Red-green Carpet

TL:DR – It’s spring and at least one hibernating moth, the Red-green Carpet, has arrived in our garden so far this year Lit up with my Heath trap again last night and despite the rain, but perhaps because it didn’t drop below 9 Celsius there was a small clutch of moths to ID and record this morning. Specifically, 2x Clouded Drab (new for the year),...

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The northern lights aren’t in my eyes – Aurora borealis

Lots of lucky locals, by which I mean people a bit further north in Norfolk saw the northern lights, the Aurora Borealis, in Norfolk and elsewhere. There is a slight possibility of seeing them in Cambridgeshire although finding somewhere with little light pollution around here is a tough call, but more to the point it’s been cloudy and wet when other...

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Early Oak Piercer just for FUN

TL:DR – Pheromones are a useful tool for discovering what day-flying moths are in your neighbourhood. As regular readers know, I do a bit of mothing…I have had a FUN lure, a pheromone lure aimed at attracting Grapholita funebrana. It’s been sighted in the garden for a couple of weeks with nothing appearing until 21st March 2023 at which point I was...

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Alpine Swifts in the UK and Ireland

Back in 2019, we took a trip to Greece, the first in many years, we saw lots of wildlife, including Alpine Swift careening way above our heads in Athens. The alpine swift is a medium-sized bird with a wingspan of around 540-600 mm. It has a dark-brown body with a slightly paler throat and underbelly. In flight, it is easily identified by its long,...

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Careers advice from ChatGPT

I gave ChatGPT the following prompt: You are to act as a careers guidance counsellor with many years experience. I added some personal career history and hobbies and asked it to come up with some advice for what I should do in the latter part of my career. This is what it had to say: It sounds like you have had a very successful and diverse career...

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The flour beetle’s water butt

A new study has demonstrated the ability of red flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) to recycle water in their rectums. This feat allows the beetles to survive in some of the driest environments on Earth. The research team of Kenneth Halberg and colleagues built a transcriptomic atlas of the beetles’ life stages, which allowed them to systematically...

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Concerning privacy concerns and device fingerprinting

TL:DR – If you’re online, you cannot ensure complete privacy. But, here are some tips on keeping at least some of your private life private. Often those in power declare that we shouldn’t worry about privacy, they often say “If you’ve got nothing to hide, then you’ve got nothing to worry about”. So let them all have clear bathroom windows and no...

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British mothers in the early spring

TL:DR – Mothing is a simple, but educational and fascinating hobby. The data it accumulates can be useful scientifically. I have lit up with a couple of different traps through the winter, but with generally disappointing results. There are not a lot of trees in our neighbourhood, which I suspect is the reason we don’t get a huge number of moths....

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How to be your own ChatGPT

The title of this post might have you imagining some kind of AI interface that lets you tap into your subconscious and create output based on prompts you give yourself…will…in a way it is. But the interface isn’t what you think… When I was writing my book Deceived Wisdom, there were lots of ideas constantly swarming around my brain for weeks and months...

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Protected: Jason Gaston speaks to me

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