The FY27 President’s Budget for NOAA proposes eliminating IOOS Regional Observations. If IOOS gets shut down, GLOS gets shutdown, and we cannot distribute critical Great Lakes data. Show your support: ioosassociation.org/how-you-can-... Learn more: glos.org/glos-funding...

Wonderful thread about some fascinating discoveries! Read it!

For me, it was the fact that I misred and misunderstood this ad...

Gorgeous capture, and if you know where to look, you can spot the flash of fireworks over Navy Pier!

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

The reason the Purple line goes street level to Linden is because it is the last remaining part of the North Shore line which used to go all the way up to Milwaukee en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago...

One side obsession from my research into the 1920s is the extensive network of ELECTRIC trains that used to connect cities and towns across the central Midwest called the Interurban. We had this more than a hundred years ago. The things we had and the things we lost.

And the map of the streetcars in Chicago was insane. You could pretty much get anywhere without a car.

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

Got bored tonight, so I downloaded 3 hours worth of Earthcam replay / archive footage from their Skydeck camera atop of the Willis Tower (Sears Tower) in Chicago and made a time lapse of the fog rolling in off Lake Michigan. Good illustration of how our atmosphere behaves like any other fluid. #ilwx

Same!

As a recipient of federal grants from #NIH (for now! 😭) that funds research in my lab, I'd like to sincerely thank American taxpayers on #TaxDay for investing in scientific research that lays the foundation for medical and technological innovation in this country and keeps us ALL safe and healthy

I kept being rate limited by doi2bib, so I made a small CLI to replace it locally: github.com/imartayan/bi... It can output bibtex from DOIs and arxiv/biorxiv links, redirect to the published version when it's available and copy the result to your clipboard

Tropical Cyclone Maila continues to spin in the Solomon Sea, while Tropical Cyclone Vaianu is undergoing subtropical transition just north of New Zealand. To the north of the equator, newly-formed Tropical Storm Sinlaku is steadily intensifying.

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

📉 FY2026 is worse. NIH has made 10,195 awards so far. NSF has made 613. Six hundred thirteen. Congress appropriated the money. The agencies are not spending it. Grant freezes. NOFO collapse. Staff RIFs. Review cancellations. You can win the budget fight and still lose the funding war.

Look at this thread of beautiful art made by humans to serve a small but specific and very important purpose: making things more fun to look at.

@everylot-usps.bsky.social @nps-cambot.bsky.social convergence 😃

VPO NORTH RIM: 6225 N HWY 67, NORTH RIM AZ 86052-9901

i'm currently working on IACUC protocols and i have to explain how i would give a mortally injured songbird the gentlest death possible and what a different world i inhabit that i consider the last moments of a being that weighs a few grams while others casually desire to end millions of lives

🚨 Hey science nerds: Did you know that there are places on earth where vegetation forms amazing spatial patterns, like this so-called "tiger bush" in Niger? Anyway, the way these have been modeled mathematically has always bugged me so I tried my hand at fixing it. Enjoy! arxiv.org/abs/2604.03031

Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft after completing the translunar injection burn. There are two auroras (top right & bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun. 🧪🔭 #Artemis www.nasa.gov/image-articl...

Thunder Thursday. Lightning over the Chicago skyline at 903pm this evening.

For my quantum column at New Scientist this month, I wrote about Tony Leggett, a legend of ultracold and quantum physics, who I was lucky to count as part of my academic family www.newscientist.com/article/2521...

Obituary: Anthony Leggett (1938-2026) Physicist who brought quantum theory to the macro world go.nature.com/4diGZVW

"genAI can be used to create podcasts from a paper to teach st-" Let me stop you right there. Before you feed somebody's paper to a slop machine, invite that somebody to talk to your students about their paper. We're right here. We academics won't shut up about our work, man. 🧪

Apparently Google has only partially updated its satellite photos of Gaza, so there are currently these weird images where whatever algorithm they use is utterly failing to blend before and after shots

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

Absolutely stunning!!! If anyone's curious about the physics of these phenomena, check out www.atoptics.org.uk/halo/common....

Very happy to see this out. 👏 @yinanwan.bsky.social Bogdan Bintu and team. Whole-embryo spatial transcriptomics at subcellular resolution from gastrulation to organogenesis | free link Science www.science.org/eprint/5MHTM...

‪ 🌳 Do you want to contribute to research on how humans perceive forests? Take this quick, anonymous 10-min survey 🌲 👉 www.biodiful.org#/forest This will help us explore how people experience forest biodiversity! Please share on 🦋 & tag @biodiful.bsky.social to reach more participants 🙏💚 🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪

Remember, the temporal paradox will return tonight. You may notice anomalies, such as missing time or strange behavior from your pets. You will likely feel tired for the first few days after passing through the temporal displacement field. This is normal for time travel.

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Tragic. Please pass this along to US Chairs and Deans, and consider it when you sit on promotion committees. This, combined with the review backlog, is dire - especially for our early career researchers.

Fascinating thread & paper on mechanisms of multicellularity:

AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default? Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.

Three postdoctoral fellowships in quantitative biology are available as part of a new Quantitative Biology Initiative in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland. Best consideration date: 3/14 Job Ad: umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j... Department: biology.umd.edu/people

Incredible lenticular clouds over Lake McDonald right now! www.nps.gov/webcams-glac... (h/t @nps-cambot.bsky.social for the webcam link!)

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This Day in Labor History: February 2, 1848. The United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war the U.S. launched against Mexico to steal land and extend slavery. Let's talk about how this also led to the widespread theft of the land grants from New Mexicans!!!

www.youtube.com/shorts/z4dy0... A video from board-certified ophthalmologist a @glaucomflecken.bsky.social - FYI if you ever get pepper spray somehow onto you, in some manner.

❗️❗️Don’t forget ❗️ Applications to the 2026 Summer Undergraduate Research Program are closing on Monday, January 26th Don’t miss your opportunity to engage in hands-on mathematical biology research and receive mentorship from NITMB faculty - www.nitmb.org/surp

⏰ Time is running out to apply for this year’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program! Undergraduate students are invited to join us at NITMB for a summer full of hands-on mathematical biology research Apply by Monday, January 26th - www.nitmb.org/surp

You can check Aurorasaurus to see if folks near you are reporting aurora.

Two new chapters from my free online book in human genetics out this weekend! These complete Part 3 of the book, on human population structure and history: 3.3: Human prehistory [separate thread] 3.4: Ancient DNA: a genetic time capsule [this thread] web.stanford.edu/group/pritch...

Sandhill Cranes typically fly with their long legs trailing behind them. On very cold mornings, like this morning when it was in the single digits, they will tuck their legs in while in flight.

Executive briefing study: When FDR abruptly died Truman needed to be briefed on massive secret Manhattan Project. Fascinating to explore its size, style, & content Memorandum for the Secretary of War from General L. R. Groves, “Atomic Fission Bombs,” April 23, 1945 nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/defaul...