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Dr. July Pilowsky

@pilowsky.me
245 followers 353 following 130 posts

I model infectious disease in wildlife using #RStats and #JuliaLang, and I design dance larps about intergenerational trauma. 🇺🇸 🇨🇱 🏳️‍🌈 they/she/he, eng/esp

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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 23/09/2026
after some in-depth discussions with my lab and also drawing on conversations on here, we've edited our new policy on AI usage in my lab feel free to adapt or re-use with attribution, or to reply to tell me how awful this policy is lol
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 04/08/2026
Mis traducciones a castellano van avanzando entonces me vas a encontrar en DMs pronto 🇪🇸
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 03/08/2026
I have uploaded my latest larp, which premiered at @makeascenemn.bsky.social , in fully boxed and playable form on my larp website. Enjoy! larp.pilowsky.me/project/the-...
larp.pilowsky.me
The Language of Bones | July Pilowsky
Raise your monstrous ancestor from their grave with the power of dance, and uncover your past.
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Science Magazine @science.org · 22/06/2026
In what may be one of Earth’s craziest forms of mimicry, researchers in 2023 reported a species of rove beetle that grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it. Learn more during #InsectWeek: scim.ag/4mM2aS9
Austrospirachtha carrijoi, a species of rove beetle
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Laura Kelley @lauraakelley.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Sexier in the city? Urban male great bowerbirds decorate bowers with human-made objects, creating brighter and more varied displays than rural males. Males strongly prefer human-made objects over natural ones, possibly boosting their appeal to females! shorturl.at/lcNY2 @royalsocietypublishing.org
The ground is covered in leaf litter. On the ground are two parallel walls made of sticks that form a corridor. At each entrance there are objects scattered around including grey plastic, green pieces of glass, grey stones, white snail shells and red items.
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Viruses are highly abundant in the oceans, but there is one place you won't typically find them: in global ocean ecosystem models... until now. Introducing "vDarwin", an explicit integration of viruses into the MITgcm/Darwin global ecosystem framework: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... a 🧵
Integration of a model of viral lysis, shunt and shuttle in a large scale ocean circulation model. (A) Schematic of the large scale ocean circulation model (MITgcm): major surface ocean circulation patterns and the schematic of the advection/diffusion are represented. Note that vertical grid spacing increases with depth (i.e., layers become thicker). (B) Simplified ecosystem represented in the study. For simplicity nitrogen remineralization to nitrite and nitrate and mortality fluxes to DOM and POM are not represented. (C) Schematic of the vDarwin ecosystem model integrated in the large scale circulation model. It represents a simplification of the ecosystem presented in (B) assuming that N is the limiting nutrient. It includes the growth of a single phytoplankton type, viral lysis, zooplankton grazing, the viral shunt and shuttle and remineralization (note that remineralizing bacteria are not explicitly represented).
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Jonathan Jacobs @bioinformer.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
When life imitates art
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
I find it fascinating that folks like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are having 'Abundance' discussions about NIH while ignoring the pre-2025 state of play, self-critique of scientists, and the many ways in which American science is imperfect and yet (near) the best in the world (or was). 🧵
nytimes.com
Opinion | What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’
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Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
“Emperor penguins, the world’s largest and perhaps most recognizable penguin species, have joined the list of wildlife endangered by global warming, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced on Thursday… largely driven by shifts in sea ice levels and food availability”
nytimes.com
Emperor Penguins Are Now Endangered, a New Assessment Finds
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Aaron Clauset @aaronclauset.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 30/03/2026
From the New Yorker.
Three scientists standing around in a lab. One of them says, “These days, if you’re not a mad scientist, you’re not paying attention.”
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
David Nogués Bravo @noguesbravo.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
Can rewilding save the planet? I gave my answer on BBC Radio's The Inquiry — and so did some of my colleagues. Tune in and see if you agree. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
bbc.co.uk
The Inquiry - How can rewilding help combat climate change? - BBC Sounds
As rewilding initiatives grow there’s a concern some risk doing more harm than good
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
EcoEvoRxiv @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
'Cities alter the latitudinal diversity gradient of birds in North America' DOI: doi.org/10.32942/X23...
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/
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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
An example of how impacts of interventions can differ at individual and population levels, and are conditional on other events. Given a car hits you, the helmet helps. But mandating helmets could lower the # of bikes on the road & thus might increase the chance of getting hit in the first place.
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 30/01/2026
Thank you so much, I use this on a weekly basis
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
Emil Hvitfeldt @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
I decided to give one of my most well liked project a bit of a make over, and I wrote about it too! See how I updated the visuals of r-color-palettes emilhvitfeldt.com/post/r-color... #rstats
emilhvitfeldt.com
R Color Palettes Refresh
Total rewrite of R Color Palettes and new release of paletteer.
