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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

@jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social

11K followers 1.1K following 12K posts

Evolutionary biologist and professional nerd. Asst Prof, University of Alaska Anchorage. queer af, they/them. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️✡️ jfmclaughlin.org

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · Oct 21

Hello new followers! I'm Jess (they/them), and I'm a newly minted Assistant Professor at U University of Alaska Anchorage! I study evolutionary genomics, mostly in birds, and mainly post my various (mis)adventures and pet pictures. Welcome!

Jess leans against a purple computer in a shared lab space. They are grinning like the absolute dork they are.

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Derek Hennen, Ph.D. @derekhennen.bsky.social · 16h

Hell yeah

Archway with text over the door part of a longer message, message over door reads "Be trans"

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 12h

Yeah, I grew a basketball sized cauliflower this year, so my hopes were high. But these just didn't do as well, and we'll get our first snow any time now. I left the tiniest ones for now to see if they can get any bigger before then.

Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

R.S.A. Garcia (BUY THE NIGHTWARD) @rsagarcia.bsky.social · 8d

This Oct, as a breast cancer survivor in treatment since 2021, I'm doing a thread on stuff I wish I'd been told.

I'll update as I go, but the first thing I'll share is every person's body & treatment is different. Some fear symptoms or side effects they might never get. Don't be afraid to fight 1/3

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 16h

So weird to be on a text-based social media with people who have atrocious reading comprehension but are also very longwinded

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

🇬🇾🗽Sydette The Dreaded Gorgon🗽🇬🇾 @blackamazon.bsky.social · 18h

Yeah I really need help with this . I’m gonna go hyperventilate into a bag but this has gone bad quickly

🇬🇾🗽Sydette The Dreaded Gorgon🗽🇬🇾 @blackamazon.bsky.social · Apr 10

Welp it’s gotten real real if you can please help. If you can’t it’s really hard out here so share

gofund.me/a5ee0064

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Erin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 19h

Hey remember that time an Atheist spent an entire week on here calling for the ethic cleansing and complete elimination of Jews because they said it was the only way to fight Israel?

Atheists refuse to account for the ethno-part of Jewish ethno-religion when they whine about ending all religions.

...
Maybe. But behind the annoyance of the atheist there is typically much less bigotry, authoritarian tendencies, tax evasion, science denialism, closeted sexuality, etc.
October 11, 2025 at 3:50 PM

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Free Łink - Matthew R Francis @bowlerhatscience.org · 21h

it's all atheist proselytizers online and JW proselytizers in meatspace, and I can avoid the JWs by pretending I'm not home

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 21h

Atheist proselytizers are the religious proselytizers I’m most likely to come into contact with and they’re just as annoying as all of the other ones I experience

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 17h

Okay just for everyone like "that's a normal sized sprout", a comparison with the ones currently at the grocery store

A single sprout in the same hand, nearly the size of all the ones in the firat pic combined

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 19h

I mean, I just buy the standard ones you get at grocery stores, perhaps they're passing off small cabbages as sprouts

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 20h

Guess I'm just used to grocery store ones that are golf-ball-sized instead of marble-sized

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 20h

So I guess this is as big as my Brussel sprouts are likely to get?

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Cohen is a Ghost @skullmandible.bsky.social · 1d

"even if it's AI, it's at least true" hard to overstate the damage this stuff is doing to people's brains. we're gonna be cleaning the slop out of archives for decades

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 20h

Alas the first thing I did was throw all my fishing clothes in the laundry before I realized the weather forecast had been a lie 😭

Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 20h

Very annoyed that the weather is okay today because I decided to stay home and do some much-needed cleaning under the assumption the weather would be shitty?

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 21h

As a professor I would like to say that this prof should be yeeted into the sea.

What a lazy and insulting breach of responsibility to the students they teach.

Claire Zagorski, MSc, EMT-P @clairezagorski.bsky.social · 22h

A student on TikTok has been documenting her journey with a professor who “wrote” the anatomy textbook and it’s all a bunch of AI hallucinations.

She’s saying that, understandably, the students are doing super poorly!

Behold what we’re teaching the healthcare professionals of tomorrow:

A diagram of the bones and (some) deep muscles of the hand and forearm. AI says that we only have four digits. It’s also identified a tendon as the median nerve, another tendon as the ulnar nerve, among other issues.

An AI generated diagram of the muscles of the neck. It hallucinated the “ennocleidomasid” muscle, and the “anterior scalpalin muscle”.

An AI generated diagram of the muscles of the lateral thigh. It says that the gluteus Maximus (the big juicy butt muscle) is on the anterior side. It also points to the quadriceps muscle and says “attattment”. It also says that the same structure is the tibia AND the deep fascia of the leg.

An AI generated diagram of the bones of the hand and forearm. This time AI says we have 6 digits. It also says that the radius is the ulnar artery. Among other many issues.

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Claire Zagorski, MSc, EMT-P @clairezagorski.bsky.social · 22h

“People who dislike Gen AI are just stuffy bores”

Bitch one of us actually knows how many fingers humans have and evidently it’s not ChatGPT

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Robin Hayward 🌳 🏳️‍⚧️ @canopyrobin.com · 1d

Today is #NationalComingOutDay but we come out to people every day and it can be anything from joyful to terrifying.

This year physical changes have reduced my control of how & when I come out, even when it's unsafe to do so, but today it's good to be your woodland trans-femme enby lesbian 🩷

Robin – a fem non-binary person with long brown hair, white skin, and blue eyes – wearing a green tshirt against a leafy background

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

SK Winnicki, PhD 🏳️‍⚧️ @skwinnicki.bsky.social · Aug 30

This team still hasn't lost a game since I was hired as a postdoc at Ohio State, and we all know correlation absolutely implies causation.

If your team needs a boost, hear me out: you could offer a tenure track position to Dr. SK Winnicki

SK Winnicki, PhD 🏳️‍⚧️ @skwinnicki.bsky.social · Jan 1

“This team doesn’t look like the team that lost to Michigan”

What happened? I’ve got a scientific theory:

Loss to Michigan: Dr. SK Winnicki was not an OSU employee
Win against Tennessee and winning against Oregon: Dr. SK Winnicki was an OSU employee

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 23h

Like I don't actually care about genre labels and I think people shitting on YA as a concept is a jerk move, but as a reader it's so freaking annoying to have to check multiple sections for things that all should be in the same one?

Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 23h

(Shout-out to a bookstore I otherwise love but always shelves Stephen Graham Jones and Tlotlo Tsamaase in Lit Fic instead of horror and SF respectively)

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 23h

The corollary is "well we definitely can't call this YA so we'll put it in Lit Fic" for books that are straightforwardly SFFH.

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 23h

Books I have recently seen shelved as YA:

- A Dark and Drowning Tide
- The Red Scholar's Wake
- Can't Spell Treason Without Tea
- Paladin's Grace
- An Unkindness of Ghosts
- The Final Strife
- The Jasmine Throne

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them) @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social · 1d

I kinda want to play "Is this YA" but I already know that 95% of the books people will ask about will not be YA.

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Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them) @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social · 1d

Just bc a book contains a protagonist between 10 and 30, especially a female protagnoist, doesn't mean it's YA. Just bc the book is written by a woman (or someone you incorrectly assume is a woman), doesn't make it YA. Just bc a book is fun, written colloquially, or has romance doesn't make it YA.

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 1d

Gotta be honest I didn't either, never really thought about it and assumed it was a 50/50 chance of being an American thing

Reposted by Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)

Nora Reed (they/them ze/hir) @nora.zone · 1d

cry havoc and let slip the frogs of war

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