Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
@nickdhiggs.bsky.social
Marine scientist and VP for Strategy and Programs @templetonworld.bsky.social
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
November 12, 2025 at 12:32 AM
Me: “Oh cool - the Amazon forest is bouncing back” 🌳☁️
Also me: “Ooooooh… 🙄”
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Also me: “Ooooooh… 🙄”
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Amazon reports strongest cloud growth since 2022 after major outage
Amazon Web Services (AWS) sees 20% increase in revenue year over year, topping Wall Street estimates
www.theguardian.com
October 30, 2025 at 9:17 PM
Me: “Oh cool - the Amazon forest is bouncing back” 🌳☁️
Also me: “Ooooooh… 🙄”
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Also me: “Ooooooh… 🙄”
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Surely emphasis should be cracking down on LLM generated papers (and their authors) rather than the
#openaccess datasets themselves. Bizarre precedent that proprietary data would be seen as more trustworthy.
www.science.org/content/arti...
#openaccess datasets themselves. Bizarre precedent that proprietary data would be seen as more trustworthy.
www.science.org/content/arti...
Journals and publishers crack down on research from open health data sets
PLOS, Frontiers, and others announce policies trying to stem the tide of suspect research
www.science.org
October 21, 2025 at 2:06 PM
Surely emphasis should be cracking down on LLM generated papers (and their authors) rather than the
#openaccess datasets themselves. Bizarre precedent that proprietary data would be seen as more trustworthy.
www.science.org/content/arti...
#openaccess datasets themselves. Bizarre precedent that proprietary data would be seen as more trustworthy.
www.science.org/content/arti...
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
[New Paper] names Chaetoderma naga, a gigantic (>13 cm) new worm-mollusc from a cold seep! Like its sister-species C. shenloong, it probably relies on endosymbiotic bacteria for energy. We named it after Nāga, a snake-god from Asian mythologies!
Out now in Moll. Res., LINK: doi.org/10.1080/1323...
Out now in Moll. Res., LINK: doi.org/10.1080/1323...
October 10, 2025 at 4:20 PM
[New Paper] names Chaetoderma naga, a gigantic (>13 cm) new worm-mollusc from a cold seep! Like its sister-species C. shenloong, it probably relies on endosymbiotic bacteria for energy. We named it after Nāga, a snake-god from Asian mythologies!
Out now in Moll. Res., LINK: doi.org/10.1080/1323...
Out now in Moll. Res., LINK: doi.org/10.1080/1323...
🇧🇸
Conch 🐚
Cay 🏝️
Nassau 📍
Conch 🐚
Cay 🏝️
Nassau 📍
What’s the word where you’re from that, when pronounced exactly as it looks, identifies a tourist immediately?
October 8, 2025 at 8:50 PM
🇧🇸
Conch 🐚
Cay 🏝️
Nassau 📍
Conch 🐚
Cay 🏝️
Nassau 📍
Blue lobsters might not be as rare as once thought:
www.bbc.com/news/article...
www.bbc.com/news/article...
September 25, 2025 at 11:50 PM
Blue lobsters might not be as rare as once thought:
www.bbc.com/news/article...
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA
10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA
10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
Climate change is not a con-job. If you want to know more about the evidence for and causes of #ClimateChange, head to our website: royalsociety.org/news-resourc...
Climate change: evidence and causes | Royal Society
Supplementary information for the project 'Climate Change: Evidence and causes'.
royalsociety.org
September 23, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Climate change is not a con-job. If you want to know more about the evidence for and causes of #ClimateChange, head to our website: royalsociety.org/news-resourc...
Check out MARMORIS - a new NGO founded to explore #deepsea habitats in The Bahamas ewnews.com/new-bahamian... Beyond excited too see a fellow Bahamian passionate about deep-sea research. Way to go Denley, @katycroffbell.bsky.social and team!