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Colette Delawalla, PhD @cdelawalla.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Wow. This is devastating. www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office
A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies
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Thijs Kuiken @thijskuiken.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
First evidence in Europe of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 infection in a dairy cow. Antibodies against H5N1 detected in a cow with mastitis and respiratory signs on a Dutch dairy farm at the end of December. A cat on that farm had died from H5N1. www.tweedekamer.nl/downloads/do...
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.
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Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez @frodsan.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Oooh love this. Easiest way to parallelise anything in #rstats. Just add futurize() to your favourite function call www.jottr.org/2026/01/22/f... Thanks @henrikbengtsson.bsky.social HT @rstats.blaze.email
Examples of how to use the new futurize package
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 17/01/2026
You may want to look into the Fastaval scene in Denmark. Many games there straddle the line between larp and TTRPG.
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
Academics, just use this simple LaTeX macro and you can avoid maintaining a separate CV just for 2026 federal grants.
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David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈 @whysharksmatter.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
The red dot is a baby North Atlantic right whale trying to migrate up the east coast of the United states. The blue streaks are fast moving shipping vessels entering and leaving New York City harbor. One collision and the whale is dead. We need *mandatory* speed limits for these vessels! 🧪🦑🌍
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 07/01/2026
From your mouth to God’s ears. It can be like pulling teeth getting disease researchers to deposit data in a proper open science repository.
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 07/01/2026
This is a serious issue in my field. I am a researcher studying avian influenza and even I am not allowed to access flu sequences in GISAID.
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Dave Baltrus 🦦 @surtlab.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Love having “venture capital” reviewing my grants
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 17/12/2025
I use the NCAR supercomputers to simulate disease outbreaks in wildlife. The impact of this terrible move will spread well beyond climate change research.
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
Kat Volk @katvolk.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Wow. Grants might now be rejected/accepted based on a single outside review and no panel
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Emilie Köhler @e-koehler.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
My research on elephant conservation in the KAZA TFCA was featured by @mongabay.com in an article that argues for corridors, not culls, as a long term solution for Southern Africa‘s growing elephant population 🐘 news.mongabay.com/2025/12/corr...
news.mongabay.com
Corridors, not culls, offer solution to Southern Africa’s growing elephant population
Since being collared in Zambia two years ago, a young bull elephant known to researchers as Z16 has walked nearly 12,000 kilometers, or 7,500 miles — three times the distance between New York and Los ...
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Tired: Publishing a ton of papers by breaking stories into small pieces and always shooting too high and working the way down the journal cascade Wired: Publishing complete stories in more substantial papers and submitting them to society journals, and not exploiting the peer review system.
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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 09/12/2025
Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...
screenshot of my post
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 02/12/2025
"Participatory science" is similarly inclusive of non-citizens and would make my Web of Science search results cleaner. I think I'll use that term in my own scientific writing.
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 02/12/2025
I do prefer the term "community science" to "citizen science" but man does it make it hard to search for papers about monitoring communities as in ecological communities.
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
John M. Drake @jdrakephd.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Applied to COVID-19 in California, the approach yields more accurate and more stable short-term forecasts than RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs, Transformers, and naïve baselines. 🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
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Dr. July Pilowsky @pilowsky.me · 30/11/2025
In times like these, the trans community relies on its community organizers, who bring people together for activism and mutual support. June Lewis is one of these trans community organizers, and she needs help. I just donated; please stand up for us, too. www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with...
gofundme.com
Donate to Stand with June: Legal and Housing Support Needed, organized by Kassandra Tomaras
June L. is a dear friend, a committed community-builder, a proud J… Kassandra Tomaras needs your support for Stand with June: Legal and Housing Support Needed
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
Kim Weeden @weedenkim.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
I'd guess that 85-90% of American scientists would be ineligible for future funding under this law, maybe close to 100% in the R1 universities. So much for funding proposals based on scientific merit. Apart from being sinophobes, the people pushing this have no clue how science or higher ed works.
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EcoEvoRxiv @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
The Queer & Trans Field Safety Assessment: a tool for protecting minoritized field scientists doi.org/10.32942/X2W...
Diagram showing tips for how to use the Queer and Trans Field Safety Assessment, or QTFSA, and a preview of its Protocols section.
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
am reminded of the old joke: what did James Watson discover? Rosalind Franklin’s notes.
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David Nogués Bravo @noguesbravo.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Today we publish a new paper at The British Medical Journal on the links between biodiversity, climate and health in relation to the hashtag#COP30 in Brazil Here we argue that climate resilience depends on nature—and both are vital for the health of people. www.bmj.com/content/391/...
bmj.com
The Amazon is one of Earth’s major climate stabilisers—we must protect the rainforest and its biodiversity
The twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change have clear implications for human health and must be central to discussions at COP30, argue David Nogués-Bravo and Helena Alves-Pinto The acce...
