Potholer54 has a new video, in which he explains the error of all those people who say “do your own research,” a phrase so heavily abused by conspiracy theorists and cranks that it has lost much of its meaning. To me, “do your own research” means digging heavily into the background science and reading the journals; to them, it seems to mean finding a Daily Mail headline that fits their preconceptions and running with it.

It’s like he’s talking about me, a little bit. When I got into arachnology 6 or 7 years ago, I was a near total n00b — I could apply what I knew about developmental biology and evolution to them, but I couldn’t just catch a spider in my garage and claim to now be an expert on spiders. I have read so many books and papers on them, in addition to continuing to chase spiders all over the countryside, but I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. I think real scientists have to approach any field with a sense of humility, even if they’ve been working on it for decades.

What really amused me, though, what that this was the latest comment on the video, at the very top of the page.

What a lovely example of a bad scientific argument! I’m pretty sure that potholer54 understands that humans, and human brains, are the product of evolution, and sarcastically suggesting that he has overlooked an explanation that every right-thinking evolutionary psychologist has deduced is a serious error of comprehension. It is a classic example of evo-psych argumentation, though — I have been told many times that because I find evo-psych to be facile, superficial, and a swamp of bogus reasoning that I must be a creationist.

To be fair, though, not all the people who were offended by the video are incapable of following a simple train of thought. For example, this person at least got the gist of what was said:

Yes, it was a criticism of the “do your own research” group. Very good! Sirtra understood something.

It was not about insulting them, though. It was explaining that they don’t know what they’re talking about, that they’re pursuing information in a wrong and misleading way, and that maybe “doing your own research” ought to involve cracking open an introductory textbook and actually studying the basics of the topic first, and understanding how the authorities in a field derive their conclusions. The purpose is to explain how to do research properly.

Like how zEropoint68 could benefit from knowing the basics of evolutionary biology before explaining tendentiously what evolutionary biologists believe about the human brain.

Are you ready for another pandemic?

No, you are not. And this one has the potential to be worse than COVID.

Cases of H5N1, the bird flu, are on the rise. Bird flu is bad — the cases are limited right now, because most of the transmission is from birds/cows to humans, and not human to human, and most of us don’t cuddle chickens that often. Please don’t start.

We’re definitely not at the point where we should panic and shut everything down, but we are at the point where we should be preparing, building up stockpiles of vaccines, and developing new vaccines (there is no commercially available RNA vaccine for bird flu yet). If the virus mutates, as viruses are wont to do, a variant could spread with stunning speed.

But don’t count on those vaccines saving us if this virus does what flu viruses sometimes do, and turns into a pandemic form. It won’t oblige humanity by slowly mutating, giving people a chance to ramp up vaccines quickly.

“It is going to happen fast,” says Ali Khan, dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health and a veteran of numerous disease outbreaks, from influenza to Ebola.

The world just saw this happen. COVID appeared suddenly and spread globally before alarm bells rang. Even with the new, quick-turn technology of mRNA vaccines, it took just about a year after SARS-CoV-2 started its global spread to get the first doses into arms. By that point, 300,000 people had died in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands more—possibly millions—died around the world before vaccines were fully deployed.

Viruses reproduce at a phenomenal rate, faster than we slow clumsy vertebrates can adapt. You just know, though, that the guy Trump wants to appoint to run the NIH is going to argue for “herd immunity” the instant a pandemic takes off. In fact, this country has been working to undermine even a minimally responsible pandemic response for the last few years.

When COVID broke out, people were largely open to vaccines. Then-president Donald Trump touted his government’s rollout of the vaccine, but he has since helped feed vaccine skepticism. Neither Trump nor his Democratic opponent for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, mentions pandemic preparedness in their respective campaign platforms.

Even uptake of routine childhood vaccines is falling. “The lack of trust around vaccines does put us in a very bad place. We do know that people are dying because they are not getting vaccinated against COVID,” Khan says. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that only 11 percent of adults and just 7 percent of pregnant women have received the latest COVID vaccine.

Some states have loosened vaccine requirements and recommendations, something that worries Khan and other public health experts. Vaccines cannot help anyone if people don’t get them. Politicians who don’t promote the need for pandemic preparations are gambling that the next one won’t hit during their terms in office. “This is all going to potentially come home to roost with the next pandemic,” Khan says.

I got my COVID vaccine. It won’t help against bird flu, though. Meanwhile, the idiots are pushing the public to take greater risks. Remember all the fools touting raw milk for some absurd reason? That had consequences in California.

The source for all those bird flu cases in California was a few cow herds, herds specifically raised to produce raw milk, from a company called Raw Farm, run by a guy named Mark McAfee. Remember that name; it could go down in history, just like that of Mrs O’Leary. McAfee has some political opportunities in the current climate.

As bird flu has spread among poultry and cattle in the US this year, raw milk has seen a new wave of interest and some high-profile supporters, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Raw milk was on a laundry list of items that faced “aggressive suppression” by the US Food and Drug Administration, Kennedy said in a post on X in October. In a fact sheet shared with CNN on Monday, Raw Farm said its CEO, Mark McAfee, “has been asked by the RFK transition team to apply for the position of ‘FDA advisor on Raw Milk Policy and Standards Development.’ ” CNN has reached out to the Trump transition team for comment.

