Another week of our lab groups #TidyTuesday on a Wednesday. This week, one of the students selected a somewhat depressing data set - National Science Foundation Grant Terminations under the Trump Administration with data from GrantWatch. This was my contribution:

A little late on the upload, but last month's lab group #TidyTuesday used the Dungeons and Dragons spells dataset. My contribution takes a look at how different schools of magic are distributed across different character classes and different "range types".

Know any stellar organic geochemists? Nominate them for an GS-OGD award! The Treibs medal is a lifetime achievement, late career award and is very organic geochem focused. The Hayes award is mid-career and is more inclusive of broader stable isotope geochemistry, and biogeochemistry.

Or if your brand is “too” interdisciplinary. Having been lucky enough to have a few interviews for fairly different sub fields (modern env geochem to geobiology) it’s always ended with not being [bio/geo/applied/etc]-enough for the vision of the position.

Check out this great write up of our field campaign out on Seneca lake in the @nytimes.com ! With @erinhassett.bsky.social. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/n...

Our research on Seneca Lake has been featured in the New York Times! Check it out! @benuveges.bsky.social @nytimes.com

Cool PhD opportunity at Uni Bern to work with Petra Zahajska on her Ambizione project Pixel2Paleo, creating high resolution pigment and lipid biomarker marker records from lake sediments 🧪. Apply by Dec. 2: www.eag.org/wp-content/u...

New co-author paper out today in @pnas.org led by the fantastic Dr. Lubna Shawar! Lubna breathes new life into the sponge sterol hypothesis with her meticulous organic geochemistry, and the ID of two new sponge-derived C31 Steranes in ~600 Myr rocks. Check it out! 🧪⚒️ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Had a great week out on Seneca lake taking samples to test some ideas about the cause of the mysterious Seneca Drums (aka Guns)! Aside from the “cool factor” of getting to investigate a local legend I grew up hearing about, there are Environmental and water quality implications of the work too.

A new semester means a new round of Sparks Lab TidyTuesday on a Wednesday! This month, one of our students picked the #TidyTuesday Pokémon dataset to visualize. This was my contribution, which explored median stat distributions by primary type. Really fun dataset and a great group exercise!

It’s that time of year again! #MinCup25

New paper with our community partners! We used four years of community science E. coli measurements to look at patterns in Atlanta streams. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Take a break from doom scrolling to have a look at this really cool study lead by @fatimagulhusain.bsky.social out of MIT!

This was a neat project to work on, and I enjoyed getting to branch out into some methane isotope work. Thanks @profbobhowarth.bsky.social for suggesting we take a deeper look.

Another really nice writeup on our recent PNAS paper by Dan Bernardi at Syracuse University A&S Communications! artsandsciences.syracuse.edu/earth-scienc...

Please tune in today to find out what federally funded research does for you!

Wonderful write-up by the amazing @fatimagulhusain.bsky.social on our recent PNAS paper: eaps.mit.edu/news-impact/...

Fantastic article on why cuts at NSF are harmful to everyone. For scientists, a thorough collection of evidence of NSF's impact. For everyone else, a small slice of the incredible number of everyday things NSF-funded research has improved. By Prof. Paul Bierman.🧪 theconversation.com/unprecedente...

Out online today in @pnas.org our paper: "Aerobic nitrogen cycle 100 My before permanent atmospheric oxygenation" With coauthors Gareth Izon, @chrisjunium.bsky.social , Shuhei Ono, and Roger Summons. 1/7 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I am so heartened to this seriously AWESOME #SaveNSF website go up today!!!! Has a take action toolkit with: 1. Press outreach templates 2. Social media toolkit 3. Elected official outreach 4. Talking points Check it out and share widely!!!! Likely more to come. www.savensf.com

New "band" new album cover! Presenting Jed-ward Sparks and the Magnetic Sectors! "Set list" on the back cover and below. Hopefully, this is a nice brain cleanser from all the craziness for any isotopically inclined people Puns by me, Artistic stylings by the wonderful Audra Linsner at tofd.co

Excited for our lab's presentations at #AGU24! I'm presenting Monday, but here are the other lab members/collaborators on deck for the rest of the week.

Exciting to see a new, community-run, and Diamond Open Access journal launching for geochemists (Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry). Free to read and free to publish! They have assembled a great team of editors too! (www.agcj.org)

Just a reminder that Goldschmidt is for organic geochemists too! If you are thinking of coming, check out the session Hilairy Hartnett and I are convening. Great Lakes, great food and great science, what more could you ask for? Hope to see you in August. conf.goldschmidt.info/goldschmidt/...

For all my fellow “peak millennials”. As someone imminently turning 33, this was a somewhat cathartic listen. www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/p...

Friday of spring break surprise: my former student, Julian Sheppy's paper is published! It's available here: link.springer.com/article/10.1... or email me (it's behind a paywall). Julian measured DOC concentration and bioavailability below urban beaver and stormwater ponds in Atlanta

Excited to announce a new paper by @juliazeh.bsky.social Caller identification and characterization of individual humpback whale acoustic behaviour | Royal Society Open Science royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Any R people over here on BlueSky? The Sparks lab had the first #TidyTueday of the year, and student choice was a Taylor Swift themed data set. This was the viz. I came up with (expand for best view). Plot shows general increase in Metacritic scores of TSwifts albums, with cover color palettes.

My son has been wanting to build a snowman all winter. We finally got a decent snow, so we BUILT a snowman. We humbly present “Shaq Frost”, the 7’2” Cornell Chilled Colossus.

Iceland xkcd.com/2874

@earth-science.bsky.social Got my shiny copy of the paper I co-wrote with the amazing Prof. Ann Pearson, out in this months issue of Geology. Ammonium “nutrient capacitor” model for δ15N signatures associated with marine anoxic events Check it out! pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/...

Interested in what we can learn from Phanerozoic Marine Extinctions? Consider submitting an abstract for our #NAPC2024 session sites.lsa.umich.edu/napc2024/pre...

Howdy Blue Sky! I’ve been told this is where science-Twitter (or whatever it’s called now) has migrated to. Excited to interact with that community again!