Zen Faulkes
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doctorzen.net
Zen Faulkes
@doctorzen.net

Home page: http://DoctorZen.net. Biologist. Author of Better Posters book and blog. Collector of academic hoaxes and academic slop graphics.

Environmental science 49%
Geography 13%

Wait... nobody has said 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea yet? 😲

It's THE submarine movie!
a large ship is floating in the ocean with a large whale in the foreground
Alt: The Nautilus submerging.
media.tenor.com

Today marks the 60th anniversary of an indelible pop culture icon.

... No, not the serious one with the spaceships.
a man in a batman costume is working on a machine
Alt: Batman (1966).
media.tenor.com

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

The School of Botanical Art & Illustration at the Denver Botanical Gardens released their lineup of lectures and classes for Winter/Spring 2026. With online and in-person options, these classes are a great way to learn new techniques or advance your current skills for artists of all skill levels!

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

👀 New blog post! 👀

Ever made a *spaghetti* line chart and wondered how you can make it more accessible and more aesthetically pleasing at the same time? 📈

Read this blog post: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/accessi...

#DataViz #RStats
How to create a more accessible line chart – Nicola Rennie
The default settings for chart software are not guaranteed to be accessible, and often need to be adapted for your own chart. In this blog post, we’ll transform a line chart to make it more accessible...
nrennie.rbind.io

Golden whatever, here’s the award that matters:

Indy the dog beats five human scores to score acting award for “Good Boy”:

youtu.be/FXxVzyUncj0
Indy the Dog wins Best Performance in a Horror or Thriller Feature for Good Boy | Astra Film Awards
YouTube video by The Astra Awards
youtu.be

George Romero’s The Wild Bunch

The clipping of interviews for social media means that interviewer questions are not to be answered, merely used as a pretext to say your talking points on a platform.

Case in point:

youtu.be/jlTggc0uBA8

Slightly diminish a band

9 cc
Slightly diminish a band

Tankini Kill
Slightly diminish a band

The Half-Naked Ladies

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

Look, if you have an active Twitter account, what it's actively telling me is that you're actively supporting white superiority and pedos. That's... kind of a "no" from me.

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

Slightly diminish a band

Tankini Kill
Slightly diminish a band

The Half-Naked Ladies
Slightly diminish a band

Neurotic Clown Posse

I have a 166,000 word, ~700 page document of how NOT OK scientists have been in the last year.

Makes a great double feature with this Spielberg feature, set slightly earlier: www.imdb.com/title/tt6294...
The Post (2017) ⭐ 7.2 | Biography, Drama, History
1h 56m | PG-13
www.imdb.com

Universities, academic societies, and NGOs who are still posting on Twitter need to stop now.

Membership in @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social used to come with one slender print journal (can't remember which it was). Now membership includes online access to seven journals, but not sure if any have a print option.

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

Our eLetter github.com/caseywdunn/s... responding to a recent Science paper was just posted. The paper found more genes with consistent support for sponge-sister than ctenophore-sister. We found several technical issues that, when corrected, reverse the conclusions and recover ctenophore-sister.

Relevant to conference poster design, too.
Comic creators often talk about "flow" through the composition of comics pages, but little work has actually studied it. So, our newest paper explores what flow is and how it works, which I’ve summarized in a more accessible way in this post: www.visuallanguagelab.com/2025/12/goin...

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

Excited that our newly described Okanagan Crayfish makes an appearance on the CBC's cool species of 2025 list: www.cbc.ca/news/science...
Tarantula with XXL genitalia, 'death ball' sponge among cool species of 2025 | CBC News
A spider with extraordinary genitalia, a carnivorous caterpillar that wears its prey's body parts, and a tiny opossum are among the cool new species described by science in 2025.
www.cbc.ca

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

I saw a lot of beautiful posters this #SICB2026. Great job on some amazing graphic design!
"Curiously Chromatic" was my personal favorite
As this ramps up and we are asked to cheerlead for it, I remain genuinely shocked that Canada, once again, under the banner of a **nation-building**, has created a funding program that excludes Canadian students and researchers based on presence in Canada. /1

universityaffairs.ca/news/feds-la...
Feds launch $1.7 billion international talent attraction program - University Affairs
The program will provide funding to bring 100 top-tier international research chairs and their teams to Canada.
universityaffairs.ca

Check out the perfect ABT structure in this graphic abstract.

"Pax9 in needed to form teeth in mammals AND you see it in the mouth of fishes
BUT some fish don't form teeth
THEREFORE Pax9 was originally used in mouth development rather than teeth."
#DBfeature 🐠

Pax9 has a broader role in initiating development of mesenchymal structures around the mouth during zebrafish development

By Sandhya Paudel, Sarah McLeod, Stefani Gjorcheska, Lindsey Barske

tinyurl.com/yc3jfpux

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

#DBfeature 🐠

Pax9 has a broader role in initiating development of mesenchymal structures around the mouth during zebrafish development

By Sandhya Paudel, Sarah McLeod, Stefani Gjorcheska, Lindsey Barske

tinyurl.com/yc3jfpux

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

At @elsevierconnect.bsky.social, the final decision lies with the ethics committee. Editors are not allowed to communicate directly with this committee. They either retract or sit on the case until you die of old age. No decision is ever explained.

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

300,000 Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library
300,000 Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library
Are we truly in the midst of a human-caused sixth mass extinction, an era of “biological annihilation”?
www.openculture.com

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

You did better than I.

About 60% of the papers I ordered to be retracted, as the editor-in-chief of the journal in which they were published, have yet to be.

Reposted by Zen Faulkes

Interesting to see support for the hypothesis that the rainbow palette isn’t inherently ordered (the colors don’t map to "more" or "less").

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#dataviz 📊 #color 🎨

Not needed, but I’d take this over whatever the blazes that thing is
Men In Tights Dancing GIF
Alt: Robin Hood’s Merry Men dancing to “Men In Tights.”
media.tenor.com

Alternative title: “Fox News Investigates: Robin Hood”

Cathedral Falls, West Virginia.