New Bahamian Non-Profit “Marmoris” Embarks on Deep-Sea Discovery Mission
NASSAU, BAHAMAS – A new era of ocean exploration is unfolding in the Caribbean with the official launch of Marmoris, a Bahamian non-profit organisation dedicated to uncovering, documenting, and conser...
ewnews.com
September 15, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Check out MARMORIS - a new NGO founded to explore #deepsea habitats in The Bahamas ewnews.com/new-bahamian... Beyond excited too see a fellow Bahamian passionate about deep-sea research. Way to go Denley, @katycroffbell.bsky.social and team!
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
This used to be an absolute plague in Brussels. Until the council said the companies were responsible for it and they'd start fining them. And then - as if by magic - the problem got solved, pdq.
September 9, 2025 at 12:03 PM
This used to be an absolute plague in Brussels. Until the council said the companies were responsible for it and they'd start fining them. And then - as if by magic - the problem got solved, pdq.
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
Lucinid bivalves are chemosymbiotic, partnering with microbes which oxidize sulfide and give them food. How do they breathe in such a sulfide-rich environment? In their burrows, one end leads up to oxygen, while another set of branching burrows lead downward, mining sulfide (203)
August 24, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Lucinid bivalves are chemosymbiotic, partnering with microbes which oxidize sulfide and give them food. How do they breathe in such a sulfide-rich environment? In their burrows, one end leads up to oxygen, while another set of branching burrows lead downward, mining sulfide (203)
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
Dr. Berry Billingsley at Swansea University is reimagining how classrooms engage with questions that transcend subject boundaries.
On @storiesofimpact.bsky.social, she discusses how to equip students to explore queries on life, the universe, and existence.
🎧 bit.ly/47BzVAL
On @storiesofimpact.bsky.social, she discusses how to equip students to explore queries on life, the universe, and existence.
🎧 bit.ly/47BzVAL
Big Questions That Change How We Learn with Berry Billingsley (podcast)
Interdisciplinary approaches to learning are reshaping religious education and science classes in schools.
www.templetonworldcharity.org
August 19, 2025 at 11:00 PM
Dr. Berry Billingsley at Swansea University is reimagining how classrooms engage with questions that transcend subject boundaries.
On @storiesofimpact.bsky.social, she discusses how to equip students to explore queries on life, the universe, and existence.
🎧 bit.ly/47BzVAL
On @storiesofimpact.bsky.social, she discusses how to equip students to explore queries on life, the universe, and existence.
🎧 bit.ly/47BzVAL
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
This *Osedax* comic by @thefuzzyslug.bsky.social is just amazing! 🤩 #MarineLife #Invertebrate #SciArt 🦑🌊🐡
August 17, 2025 at 3:44 PM
This *Osedax* comic by @thefuzzyslug.bsky.social is just amazing! 🤩 #MarineLife #Invertebrate #SciArt 🦑🌊🐡
Deepest know chemosynthesis-based ecosystems!
This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered
July 31, 2025 at 10:29 PM
Deepest know chemosynthesis-based ecosystems!
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered
July 31, 2025 at 3:38 PM
This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
“Digital asbestos” is such a perfect descriptor! bsky.app/profile/katr...
Someone on here compared AI produced material as "digital asbestos " which in a few decades' time we will have to work out how to eradicate from the fabric of research.
From my own academic research, even pre LLMs there was a huge danger of zombie factoids that begin in a respectable publication by mistake and then get reprinted for decades because no one is backtracing to the original source. Once bad info gets into the system it can take years to clear it out.
July 30, 2025 at 8:41 AM
“Digital asbestos” is such a perfect descriptor! bsky.app/profile/katr...
This thread on storytelling from @toriherridge.bsky.social keeps haunting me…
Tucked inside this piece by @iandunt.bsky.social is a paragraph that speaks to a deep unease that has been growing inside me about storytelling, and how it’s power is divorced from truth (or maybe reality/fact is a better word).
iandunt.substack.com/p/you-dont-w...
iandunt.substack.com/p/you-dont-w...
July 9, 2025 at 10:32 AM
This thread on storytelling from @toriherridge.bsky.social keeps haunting me…
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
“Data is like people. If you torture it for long enough, it’ll tell you more or less whatever you want to hear.”
