Archive (Page 2) • The Week in Botany • Buttondown

🌼 The Week in Botany April 29, 2024

April 29, 2024

The diffusion of social media means it’s easy to overlook interesting conversations if you’re not on the same network. This thread from Bluesky by Mark...

🌻 The Week in Botany April 22, 2024

April 22, 2024

This week we’ve arranged for Botany One to be at Student Botany Festival as part of Botanical University Challenge. The exact details aren’t fixed but it...

🌻 The Week in Botany April 15, 2024

April 15, 2024

My fuzzy head last week meant that I forgot to wish people a happy Eid, if they celebrate. If I were still in Leicester then it would probably be much easier...

🌻 The Week in Botany April 8, 2024

April 8, 2024

I hope you're well. I'm suffering a little from the storms passing overhead and giving me headaches. On the plus side, it does make Big Jet TV more...

🐇 The Week in Botany March 25, 2024

March 25, 2024

It's been a grim week, so getting to browse a lot of Botany has been a welcome escape from the news. This week I'm able to add attention from BlueSky into...

🌻 The Week in Botany, March 18, 2024

March 18, 2024

Spring is well on its way here, with the tulips pushing through as the latest round of the bulb lasagne in the flower pots. I was expecting them to be a dark...

🌻 The Week in Botany, March 11, 2024

March 11, 2024

Thank you for all the well-wishes. I've done very little this week, but plan to make a slow return in the coming week. I'm finding recuperation tedious, and...

🏥 The Week in Botany, March 4 2024

March 4, 2024

I'm a little fuzzy this week. On Monday, when the last edition came out, I was in a hospital bed recovering from an operation on one of my kidneys. I've been...

🌻 The Week in Botany, February 19 2024

February 19, 2024

I'll start by flagging up the Plant Health Undergraduate Studentships in the Careers section. The RSB has twelve awards for undergraduates to get some...

🌻 The Week in Botany, February 12 2024

February 12, 2024

🌻 The Week in Botany, February 12 2024 If you're receiving this, then the move to Buttondown went well. One reason for moving is that I hope in the longer...

🌙 The Week in Botany February 5, 2024

February 5, 2024

You may need to check your spam folders next week as, if all goes well, this will be the last TWiB sent through Substack. We’ll be moving to Buttondown for a...

🌻 The Week in Botany January 29, 2024

January 29, 2024

I’m hoping that next week, I’ll start to test negative for COVID. At the moment, I’m positive in both senses of the word. It means I’m still out of energy,...

🌻 The Week in Botany January 22, 2024

January 22, 2024

It’s a much-reduced newsletter this week. Work has been a struggle and every night this week I’ve been ready to sleep by five o’clock. On Friday I found out...

🌻 The Week in Botany January 15, 2024

January 15, 2024

I’m hoping I have this sent on time this time. I had the email written Sunday evening last week, but forgot to press the ‘schedule’ button. Happily, I’m...

🌻 The Week in Botany January 8, 2024

January 8, 2024

It’s a slow start this year, though we should have more things out next week. Something that did happen over the holiday is I set up an account for Botany...

🎄 The Week in Botany, December 18, 2023

December 18, 2023

Welcome to the last Week in Botany for the year. I’ll be taking the last week of the year off, so there’ll be no email on December 25, and no data for an...

🌻 The Week in Botany December 11, 2023

December 11, 2023

This week I heard that the Royal Society of Biology will have a free online event. Professor Jonathan Drori will be talking about the ground rules for...

🌻 The Week in Botany December 4, 2023

December 4, 2023

I spent quite a bit of time out of the office this week. Instead, I was working in Thame, the murder capital of Oxfordshire, which might come as a surprise...

🌻 The Week in Botany November 27, 2023

November 27, 2023

I’m trying a different method of spotting the popular stories and papers getting shared on social media. This week, they’re pulled from Twitter, Mastodon,...

🦃 The Week in Botany November 20, 2023

November 20, 2023

This week I’ve been working on a new system to track interest in stories on a wider range of sites than just Twitter and Mastodon. I was hoping to have it...

🌻 The Week in Botany November 13, 2023

November 13, 2023

It’s a quick Week in Botany this week, as I’ve been rushed off my feet. I got to Friday evening and then fell asleep with exhaustion and I’m not sure I’ve...

🌻 The Week in Botany November 6, 2023

November 6, 2023

It’s a late finish tonight, as I’ve been supervising the office manager over the weekend. It’s Bonfire Night here, and fireworks make his whiskers twitch....

🎃 The Week in Botany October 30, 2023

October 30, 2023

I’ll start by mentioning a webinar that’s on tomorrow, Plantae Presents: Importance of Self-care and Community Care. It’s happening at 08:00 AM PDT, 11:00 AM...

🌻 The Week in Botany October 23, 2023

October 23, 2023

It’s the last week of summer time in the UK this week. Next weekend the clocks will move back and the evenings will plunge into darkness. If I remember...

