Gunnar De Winter

@gunnardewinter.bsky.social

141

Followers

125

Following

575

Posts

Random idea generator, occasionally in human form
Science communication professional somewhere in Belgium

• Biologist • Writer • Overthinker (I think)

🙋‍♂️ gunnardewinter.com
✍️ subtlesparks.substack.com

Posts Replies Media

Sad to see Metaphorosis go - I've had the good luck of having a story there (The Lonely King) and it was a pleasure working with Morris, a great editor who (equally greatly) supports the authors he works with.

Metaphorosis' next issue will be our 100th - and last. Metaphorosis magazine closes at the end of 2024 after a nine year run. magazine.metaphorosis.com/editorial/20...

Metaphorosis’ next issue will be our 100th – and lastmagazine.metaphorosis.com The end of the story – Metaphorosis closes after issue #100.

Or, what Nietzsche, Caesar, and Frankenstein can tell us about the modern disillusion with love. subtlesparks.substack.com/p/love-is-de...

Love Is Dead and We Killed Hersubtlesparks.substack.com But we can also Frankenstein her back to life

Ugh. Final round rejection, "well written, great story, but decided not to accept based on nothing but word count" (Narrator's voice: the story's word count was more than 1,000 words *under* the max limit...) No shade, I guess everyone's budget is tight, but still, ugh.

Reposted by

Gunnar De Winter

It's difficult to get in the mood to write this arctic horror when it's over 90 degrees and humid...which has made me think about the fact that arctic horror, as a genre, could someday be only historical or fantasy. That's the real horror.

Have you ever wondered what grieving elephants have to do with bouba and kiki? I got you covered. #science #biology #philosophy

Talking Animals and Non-Human Consciousnesssubtlesparks.substack.com A story of elephant names, whale songs, and the null hypothesis

"... a powerful tool to identify potential gut metabolite-based therapies that target human GPCRs for treating AD." #science #health #microbiome www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Systematic characterization of multi-omics landscape between gut microbial metabolites and GPCRome in Alzheimer’s diseasewww.cell.com Combining machine learning and multi-omics analysis, Qiu et al. identify the molecular relationship between gut metabolites and dark G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRome) in Alzheimer’s disease. This ...

Or how the evolution of baby monsters inspired some changes to my newsletter...

Hopeful Monstersubtlesparks.substack.com Welcome to my newsletter - here is my monster post

Wait, where did Saturday go? This doesn't seem fair, brain.

How to breed pandemics 101 "... epidemic clones emerged and expanded between 1850 and 2000, indicating recent selective pressures, possibly driven by industrialization, associated pollution, and human population change..." #science #medicine www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Evolution and host-specific adaptation of Pseudomonas aeruginosawww.science.org The major human bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes multidrug-resistant infections in people with underlying immunodeficiencies or structural lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis (CF). W...

Migraine? Might be the fluid sloshing through your brain. #science #neuroscience www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Trigeminal ganglion neurons are directly activated by influx of CSF solutes in a migraine modelwww.science.org Classical migraine patients experience aura, which is transient neurological deficits associated with cortical spreading depression (CSD), preceding headache attacks. It is not currently understood ho...

"If your heart beats punctuation marks and pushes ink through your veins, seeing silicon copywriting flood the marketplace of regurgitated ideas is a symptom of a systemic disease." #writingcommunity

Is Your Writing a Product or a Process?subtlesparks.substack.com And what AI's got to do, got to do with it

Yet again, evidence that people should read more fiction. A big meta-analysis hot off the press finds small but consistent cognitive benefits of reading fiction, especially in verbal ability, general cognition, and empathy. #writingcommunity psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion." - Franz Kafka

"For young people in today’s world curating an identity online is not optional... They are taught implicitly to see themselves as a brand, yet one that will be judged according to its perceived authenticity." #culture #technology www.noemamag.com/overthrowing...

Overthrowing Our Tech Overlords | NOEMAwww.noemamag.com Today’s tech barons treat their users however they like and believe there is little we can do to stop them. A cloud rebellion could change things.

🤯 Ants actually have medics! "...the first example of the use of amputations to treat infected individuals in a non-human animal... ants can adapt their type of treatment depending on the location of wounds." #science #biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Wound-dependent leg amputations to combat infections in an ant societywww.cell.com Frank et al. provide the first example of the use of amputations to treat infected leg wounds in a non-human animal. The findings demonstrate that ants can adapt their treatment modality depending on ...

"... researchers are routinely detecting DNA from obscure fungi. ....they can tell they’re dealing with new species, thousands of them, that are genetically distinct from any known to science." #science #biology www.scientificamerican.com/article/myst...