Imagine a pandemic with RFK jr and Jay Bhattacharya in charge. Or don’t, if you don’t like nightmares. We are so screwed.

Oh, and for those people who look at a table listing a mere 57 cases, who think that’s minor and nothing to worry about, that’s just human cases. The virus is thriving in herds of cattle and flocks of birds, you know, those animals most of us eat.

In updates since November 27, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) confirmed 14 more H5N1 outbreaks in dairy cattle, all involving California herds. The latest additions push the state’s total to 475 and the national total to 689 across 15 states.

Also, APHIS confirmed more H5N1 outbreaks in poultry in six states. All involve commercial farms. In California, the virus struck poultry farms in three counties—a duck breeder and a broiler facility housing more than 266,000 birds in Fresno County, a turkey farm in Merced County, and a commercial hatchery in Tulare County.

In Minnesota, the virus hit two more turkey farms in Meeker County, one of which has nearly 242,000 birds.

Similar outbreaks were confirmed at turkey farms in North Dakota (Ransom County), South Dakota (Beadle and Faulk counties), and Utah (Sanpete County).

In the south, the virus was confirmed at a broiler farm in Tennessee’s Gibson County that houses 37,200 birds. The outbreak is Tennessee’s first since October 2023.

Think of those as vast culture dishes where H5N1 is proliferating and mutating at a furious rate. Give ’em time, we’ll get a deadly variant popping out eventually.

Would you like some free biological illustrations that aren’t the products of an AI’s unrestrained imagination? NIH BioArt is such a source.

These are bold, simple illustrations with limitations. There is a section on arthropods, but it doesn’t contain any spiders, or much of anything outside ticks and mosquitos. If you want a graphic of a tick, it’s got you covered. Here’s a tick for you:

In that treasure trove of old documents from my mother, I found this little surprise: she’d also saved one of my extra figures from my research at the University of Oregon, the stuff that led to me working with Judith Eisen.

That’s another oldie — Mom must have asked what the heck I was doing in the lab, and I gave her an old print and tried to explain it to her. And she salted it away for 40 years!

My experiences in grad school were mostly happy ones, and I credit that to the fact that I was lucky to work with good people. I entered the lab of Charles Kimmel, working on zebrafish neuroscience, and stumbled my way through several projects before Chuck suggested a new one: he recommended that I use a fluorescent lineage tracer dye, rhodamine dextran, injected into midblastula cells, which we’d allow to develop into a larva in the hopes that some of that dye would end up in the neurons I was interested in.

This was a cunning strategem. First of all, this was a labor-intensive project; we’d have to do a hell of a lot of injections to get the dye into the few cells we cared about by happenstance. We’d eventually do the experiment and get a yield somewhere under 5%. The other angle is that he already had someone lined up to work on the idea, and I was being drafted to assist in the experiment.

I didn’t mind. That someone was a new post-doc, Judith Eisen, and I think we worked well together. Judith was intimidatingly intense, but nice. We got into the rhythm of this experiment smoothly. In the evening (this was a timing-dependent experiment, you had to start with embryos of a certain age) we’d get together over a beaker with hundreds of embryos, and then we had to work fast, because there was a narrow window of time to get the injections done. I’d line up ten or so embryos on a slide, and pass them to Judith, who was poised over the microscope with a microinjector, and bang bang bang, she’d shoot up single cells with the dye. I was the loader, she was the gunner. We’d set up maybe a hundred embryos before stopping and letting them then develop.

The fun work started the next day. We’d go through the previous night’s collection, put each embryo under a fluorescence microscope with a silicon intensified target camera and take pictures. Most of them we’d throw out — they had labeled skin cells, or labeled kidney, or labeled notochord, or whatever, which might be useful to someone, but not us. We wanted labeled spinal neurons. We’d get a few.

The next step might sound crude, but it was the 1980s, it was what we could do. We’d see a glowing cell on the video monitor, and we’d tape a piece of transparent plastic on the screen and outline all the cells with a sharpie. Then we’d come back to that special cell over the course of the day, and draw on that same piece of plastic with a different color. Our data was these sheets with the changing shape of labeled cells.

I vividly remember our eureka moment. We were going through our daily labeled embryos, and we had this one fish that looked familiar, a cell that looked like one we’d seen before. We sat there and made a prediction, I bet we knew exactly how that cell would develop in the next few hours. Judith grabbed all our data and spent an afternoon manually aligning all these drawings — our simple technique had some virtues, in that we could so easily align analog pictures — and came back and could say that we had precisely three cell types that had a stereotyped pattern of outgrowth.

Those were great times, and it was most excellent working with Judith. Some of my happiest memories of working in science were from those years in Chuck’s lab, partnering with Judith, so the latest news from Oregon makes me even happier: Judith Eisen has been elevated to the National Academy of Sciences! That is a well-deserved honor, and I’m happy for her.

What I learned from that experience was that a key ingredient of good research was collegiality, mutual support, and cooperativity. I think that’s what I took away from my training, that I should model my own mentorship in the years since on that of Judith Eisen and Chuck Kimmel.