Isn't this the goober who constantly whines about being silenced? Then why can't I escape seeing or hearing him every time I look online.

(7/7) With @helenanorman.bsky.social, @cortesedaphne.bsky.social, Amelia Munson, and @jlindstrom.bsky.social.‬ What do you think – is it time to move beyond the fiction of constant baselines?

(6/7) The solution isn't to abandon SMR, but to refine measurements: either integrate across sleep-wake cycles for daily estimates, or match measurement states to your biological question. Shifting from static to dynamic baselines will provide more meaningful estimates of organismal energetics.

(5/7) Size, age, social environment, abiotic factors all affect sleep architecture. Correlations btwn SMR & behaviour, environmental effects on SMR/AS, heritability, scaling relationships - all could be confounded with sleep-wake states and partitioning of maintenance processes.

(4/7) Another issue: due to partitioning of different functions between sleep and wakefulness, treatment or environmental effects on SMR via effects on specific functions (e.g. protein synthesis) may be missed entirely if you measure during the wrong state.

(3/7) We modelled the consequences: Sleep-only measurements underestimate daily integrated energy costs. Wake-only measurements overestimate them. The bias isn't random - it follows predictable patterns based on variation in individual or species sleep architecture.

(2/7) The problem: Different maintenance processes happen at different times. Ion regulation & thermoregulation are active during wake. Protein synthesis, many brain functions, immunity peak during sleep. How “maintenance” is defined and what constitutes SMR depends entirely on WHEN you measure it.

And they said we were crazy. Well who's laughing now.

How do you know they're not?