🌻 The Week in Botany October 16, 2023

October 16, 2023

If you’ve been affected by the events of this week, then you have my sympathies. It’s left many botanists on social media shocked this week. Here’s a...

🌻 The Week in Botany October 9, 2023

October 9, 2023

This week I got to find out what happens when all the automated systems I use to help me break down. It’s been a really interesting week. I’m hoping next...

🌻 The Week in Botany October 2, 2023

October 2, 2023

I had an unpleasant surprise this week. One of the highlights of going to the Annals of Botany meetings in the summer has been talking with Philip White, one...

🌻 The Week in Botany September 25, 2023

September 25, 2023

It’s been another 7-day week, the second in a row, so I’ve experimented with using AI to summarise the scientific papers. It cuts down on brainwork. At the...

🌻 The Week in Botany September 18, 2023

September 18, 2023

The weather has gone from unbearably hot to cold and wet over the course of a week here. It’s nice to have some autumnal weather for the autumn. I imagine...

🌻 The Week in Botany September 11, 2023

September 11, 2023

It’s been a busy week, but it’s one of those weeks where it feels like there’s something to show for some of the effort. We have ten stories out this week...

🌻 The Week in Botany September 4, 2023

September 4, 2023

Here are the stories shared on Twitter 🐦, Mastodon 🐘 and Newslit 📰. I’ve tagged them this week, so you can see what’s coming from where. There’s being a bit...

🌻 The Week in Botany August 28, 2023

August 28, 2023

With Twitter sharing falling, I’ve started running an experiment on Mastodon to see if I can improve the automated harvesting of share counts, likes and so...

🌻 The Week in Botany August 21, 2023

August 21, 2023

This time with the correct date.

🌻 The Week in Botany August 14, 2023

August 14, 2023

It’s been a puzzling week on Twitter, with some stories getting a lot of traction, but a lot less middle-ground tweets. In other Twitter news, The Thesis...

🌻 The Week in Botany August 7, 2023

August 7, 2023

It’s been a disappointing week. In a week when even cacti are struggling with the climate, I had hoped to launch a weekly round-up of the latest climate...

🌻 The Week in Botany July 31, 2023

July 31, 2023

I think if you want the authentic experience this week, you should punctuate each item with at least two lung-rattling coughs. This week the links are from...

🌻 The Week in Botany July 24, 2023

July 24, 2023

In the past, I’ve mentioned that the email will arrive Monday morning, unless COVID intervenes. My test came back negative, so it’s just a bad cold. This...

🌻 The Week in Botany July 17, 2023

July 17, 2023

Here’s another collection of the stories shared on Twitter. There’s nothing from Mastodon this week. There are plenty of interesting plant conversations...

🌻 The Week in Botany July 10, 2023

July 10, 2023

After Musk killed the APIs for Twitter, the only way to track what’s popular on the site has been human eyeball v1.0. This week’s innovation has been putting...

🌻 The Week in Botany July 3, 2023

July 3, 2023

It’s a grim week this week, with Gabriel Trujillo’s death on fieldwork making the headlines. It’s an unfortunate reminder to make sure of your safety if...

🌻 The Week in Botany June 26, 2023

June 26, 2023

It’s another mixed week. Twitter continues to decline. I think some of that is the effect of summer, but I don’t remember views dropping so much before. One...

🌻 The Week in Botany June 19, 2023

June 19, 2023

I’ve put this issue together slowly, as the air is full of a storm that isn’t quite arriving and leaving my head fuzzy. There might be some interesting typos...

🔥 The Week in Botany, June 12 2023

June 12, 2023

This week I learned that thunderstorm asthma is a thing. The plant connection that it’s caused by winds picking up pollen, and thunderstorms breaking the...

The Week in Botany June 5, 2023

June 5, 2023

It feels like one of those weeks where, if I were feeling lazy, I could copy ‘n’ paste the New Phytologist table of contents as the week’s interesting...

🌻 The Week in Botany May 29, 2023

May 29, 2023

It’s been a quiet week on Twitter this week, possibly due to a lot of plant attention being based at the Chelsea Flower Show. A paper that caught my eye was...

🌻 The Week in Botany May 22, 2023

May 22, 2023

It’s going to be a busy week this week, not least because the Royal Society of Biology is holding its Summer Conference on Thursday. It’s online and free, so...

🌻 The Week in Botany May 15, 2023

May 15, 2023

No Mow May is well underway, though the sound that’s coming through window as I type tells me many of my neighbours disagree. The front lawn is a mix of...

🌻 The Week in Botany May 8, 2023

May 8, 2023

As predicted the various usual aids for reading Twitter failed this week. I can say the links in this week’s newsletter were shared on Twitter, but I can’t...

🌻 The Week in Botany May 1, 2023

May 1, 2023

Another public holiday has snuck up on me. This time it’s May Day. If I can, I’ll be making time to go out and see some bluebells in the woods. Otherwise I...

🌻 The Week in Botany April 24, 2023

April 24, 2023

I’ve been slowly putting this together this weekend due to a large headache, sadly due to the weather rather than any particular event. If it wasn’t the...