"The biases do not disappear; they get encoded into the model and then laundered into outputs that feel objective because they are numerical. Replacing one prestige filter with another that is harder to see or challenge is not progress toward equity in science; it’s the opposite."

can’t tell yall enough what a breakthrough it was for me to learn from this interview that most people just want to feel like they’re being obeyed they rarely follow up on whether you actually obey them

Oopsies

Happy 100th, Mel Brooks. Spent 10 minutes trying to pick out the funniest clip I could think of from one of his films. I'm not even sure this is it, but it's from the amazing climax of my favorite Brooks movie, so... enjoy "The French Mistake" www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMK6...

fyi, that AltNOAA story about a whale escape that's making the rounds is completely made up/AI generated and the OP is aware and thinks spreading fake stories is fine generally speaking the "altgov" accounts are firehoses of misinfo that are not worth your precious attention

the next democratic president and congress should revive the idea of world's fairs. the idea behind this would be great if it hadn't been planned and executed by a group of incompetent groyper shitbags

Y'all - the Smithsonian is hiring three new curators - herpetology, ichthyology, and ornithology! Notably, this is a 2nd fish curator position - i.e., not the same as the one advertised last month. So if you applied for that one apply again. www.usajobs.gov/job/873849000

Weirdest NATURE-branded interactive ever? It’s like Would you terraform Mars via (a) magic, (b) the power of Grayskull, (c) dilithium crystals, (d) hope www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Two years ago, a town in Washington also experienced a warehouse fire at a Lineage cold storage facility. Read more in today's newsletter about what the Finley fire — which took about two months to put out — tells us about the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights: lamaterial.com/p/what-reall...

I have long appreciated and enjoyed Outward and I respect everyone in this conversation and it is flabbergasting to me that they’d choose to do this as a final episode

my siblings in Christ, the OMB proposed rulemaking still has not closed it comments yet the draft GFA put forward by NSF is trying to go through with (1) 15% de minimis indirect rate and (2) disallowing publication costs

Public health research at world-class institutions like the NIH is an important public good. Rep. Suzan DelBene, Rep. Lori Trahan and I are leading 122 of our colleagues to oppose the Trump Administration’s efforts to give partisan political appointees final say over health research grants.

We had a very early start to spring in the West this year, it sustained, and now we can see that the "end" of spring was reached early to very early across pretty much all L48 states #statusofspring www.usanpn.org/data/maps/sp... @usa-npn.bsky.social #phenology

This Day in Labor History: June 25, 1938. FDR signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. This groundbreaking piece of legislation set the standards of labor that defined post-war America, including minimum wages, overtime pay, and the banning of most child labor. Like everything, it was also incremental.

Corlett Wood showing that association with different symbiotic microbes leads plants to grow leaves with distinguishably different trait combinations — but they don't have a similar effect on growth/biomass traits. #Evol2026

Kevin Ricks presenting a whole bunch of species distribution modeling to demonstrate that plants with symbiotic mutualists like nitrogen-fixing rhizobia may be less able to migrate and track suitable conditions to higher latitudes as climate warms #Evol2026

Just about ready to start in room 22, Coevolution I #Evol2026

The website (and registration) are live for the January 2027 @asn-amnat.bsky.social American Society of Naturalists meeting: www.amnat2027.org On the East Coast of the US for once, which makes this easier for many people to attend by train or car (or travel from Europe more easily)

On the one hand the absolutely spiceless burrito I’ve just finished has me feeling more smugly Californian than I’ve ever felt in my life but on the other hand I ate it in the city library’s shaded “Reading Garden” while a guy plays guitar in a little amphitheater so: not bad, Cleveland, not bad

“Trump didn’t just fail to drain the swamp—he created a brand new, quite literal, one.” www.liberalcurrents.com/let-us-refle...

The LC Discord cooked up some thoughts on the scandal naming convention

Grad student @gykim.bsky.social 's Opuntia common garden might be the prettiest thing on campus right now.

I don’t know man, who is “the Democratic Party” if it’s not the voters?Democratic voters choose candidates, not party leaders. And party leaders need to listen to what voters are telling us - and right now they are demanding our party be bolder.

