Neuroscientist by training, tinkerer by nature. Now scanning transparent mouse brains with light-sheet microscopes. Microscopy, clearing, data crunching, tinkering.
Working as postdoc at @radboudumc with Nael Nadif Kasri and Corette Wierenga, looking at neuron-distribution differences in mouse models of ASD.
Married, father of two. Toots in English, German, Dutch. Boosts a lot.
opted into tootfinder for full-text indexing. Check it out: https://www.tootfinder.ch/index.php?join=1
🎓 Today at @SURF, during the Digital Sovereignty course for board members, directors, and decision-makers in education and research, we had the pleasure of speaking with @Karlitschek and @fabricemous from @nextcloud!
We explored visions, asked deep questions, and learned from their experience. We’re moving into position to have the right conversations and be in control of IT 💚👌
💻 Digitalization is not the heart ❤️ of organizations, but the lifeblood
If you drive in #France and suddenly see something milky on the roads, it's not a new farmers' protest. It's called "lait de chaux".
This #whitewash consisting of lime and water is a try to protect the bitumen in the roads from melting due to more and more heatwaves: https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/evenements-meteorologiques-extremes/vagues-de-chaleur-canicules/canicule-du-lait-de-chaux-repandu-sur-les-routes-pour-eviter-la-chaleur-du-bitume_7326369.html The streets are about 10 degrees cooler due to the white colour.
This week-end, we will have up to 37°C.
#climateDiary #ClimateAdaption #ClimateCrisis #white #colours #heatwave #road #roadSafety
"The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse."
Great post on the impact of GenAI on students' ability to learn how to write and therefore how to think
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-of-the-student-essayand
A beautiful pair of Solitary Rugose Coral fossils.
Eroded into perfect cross-sections, you can see their internal structures.
County Donegal, Ireland.
Cormacscoast.com walking tours
#wildatlanticway #walkingtours #discoverireland #keepdiscovering #fossil #irishfossils #coral #rugosecoral #Ireland
The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding and autocratization, in particular in the U.S. To this end, it sets out how autocracies often follow a common playbook, built around the “3 Ps”: populism, polarization, and post-truth. Leaders present themselves as voices of “the people” against “corrupt elites”, inflame societal divisions, and undermine facts to avoid accountability. This leads to a cascade of dangers for scholarship, including censorship, restrictions on funding and research collaboration, and even violence. The Trump administration serves as a contemporary example, with policies that curtail international scientific cooperation, revoke research grants, and suppress studies related to public health, climate change and minority issues. Because open inquiry and dissent are central to science and academia—qualities antithetical to authoritarian control—academia is often among the first targets of autocrats. To help scholars resist authoritarian developments, the handbook highlights both historic and contemporary measures aimed at attacking scholars, their institutional environments, and their scholarship. The handbook also sets out a framework for action based on personal risk level—low, medium, high, or extreme. This is designed to help scholars think about their own risk and purposefully choose actions in line with it. The handbook considers tools for enhancing digital safety and highlights the importance of ongoing documentation, preserving imperilled data, and creating distributed archives as a defence against erasure. It also calls on scholars to tell their stories—publicly or anonymously—to inspire others, maintain accountability and preserve a historical record. Accompanying the handbook is a living wiki that will continue to incorporate new developments and provide updates on global efforts by scholars to push back against authoritarianism and safeguard the democratic foundations that enable free inquiry.
Heute war ein Schulfest. Da gab es einen Quizstand. Eins underer Kinder (9) wollte schummeln, kam zu mir und bat, ob ich "schnell bei ChatGPT" nachfragen könne nach der Frage, ob die Legislative in den USA im Weißen Haus oder im Capitol sitze. Danach folgten weitere solcher Fragen. (Edit: Das Quiz warn nicht für 9jährige, sondern einfach ein Stand auf dem Hof, wo vor allem größere Kinder waren, aber kleinere Kinder turnten da rum und wollten auch mitmachen).
Wir haben später nochmal über diese Situation gesprochen. Ich habe gefragt, warum es nach ChatGPT gefragt hat. Die Erklärung war, dass der Lehrer bei einer Frage vorher mit den Kindern die Lösung mit Google und ChatGPT "gesucht" habe und nur ChatGPT hat sie richtig gewusst.
