NEW: A lot of bad has happened to American science over the last year but nothing comes even close to what’s about to happen if we don’t speak out in opposition to the OMB rule changes and I hope @aaas-socsci.bsky.social @apsphysics.bsky.social and others will launch public campaigns about this. 🧪🔭⚛️

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

Timeless advice: "Your generation must come to terms with the environment. You must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth." - Rachel Carson, commencement address, Scripps College, 1962 loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/C...

Still space in the PA Botany insect diversity workshop - registration link here!

Discworld QOTD, from Men at Arms

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Still space in the PA Botany insect diversity workshop - registration link here!

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

Discworld QOTD, from Carpe Jugulum

There is no way to do anything interesting in any sustained way in any field without immersion in that field. That's just a fundamental fact of being human, and there's no getting around it.

Hey plant friends, PA Botany is back this year with our summer workshop series - June 10 for Carex (central PA), June 23 for Herbivorous Insect Diversity (northeast PA), tbd for PA Plant Communities. Registration is open, links at pabotany.org! Hope to see some of you there!

I always knew plants were up to something @martinebotany.bsky.social

ggplot(ritual) + geom_sf() + theme_c̵̤͛̌̎̀͘t̶̡̨̯̝̼͗̂͒͊̀̾̇̾͜h̸̡̰͉̼̖͉̉u̶̡̗̮̜͍̠̯̙̍l̸̞̲̓̒̒̓̓̃̔h̶̛̖̣̲̩̖͉̠͍̬̄̔̊̽͜u̸̱͛̈̽̀̅() + coord_noneuclidean() #RStats #rayshader #rayrender

say it with me fellas 🗣️ the ocean of truth washes over the pebbles with every wave, and they rattle and clink with the most wondrous din 🗣️

Some insects will go to great lengths to avoid answering email. (Blue death-feigning beetle, Asbolus verrucosus, very much alive but trying to convince me it's not; Mojave Desert, California.) 🐙🌿 #bugsky

Is this Angine de Poitrine

Hey plant friends, PA Botany is back this year with our summer workshop series - June 10 for Carex (central PA), June 23 for Herbivorous Insect Diversity (northeast PA), tbd for PA Plant Communities. Registration is open, links at pabotany.org! Hope to see some of you there!

It's just cheaper this way

📊 Five #ggplot2 functions I wish I'd known about earlier 📊 I've written a short blog (with examples) of some of the lesser-known {ggplot2} functions and arguments that make it easier to create better charts! Link: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/five-gg... #RStats #DataViz

Please God no

“Not only did ASU allegedly not communicate to its academic community that their lectures would be spliced up and cannibalized by an AI platform, but the resulting modules are just bad.”

thinking about the gould quote again

Vale Peter Raven, champion of plants and biodiversity. 'In one of his lectures, he described biodiversity as “the whole business”—the sum of organisms, their variations and the communities they form. It was a plain phrase for a concept of considerable scope.' news.mongabay.com/2026/04/pete...

i am requiring you all to learn about this show and enjoy it with me. we have to all get into it together okay kotaku.com/game-show-dr...

Fellow northeastern organismal types, I hadn't heard of this conference before but it's really great. Seems especially friendly for students, and lots of conservation/non profit folks are here for networking, etc. Also a big teaching/pedagogy representation!

NEBS is in Burlington, VT at the Northeast Natural History Conference! The wildflowers are in bloom outside and the presentations and posters inside are fantastic. If you're here, come stop by and visit our table!

Honestly I would love a whole 30 uninterrupted minutes

Grad school: to be successful in a future career you're going to need to focus on THIS ONE THING for the next 5 years. The actual career in question: you can't focus on one thing for more than 30 minutes at a time and you have to keep switching between 1000 things endlessly

"I. This is not a game. II. Here and now, you are alive." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

The Moon: oh wow you guys decided to come back Artemis II crew: earth’s haunted

Hey y'all. Love all the love for the program (we're pretty proud of it too). But the fact that the solicitation is archived does NOT mean that the program is shutting down. We're hanging in there, struggling through the uncertainty with everyone else.

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

Every term without a fault an undergrad tells me "I spent 2 hours on this problem and you identified it in under a minute", and every term without a fault I answer "it took me over a decade to identify it in under a minute"

This is exactly what happens when you work in natural history collections. That one weird specimen you find after hours of sorting specimens stands out because you have amassed info from previous specimens, compare it, and you put it aside. cont'd #biodiversity #SPNHC #archives #museum

This is so, so well-articulated.

Working on a lesson about the perils of LLM-based scientific search.

Oh nothing, just a peer reviewed paper my colleagues found... doi.org/10.1016/j.ma... "1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min." Even AI knows what's wrong here, but @elsevierconnect.bsky.social doesn't.

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

Student: "so what is a species then?" Me: You're not allowed to ask me that for two more weeks

The danger to my job from AI isn't that AI can do my job, it's that my job is made even more precarious by the way AI is shaping ideas of the value of work. It can't do my job, but it can be part of convincing people (incorrectly) that my job isn't necessary.

increasingly believing much of the communication gap between LLM Enthusiasts and LLM Skeptics on this website boils down to “are you someone who has largely experienced a *reasonable* amount of job security in tech, or are you someone who has not experienced job security and likely aren’t in tech”

I think a lot of people who are well-intentioned LLM boosters who have been able to fairly reliably find well-paid work in tech really do struggle with putting themselves in the shoes of people working in other sectors that have been feeling precarious for a long time and now feel WAY more so

This gives me an opportunity to yell about one of the coolest museum studies I've ever seen: using BIRDS to quantify pollution Bird specimens from the early-mid 20th century are literally more grey from the sheer level of pollution!! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This week on EHN: Adrienne Brown reflects on doing #envhist #envhum in 2026

Thought I would share this famous analogy from Felsentein’s book I just re-stumbled on. Just in case you’re bug in a box and missed it 😜

13/ Today's environmental movement largely understands the crisis as rooted in political economy, not population. But Ehrlich's instinct didn't disappear. It resurfaces in eco-fascism, green anti-immigration politics, the persistent urge to blame the poor. Commoner's work isn't done.

Holy shit y’all I just got an email I’d like to nominate for the "Wildest All-Faculty Email" Hall of Fame

Paul Ehrlich has died. Most will remember him for "The Population Bomb." But for many of us, Ehrlich and Raven 1964 was a foundational read that influenced our careers. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

One reason many people hate ‘AI’ is because they instinctively understand that this is how it will be used. (And you should read the whole 🧵)