Christian Weinrich is demo-ing PCR "blockers" for metagenomics of eukaryotic associates of beetles — normally, host DNA overwhelms 18S rRNA sequence output, but with the blockers, he can identify parasitic mites, beetle foodstock, environmental microbes, even a parasite of the mites! #Evol2026

In the host/parasite evolution session, Nora Hines is showing us preliminary population genomics from northern cardinals and lice collected across Arkansas — excited to see where this one ends up #Evol2026

PulseNet USA is CDC’s foodborne pathogen molecular fingerprinting program. It identifies shared pathogens & sources of infection across cases in our increasingly dispersed food system, helping public health agencies detect and stop cryptic outbreaks! It’s super neat. Happy #PulseNet30!!

Climate.us is live. Built by members of the team behind Climate.gov, this new independent nonprofit website keeps trusted climate information easy to find, easy to use, and harder to erase. #ClimateForUs #ClimateUS

🌲🌉 Species Distribution Models with BART 🌉🌲 You can still join us! 🚀 Don’t miss the opportunity to take your #SDMs to the next level with @jbyoder.org Learn how to apply BART for SDM and master powerful R workflows with the embarcadero and dbarts packages🌍 @colincarlson.bsky.social #Rstats

To the #Evol2026 folks, I am recruiting MSc/PhD students (with or without their own funding) - please send people my way if you know of anyone interested in blending ecology & evolution!

of course cancel me daddy is taking full credit for the lander win.

For the first time in US history, the House and the Senate have PASSED a War Powers Resolution. That is how badly Americans oppose Trump’s illegal war with Iran. No more threats. No more bombing. This reckless, illegal war must come to a REAL end now. No more endless wars.

We always come back to "is mass death good or bad" when litigating the far-left dumbass-posters on this topic, and I think we could say more about how their fundamental premise is flawed: USAID is not the CIA. The way we know this is that the far right captured the government and turned USAID off

as a newly-named Scientific American Young American Scientist (2026), I guess my thoughts are that (1) editorial layoffs are not good, and (2) the existing union-busting bullshit that these folks have been subjected to is also not good

Kyle McElroy demonstrating the challenges of capture-based sequencing for tracking gene losses — but shows that an eyeless deep-sea glass scallop, closely related to species with well-developed eyes, has lost a whole suite of genes for light-responsive opsins #Evol2026

i'm at the death of american journalism. i'm at the death of american science. i'm at the combination deaths of american journalism and science.

Adam Stuckert is looking at genes underlying color and patterning in poison frogs — one Fst outlier between striped and spotted morphs of *Ranitomeya imitator* is homologous to a gene that controls stripe development in zebrafish #Evol2026

Really excellent talk by Weixuan Ning, presenting just-published work tracing the domestication site of cotton with whole-genome sequencing of wild relatives doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #Evol2026

I Lived It: someone turned our paper into an AI manga podcast

Algae awareness is at an all time high and this is a good thing

The ISS has hosted 6 Italian astronauts since 2001 when Umberto Guidoni became one of the 1st Europeans to visit. But as far as "planting the flag", it was Samantha Cristoforetti who made it a proper destination for ESA's Italian astronauts with the launch of the 'ISSpresso machine'.

Remember X-Labs? Without transparency, and in defiance of Congress, a new memo to NSF directs “program managers to stop seeking funding for any proposals, even those that received the highest marks from outside reviewers and program staff, “until we are able to provide more details.”

Making sure people at #Evol2026 see this. "The agency’s biology directorate, for example, has been cut by $200 million from its FY 2025 level of roughly $800 million" "Program managers would normally rush to inform [...] the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut." 🧪

This poll was about whether people thought homosexual acts were immoral, but I like how it looks like the numbers refer specifically to this guy

Our lab website is updated with a new postdoc opening! This is a 2-year, in-person position looking at the relationships between climate change, pandemic risk, and policy choices over the 21st century. Please reach out (not on here)! www.carlsonlab.bio/join

Job ad is not out yet, but we're going to be hiring an Asst Prof at Cal State Northridge who works on either birds or mammals (area of research is broadly defined). Track down @jbyoder.org, @mutualismecology.bsky.social, or me at #Evol2026 with questions!

I'm not sure I've ever seen a single sentence go downhill this far and this fast

literally what

Sam was a great colleague. I hope he is enjoying his retirement while still being an advocate for science.