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Dave Keating @davekeating.substack.com · 05/11/2025
It's important for Europeans, and others from visa-waiver countries, to understand they don't have freedom of speech rights when visiting the United States. The Trump regime is still deporting visitors for critical comments made online, because they can.
newyorker.com
How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation
As an Australian who wrote about the demonstrations while on campus, I gave my phone a superficial clean before flying to the U.S. I underestimated what I was up against.
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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Wow. I did not know that Alfred Russell Wallace (co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection) wrote a book in 1904 about the biological potential for life on other planets, and I've just found this extraordinary paragraph setting out the insanity of atmospheric pollution [1/3]. In 1904!
But the sketch I have here attempted to give of its varied functions shows us that it is really a most complex structure, a wonderful piece of machinery, as[ 259] it were, which in its various component gases, its actions and reactions upon the water and the land, its production of electrical discharges, and its furnishing the elements from which the whole fabric of organic life is composed and perpetually renewed, may be truly considered to be the very source and foundation of life itself. This is seen, not only in the fact of our absolute dependence upon it every minute of our lives, but in the terrible effects produced by even a slight degree of impurity in this vital element. Yet it is among those nations that claim to be the most civilised, those that profess to be guided by a knowledge of the laws of nature, those that most glory in the advance of science, that we find the greatest apathy, the greatest recklessness, in continually rendering impure this all-important necessary of life, to such a degree that the health of the larger portion of their populations is injured and their vitality lowered, by conditions which compel them to breathe more or less foul and impure air for the greater part of their lives. The huge and ever-increasing cities, the vast manufacturing towns belching forth smoke and poisonous gases, with the crowded dwellings, where millions are forced to live under the most terrible insanitary conditions, are the witnesses to this criminal apathy, this incredible recklessness and inhumanity.
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Jan Gogarten @jangogarten.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
A paper for the #eDNA crowd, in particular those using flies for terrestrial biomonitoring. We show that massive pooling works well, reducing costs + time, bringing us a step closer to scalable terrestrial eDNA biomonitoring. doi.org/10.1002/edn3...
doi.org
An Exploration of DNA Extraction Methods of Fly iDNA for Scalable Biodiversity Monitoring
Metabarcoding of invertebrate-derived DNA (iDNA) is an excellent tool for assessing terrestrial mammal diversity, but the time and costs associated with sample processing constrain its wider adoption....
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Greg Albery @gfalbery.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...
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dr Katarzyna Nowak @katzyna.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
Sadly, the conservation outlook for #BiałowieżaForest World Heritage Site is now "critical" largely on account of state border barriers, #militarization and breakdown in #transboundary cooperation. The IUCN released the assessment some days ago: worldheritageoutlook.iucn.org/explore-site...
worldheritageoutlook.iucn.org
Białowieża Forest | World Heritage Outlook
Situated on the watershed of the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, this immense forest range, consisting of evergreens and broad-leaved trees, is home to some remarkable animal life, including rare mammal...
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Hannah Thomasy @hannahthomasy.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
Recently came across Lisa Taylor's amazing work on coloration in jumping spiders, including using eyeliner to give them teenytiny makeovers to see whether these colors helped them attract mates/avoid sexual cannibalism. Sometimes in science, there aren't standard tools for the thing you want to do🧪
Magnified image of a jumping spider with a red face and a liquid eyeliner applicator
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Royal Society Publishing @royalsocietypublishing.org · 20/10/2025
We are pleased to announce that throughout Open Access Week, from 20 – 26 October, all Royal Society journal content is freely available. Explore our journals here: royalsociety.org/Journals/ #OAWeek #OAWeek25
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Lachlan Kermode @ohrg.org · 17/10/2025
Very grateful to @nsaphra.bsky.social for making their (successful) job market materials publicly available: nsaphra.net/post/jobmark.... It's very handy to be able see what these things are supposed to look like!
nsaphra.net
Faculty Market Portfolio | Naomi Saphra
Statements from my faculty applications.
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Reposted by Dr. July Pilowsky
Hannah Harris Green @whatsitlike.me · 15/10/2025
I'm working on a story about this policy change regarding X gender markers on passports. If you have an X gender marker and want to discuss, please DM me! papersplease.org/wp/2025/10/1...
papersplease.org
CBP changes procedures for airline passengers with “X” passports – Papers, Please!
CBP regulations require would-be airline passengers to identify as “M” or F”. These regulations were never changed, even when CBP was accepting “X” gender markers.
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