NEW SERIES!”
January 5, 2026 at 4:50 PM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
first #WorkplaceGratitude of 2026 goes to the copyeditor who somehow turned the mangled frankenstein proofs I was surprise handed on 19th Dec into an almost perfect version based only on my crabby notes because I was unable to use their proprietary proof edits software properly. A HERO.
January 5, 2026 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Dr Vanessa
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
#MondayNetwork - a regular appeal to any #skystorians with intersecting interests: food /nutrition, surviving climate change, environmental determinism, race science, exploration, acclimatisation & physiology, cit sci, Indigenous knowledge, & related topics to say hi or share link to your work! 🗃️
January 5, 2026 at 8:20 AM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
doing a quick lit review and wrote something along the lines of "this was published in 1994 so it is over 20 years old now" and then realised my maths error and did the oblig. crumble into dust.
January 5, 2026 at 1:43 PM
hpsvanessa.bsky.social
The light was just perfect this morning (Mr Hat having peanut breakfast on the arch while squirrel looks on)
A snowy garden scene. Bright blue sky to the left, glowing yellow light on trees to the right. Snow sits in shrubs and large plants: a wood pigeon perches on an archway to the left and a grey squirrel sits to the right. The same snowy garden scene from above, with snowy roofs visible in the distance
January 5, 2026 at 12:49 PM