No-strings-attached, zero-means-testing, no-questions-asked cash payouts have been proven, over and over again, to be the most effective form of charity/aid going. It gets people in housing, and it saves the state money. We know this. It's fact, not theory.

If new proposals detailed in an FDA memo are put into place, experts told me it would mean the end of annual flu shots. And end of most vaccines for pregnant people. And maybe the end of updates to pneumonia vaccines. And more. www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-va...

"Credible sources suggest none—or very few—of the ACIP presentations will be delivered by CDC scientists or experts. Instead, external groups, including some with clear anti-vaccine track records, are slated to take the lead. This is highly unusual..." open.substack.com/pub/yourloca...

If you have a student, anywhere in the world, who would like and entomological society membership please have them come on over to our entopoc.org website to sign up for up to three free memberships per student!

This is truly awful. I have served in the university media board for 3 years and saw how brilliant and committed the student editors of these magazines were to quality and integrity. This is such a loss for the university community at large. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/u...

With cuts to federal research, we need your support now more than ever to help us provide more research funding to our early career scientists through the Grad Student Research Awards. Make a donation today on #GivingTuesday! #iamabotanist #Botany crm.botany.org/makeadonation

Writing an Introduction is hard. There are a few ways Introductions often go astray - avoid these. "What your Introduction section isn't" -

Not an easy read but wonderfully written and an insightful look into electroshock therapy.

📢 We are taking applications for our Postdoctoral Fellows Program at Harvard/DFCI! 🔹Join a research group in our department 🔹Co-mentoring opportunities with 2+ faculty 🔹Collaborate with investigators beyond our department 🔹Salary starts at $75K Apply here: t.co/B7SLZzQFKu

This #GivingTuesday please consider donating to @abcmicrogrants.bsky.social to support undergraduate students globally!! 🫶🗺️ Help us make #animalbehaviourresearch more inclusive 🐝🐝🐝 Sign up to be a monthly donor, or make a one time contribution using this link opencollective.com/animal-behav...

Holy shit A methodology out of date since the FUCKING 1700S???

If you run across a gen A.I. slop 🤖💩 diagram in an academic journal, I’d love to know about it! Please fill out this form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Slop in journals is illuminating about journals’ quality control. And journals would like you to forget their mistakes. #AcademicChatter

These generous travel awards are still available for applications! Please share with your networks, the deadline is coming up on December 5th!

I have come to the idea that we have to collectively, brutally, ritualistically kill Target just to show capital that we truly aren’t fucking around.

An essay for World AIDS Day and the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks's valiant act of resistance, an essay on quilts and solidarity, on stitching the fragments together.

Make sure you don’t miss our key dates for abstract submission and registration!

one of the pics is Billboard Chris (professional troll) saying "individuals who identify as trans should be automatically disqualified from holding any position as teacher or professor", with the undergrad's mom- an attorney defending J6 rioters- agreeing. this is about kicking us out of teaching.

Pollicipes polymerus wreath (west side of San Juan Island, WA) for #Crustmas

The news has entirely failed to grasp the unprecedented scope of the ICE and DHS budgets. Nothing like it in modern history. A galaxy of public/private surveillance and caging institutions for $100,000,000,000s unleashed on a public that will be forever changed. www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

My god…they just took 50 million from the general budget for vouchers going to private religious schools. Now, another 100 million?

every trans person i see post about the OU suspension knows that the suspended target is trans & a grad student, & has an innate awareness that this is about purging trans employees. every cis person i see thinks the target is a rando professor & that this is about giving conservatives good grades

“Don’t worry, the athletics department has an unaccountable slush fund that trades on the university name” isn’t really the winning argument you think it is.

In a new leaked memo, the FDA outlined plans to make it much harder to get new vaccines approved, claiming, without sharing evidence, that the COVID vaccines have killed at least 10 children. This is so reckless. The science shows us that COVID vaccines have saved millions of lives.

Scientists studied thousands of children born March 2020-May 2021. Out of 800+ mothers diagnosed with COVID-19, 16.3% of their babies received a neurodevelopmental diagnosis by 3 years old, compared with 9.7% who weren’t exposed to COVID-19 in utero.

I would love to see detailed reporting about how these deals come together. This one looks like an inside job even more than Columbia’s.

Here's a note I sent to our members about what we did with their money, and why we expect the Onion to outgrow the Washington Post. We keep doing weird, hard shit — taunting ICE, yelling at Congress for not taunting ICE, buying bad websites — when nobody else does. Our members keep getting papers.

'A 2025 study of jailbreak attacks in medical prompts found that leading large language models complied with unsafe instructions in most test cases – up to 98% when the most effective techniques were used in simulated scenarios.' They complied with up to NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT of unsafe instructions.