Kleine Anekdote, aber da steckt viel drin. Ich habe nochmal erklärt, was eine Suche mit Google eigentlich ist und das Google keine Antworten liefert bzw. eigentlich liefern sollte und dass sie eventuell ein Versuch einer KI gesehen haben, die dafür bekannt ist, besonders schlecht zu sein. Aber auch, dass ChatGPT gar keine Wissensdatenbank ist und halluzinieren kann. Das Kind war stark irritiert davon, weil im Sprachalltag von Kinder, Schule, Medien ChatGPT quasi als Superpower imaginiert wird und überhaupt nicht klar ist, dass ChatGPT nicht dafür da ist, um Wissensfragen zu beantworten.
Wir konnten das jetzt klären, aber sonst wird das wohl nicht geklärt. Das macht mich nicht besonders glücklich. Ich habe in den letzten Jahren nun schon mehrfach kurze Medienunterrichtseinheiten an den Schulen der Kinder zu Computer-nahen Themen gemacht. Aber das ist eben nur ein Tropfen auf den heißen Stein. Das läuft wirklich extrem schief gerade. Und hier ist auch nochmal eine Alterslinie erkennbar: Je jünger die Kinder, desto selbstverständlicher sind für sie LLMs in der Lebensumgebung, während die älteren Kinder sie als "neu" auch eher skeptisch betrachten.
Jaarlijks rapporteert de Autoriteit Diergeneesmiddelen over de verkoop en het gebruik vn antibiotica voor de veesector. In 2009 heeft de Tweede Kamer, na jarenlange stijging van gebruik, bepaald dat voor 2015 een significante verlaging noodzakelijk was. Dat doel is in dat jaar net gehaald. Hier de ontwikkeling eerst in verkochte hoeveelheid en daarna in gebruik...
reminder that I have 20+ years of data experience and I'm looking for some kind of Data Scientist/Analyst/Analytics Engineering gig, remote in the US (I'm in Portland, OR)
I would like to be doing something that makes the world a bit better, and every one has data, so it seems like that should be possible.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amsantos/
Reboosts and links to job posts are most welcome!
The #Nachtlichter app was designed to assist participants in counting and classifying light sources. We pre-defined street segments (usually from one street corner to the next), and participants went there at night and reported all the different lights they could see.
One question that we had to deal with early on was "how do we categorize all the different light sources that are out there?" In the end, we came up with 18 categories (including "other" as the final category for uncommon things like flagpole lights, glowing park benches, illuminated water fountains, etc.).
(9/)
We had originally proposed that we would cover at least 6 square kilometers in at least 3 German communities.
In the end, our fantastic team of citizen scientists made observations in 33 communities in 9 countries (but mainly in Germany), covering a total area of 22 square kilometers!
(10/)
So what did we find? Well, first, we compared the number of lights that our participants counted (per square kilometer) to the brightness of the #VIIRS_DNB satellite instrument.
We see a clear correlation between the two, and this gives us a "conversion" factor from "nW/cm^2sr" to "lights/km^2".
We used this factor to calculate how many light sources out team would count if we covered the entire area of Germany exactly at midnight. Our result is 78 ± 3 million lights, or roughly one per person.
(11/)
You can see that while the relationships are obvious, the number of each light of different light types is not directly proportional to the satellite brightness. That's similar to what we saw for Tucson: as you go from more rural to more urban places, the relative importance of street lights decreases.
We looked at this by comparing the fraction of lights of different types for observations in different land cover types.
(12/)
These results are particularly important for people who model artificial night sky brightness (skyglow), because up until now, most skyglow models assume that all of the light comes from streetlight-style lights.
This shows that there are a great number of light sources that shine sideways (signs, and windows), that are right now being largely ignored.
This is also important for efforts to reduce #LightPollution, because it means that while streetlights are important, fixing them is not going to come close to fixing the entire problem.
Illuminated advertisements and lights mounted on buildings are also important - and the lights from residential houses probably matter a lot more than people generally think!