Nice, ultimately hopeful, article on the flawed field of behavioural science, with some pretty big clues about why the field has such problems: “A whole strata of academics became akin to rock stars thanks to their ability to explain why humans behaved the way they did”
Inside the scandal that rocked behavioural science – and paved the way for revolution
Five years after a widely revered study was debunked as totally bogus, Helen Coffey asks the experts whether trust in the sexiest branch of science has been irrevocably eroded – and how to discern bet...
www.independent.co.uk
June 30, 2025 at 12:47 PM
“Data is like people. If you torture it for long enough, it’ll tell you more or less whatever you want to hear.”
Junior researchers are often given poor [or no] advice about trans national shipping of scientific samples. Academic societies could really help their members by commissioning good advice on this topic, e.g. @ASMicrobiology helpful document:
asm.org/guideline/pa...
—-
www.bbc.com/news/article...
asm.org/guideline/pa...
—-
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Chinese nationals accused of smuggling 'biological pathogen' into US
Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu allegedly brought a fungus into the US which damages a variety of crops and is toxic to humans and animals.
www.bbc.com
June 4, 2025 at 12:40 AM
Junior researchers are often given poor [or no] advice about trans national shipping of scientific samples. Academic societies could really help their members by commissioning good advice on this topic, e.g. @ASMicrobiology helpful document:
asm.org/guideline/pa...
—-
www.bbc.com/news/article...
asm.org/guideline/pa...
—-
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Harvard was partly founded on a donation from overseas immigrants from the nascent colony of Eleuthera (Bahamas) - 'It was the largest gift the college had received (up to that time) since the original Harvard donation, and is known as the Eleutheran donation’ www.harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/cast...
May 23, 2025 at 5:25 PM
Harvard was partly founded on a donation from overseas immigrants from the nascent colony of Eleuthera (Bahamas) - 'It was the largest gift the college had received (up to that time) since the original Harvard donation, and is known as the Eleutheran donation’ www.harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/cast...
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
Success in academia often has more to do with luck, patronage and the job market than “hard work”.
Good academics acknowledge this.
I worked hard, but I was in the right place at the right time on occasion. Historians far more talented than I have fallen between the cracks.
Good academics acknowledge this.
I worked hard, but I was in the right place at the right time on occasion. Historians far more talented than I have fallen between the cracks.
May 21, 2025 at 7:16 AM
Success in academia often has more to do with luck, patronage and the job market than “hard work”.
Good academics acknowledge this.
I worked hard, but I was in the right place at the right time on occasion. Historians far more talented than I have fallen between the cracks.
Good academics acknowledge this.
I worked hard, but I was in the right place at the right time on occasion. Historians far more talented than I have fallen between the cracks.
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
Not sure how other folks pick journals. When I was starting out I wanted a breadth of journals. Now I prioritize ones that are owned by scientific societies. I have no interest in paying APCs to anyone other than a society. That makes @royalsocietypublishing.org one of my favorites #OA or not.
May 15, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Not sure how other folks pick journals. When I was starting out I wanted a breadth of journals. Now I prioritize ones that are owned by scientific societies. I have no interest in paying APCs to anyone other than a society. That makes @royalsocietypublishing.org one of my favorites #OA or not.
I once held a door open for Sir David Attenborough…
May 8, 2025 at 9:58 PM
I once held a door open for Sir David Attenborough…
Reposted by Dr Nick Higgs 🇧🇸🇬🇧
The hypothesis that land-dwelling iguanas rafted across the Pacific Ocean helps explain how iguana lineages from South America dispersed so easily throughout the Caribbean & The Bahamas, with some reaching small islands surrounded by deep-ocean environments. theconversation.com/we-discovere... 🧪🦎
May 3, 2025 at 2:26 PM
The hypothesis that land-dwelling iguanas rafted across the Pacific Ocean helps explain how iguana lineages from South America dispersed so easily throughout the Caribbean & The Bahamas, with some reaching small islands surrounded by deep-ocean environments. theconversation.com/we-discovere... 🧪🦎