Mysterious ‘Dark Fungi’ Are Lurking Everywherewww.scientificamerican.com The land, water and air around us are chock-full of DNA from fungi that scientists can’t identify

Reposted by

Gunnar De Winter

The next story in our "Children of Imagined Worlds Series," "The Keeper" by Frances Ogamba. Read it now: bit.ly/3XIdepD @FrancesOgamba #litjournal #scifi #sff #scififantasy #fantasy #scifiwriters #sciencefiction #fantasybook #bookish #currentlyreading

Reposted by

Gunnar De Winter

We're still missing some last (German-speaking) participants, and it only takes 5 mins! You need headphones though 😁

Bored with work? Ready to feed some animals and help research at the same time? 🐦🐦‍⬛🐧 @PotthoffJonas and I need YOU to do our fun 5-min study! German speakers, do it directly on your phone here: survey.uni-graz.at/index.php/53... Spoiler: This cool bird will follow you to the end!

Reposted by

Gunnar De Winter

einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter: (1) your haters are trash (2) you’re a baller, a true queen (3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️

Yes. Next. Is science’s dominant funding model broken? #science #funding #academia www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Is science’s dominant funding model broken?www.nature.com Should one principal investigator have the power to determine postdocs’ careers? Share your thoughts on academia’s dominant funding model in our survey and reader poll. Should one principal investigat...

"... a unified mechanism for the three fundamental DNA rearrangements—insertion, excision and inversion—that are required for genome design." #science #biology #genetics #biotech Bridge RNAs direct programmable recombination of target and donor DNA www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bridge RNAs direct programmable recombination of target and donor DNA - Naturewww.nature.com A bispecific non-coding RNA expressed by the IS110 family of mobile genetic elements forms the basis of a programmable genome-editing system that enables the insertion, excision or inversion of s...

Reposted by

Gunnar De Winter

Still seeing this doing the rounds in the #writingcommunity so once again I am begging you to stop sharing this with the wrong attribution. I love Jordan Peele but this is not his quote. Too many women have had their work attributed to men. Don’t be part of the problem.

As big tech is betting big on personalized AI assistants, can we ensure they give wise advice? The answer starts with two dusty feet... #science #technology subtlesparks.substack.com/p/can-we-eng...

Can We Engineer Wisdom Into Our Virtual Assistants?subtlesparks.substack.com Dusty foot philosophy, metacognition, and building moral foundations

Reposted by

Gunnar De Winter

writers, post something random from your backlist. don’t think. just do it: podcastle.org/2022/05/31/p...

writers, post something random from your backlist. don’t think. just do it: thedeadlands.com/issue-13/ete...

To Build Eternity, With Bones, by Gunnar De Winter - The Deadlandsthedeadlands.com but once, after Sunday service, she heard the sexton say that there are places where the dead traverse a river after death, paying a boatsman to ferry them across the water.

PodCastle 737: The Eight Hundred Legs of the Rio-Niterói Bridge - PodCastlepodcastle.org The Eight Hundred Legs of the Rio-Niterói Bridge by Renan Bernardo Have you seen pictures of the unfinished Presidente Costa e Silva Bridge, with its columns telling stories of falls and drownings ...

writers, post something random from your backlist. don’t think. just do it: thedeadlands.com/issue-13/ete...

writers, post something random from your backlist. don’t think. just do it: www.unchartedmag.com/stories/salt...

Salt Girl - Unchartedwww.unchartedmag.com The sand garden glowed eeriest during the hour right after sundown, like the earth itself was churning out its last breath. For as long as Rika could remember, her father dragged a wooden rake across ...

A truth rarely acknowledged by our friends steering the out-of-control tech titans. How Vulnerable Low-Wage Workers Power AI Algorithms (From lithub.com/how-vulnerab...)

Tidbits. Also, volcano snail! open.substack.com/pub/subtlesp...

Writing As Thinking, How To Raise Your AI, and… Volcano Snail!open.substack.com Notes from the margin #1

"One of the mottos I like to live by is 'never admire quietly'. If I admire something about somebody I think it’s important to tell them. We humans are so fragile and it’s important to give people their flowers while they’re here." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (via Jeannine Ouellette's newsletter)

Okay, I don't know if any neuroscientists are following me on here, but I'd love to get your take on this: #science #neuroscience #language www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought - Naturewww.nature.com Evidence from neuroscience and related fields suggests that language and thought processes operate in distinct networks in the human brain and that language is optimized for communication and not for ...

Shocked. Shocked, I say. "Many of the large language models that power chatbots claim to be open, but restrict access to code and training data." #technology #machinelearning www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Not all ‘open source’ AI models are actually open: here’s a rankingwww.nature.com Many of the large language models that power chatbots claim to be open, but restrict access to code and training data. Many of the large language models that power chatbots claim to be open, but restr...