(13/)
Huge thanks go to the hundreds of people who took part in the project!
Thanks also to @helmholtz and @bmbf_bund for funding our research!
If you'd like to learn more, we've also written a "questions and answers" document for non-academics. It's available in both German: https://doi.org/10.48440/gfz.1.4.2025.001
And English: https://doi.org/10.48440/gfz.1.4.2025.002
Check out also this "behind the paper" blog post written by two of our citizen scientists: https://communities.springernature.com/posts/behind-the-paper-citizen-science-illuminates-the-nature-of-city-lights-citizen-scientists-insights-into-the-research-project-nachtlichter
And thanks to everyone who read and shared parts of this thread!
(14/)
Nature Cities has also published a "research briefing", with comments about the paper from me, one of the reviewers (Noam Levin), and the editor. Check it out: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00242-w
(An addition to the thread later in the day, 15/15)
Another article about #LightPollution also came out in Nature Cities today: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-025-00258-2
@travislongcore is a co-author, and the paper's title is "Artificial light at night outweighs temperature in lengthening urban growing seasons"
The authors looked at how temperature, artificial light, and how urban a city is (impervious surface fraction) affect the start and end of the growing season for plants.
They found that artificial light "increased exponentially toward urban centers, and exerted stronger influence than air temperature in lengthening the urban growing season, especially by delaying its end, although the effects varied across climate zones."
In case you are interested in light pollution and didn't see it yet, check out the thread above 👆
@skyglowberlin Ahhh I was literally just wondering on the bus this morning about whether increased lighting vs 'just' climate change might be behind some of the unseasonal flowers @joncounts and others have been noting....
@cosmos4u yeah, at first I thought it was good that they came out together, but that may have sucked the air out of the room for ours...
It was reported in El Pais, Deutschlandfunk Nova, and (maybe?) BR.
Coming out a week before the summer solstice probably also doesn't fit well to the stories the editors want to tell - the "hot time of year" for interviews with me has nearly always been January and February, when the nights are long.
@skyglowberlin @travislongcore
This is cool.
I also noticed that certain wildflowers bloomed near the glass door of my house at least 2 weeks earlier in the Spring than it did in the surrounding yard.
There might have been some affect due to temperature leakage, but it really seemed to be due to the light, and this supports that.
@skyglowberlin great thread, thank you.
I read a couple of times about vehicle lights being indirectly counted but couldn't see the contribution quantified?
🙏🏽
@jbenjamint Yeah, we asked people to rate how many cars were driving. The scale was something like:
o continuous traffic
o several per minute
o one car per minute
o little to no traffic
We didn't have a good way to bring that into the paper in the same way as the count results, but also, traffic pretty much ends on the vast majority of German streets around 9-10 pm. I mean, there are still cars, but it's nothing compared to the early evening.
Car headlights might help to explain why we see such a discrepancy between citizen scientist observations of star visibility in the early evening and satellite measures of light emissions well after midnight (see: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7781)
@skyglowberlin @helmholtz @bmbf_bund
Thanks to cheap 360 cameras, it might be quite simple to get a bunch of volunteers to actually survey a target at midnight.
I'm thinking a group of motorcyclists could be prepositioned with chosen routes, and at the right time, ride out. Send the videos back, run them through some image processing, presto.
Similarly, riders willing to do this over moderate distances could get you rural data.
@Benhm3 We thought about ideas like that, but it's difficult to clearly identify light sources from imagery alone. In this example, a human can figure out (especially if they are there) that the light here is coming from floodlights and count them. But it would be much more challenging to try to get that just from imagery.
There are lots of other examples where lights can only really be seen from the sidewalk and not the street.
@skyglowberlin @helmholtz @bmbf_bund
Wow. Fascinating
Wladimir Mufty
Loren
Petra van Cronenburg
Cian O’Donnell
Cormacs Coast
Ulrike Hahn
Caspar C. Mierau
𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇
Datagraver.com
Melissa Santos
Christopher Kyba 🇨🇦🇪🇺
Zeborah
nosfe
Daniel Fischer
Rozzychan
Ben Thompson 🐕
Large Format Projectionist
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