This is the Sunburst Candy Spider from Thailand. Not AI (sucks to have to declare this). Very real and had been on my wish list for a long time. The taxonomic placement is unclear, so we are leaving it at Cyrtarachninae.

Any person who claims to be an academic leader and signs a document like this is neither.

The legal, media, and academic institutions capitulating to an authoritarian ordering payments for favorable treatment are damning themselves to irrelevance. They are destroying their institutions. They will be — and should be — shunned for failing in their most basic purposes for existing.

You've heard of the Friday night news dump. Here's the Friday night of Thanksgiving wknd dump. For special circumstances, like when the faculty assembly votes 595-4 against paying to end a shakedown and you do it anyway. Link to agreement here: bulkmail.northwestern.edu/trk/click?re...

This is so deeply at odds with the vision and history of America. Take pretty much any ethnic or racial group that are part of the American mosaic America today - they have all faced the same accusation. The moment these accusations are turned into policy are some of the most shameful in US history

Happy consumerism bonanza day! Throw tomatoes at target/Walmart/Amazon! Get some freaky little presents from artists! Big corps make the wealthy wealthier & artists are trying to buy wet food for their cats. Artists, drop your shops! For a start, check out SquidFacts.net More of my faves below

Feels worth pointing out that the entire reason Trump put the national guard into cities was bc they were hoping something violent would happen to some of them.

Did you know that you may be able to publish your paper in our open access journals at no cost? At the BES, we believe cost should not be a barrier to publishing. We have outlined how you can use resources that cover the fees for processing and publishing your research. buff.ly/irQPJaP

One of the points Joshua Davis makes in *Police Against the Movement* is that COINTELPRO was started by the police and all the FBI did was federalize it. And SNCC and CORE did a ton of organizing around police brutality specifically. #BookSky

look 👀 LOOK at the spider book 🕷️📘👀 gaze at its thoughtful features & reasonable price 💵🔍👀 $9.25 gets you everything you need to start spidering bookshop.org/p/books/spid... need a more premium experience? i have a limited number of autographed copies available, each with a spider doodle; DM me

NEW from me - NSF cancels grant scheme for social science research. Seems the NSF quietly archived ALL calls for DDRIG grants in the SBE directorate. This is a massive blow for PhD students wanting to do cutting-edge social science research. 🏺🧪

It's not this platform. It's all of society that hates AI

Wondering if insects feel pain? Here's our critique of work that looked at this in bees. We were unconvinced of the evidence, and built a model to think through these issues. Their response is published alongside and we'll have a response to that out soon. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Putting on my hat as @asn-amnat.bsky.social ASN President for announcements, please share widely!!! 2. ASN Early Career Investigator awards are now open for application. Self-nominations okay! Due Jan 5 nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

“It is not acceptable to recruit a variety of students into the laboratory, subject them to a variety of stress tests and abuses, and then keep the students who thrive under abuse and get rid of the students who aren't able to thrive in the lab. That's straight-up exploitation.” 👏👏👏

We know a lot of our membership either works on, or at least cares, about endangered species. There are recent governmental efforts to alter the Endangered Species Act. If you're concerned about this then you might want to consider signing this letter: defenders-cci.org/sign-on/safe...

Putting on my hat as @asn-amnat.bsky.social ASN President for announcements, please share widely!!! 8) The ASN Diversity committee is seeking 2 new members to start Jan 2026, Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Flu Overview update. A month ago we detected flu in less than 10% of samples. In the most recent batch over 50% had FluA (H1N1 and/or H3N2) and 75% had FluC. Numbers were low, but flu season is starting.

More than a million Palestinians in Gaza are vulnerable to upcoming winter weather. Israeli authorities for months have either blocked or partially restricted the entry of key shelter items, despite a ceasefire that requires the unfettered flow of aid.

The EPA is starting to allow the use of pesticides containing PFAS on food. The move is part of an effort to roll back the regulation of what are called "forever chemicals" because they don't break down easily in the environment.

Weird word of the day: "kleptosquamy." The testate amoeba Awerintzewia cyclostoma steals scales from other amoeboid organisms to build its own shell. This one has robbed Quadrulella, Netzelia, various euglyphids, and even an Acanthocystis. Kleptosquamy! #amoebae #ProtistsOnSky #biology #nature

🚨Good news, everyone! 1) I'm thrilled to be joining the behavior powerhouse that is Indiana University!! So stoked, starting Jan 2026. 2) I'm recruiting grad students! Are you (or your trainee) interested in sensory ecology? behavior? evolution? fieldwork? spiders? Drop me a line Jstafstr(at)iu.edu

From @democracydocket.com ⬇️ www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...