Thread. The new McCarthyism is, and has been, tearing through education for years. These are just a sampling, and they have been the rehearsals for purges in places like late-night TV.

This one followed every child born in Denmark from 1999-2010, with more than 650,000 children. No association between MMR vaccine and autism was observed. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30831578/

Trump again just implied that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Many studies have shown that there is no relationship between MMR vaccine and the development of autism. This one followed every single child born in Denmark from 1991 through 1998 (n=537,303). There was no association.

A milestone for plant genomics just out @natgenet.nature.com 130 bryophyte genomes! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Why do queen bumblebees emerge from hibernation during weekends?" I love this framing about bias in hobbyist-collected data.

Some people think ChatGPT has a place writing things like news briefs, stuff written to a specific style and tone and, y'know, kinda boring. So Science did a study. ChatGPT failed. Why? It got stuff wrong. "Also, extensive editing for hyperbole was needed." www.science.org/content/blog...

Of course some processes at NIH & in US science in general should be reformed. But uncritically presenting Jay Bhattacharya as a naive idealist rather than a hypocrite & political operative charged with NIH’s destruction is wildly divorced from reality. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/o...

Thread

i dont mean this is a magical mystic indigenous way either—we are just taught that we are animals, that we are part of our environment, that we are related to and in relation with the living things around us

it is so weird to watch non-Indigenous science explore the idea of animal moods or animal conciousness i was just raised to assume animals are complex beings who experience a bevy of emotions and i don’t think i realized until quite recently that this was not the usual experience?

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases. This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions. arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

The plan for NSF is to demote its director to an advisory role to what a former senior figure compared to a Soviet political commissar. Also, greatly reduce the role of rotators from academic departments to consolidate administration power. This is a disaster for science and innovation.

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

“There is no comparable requirement for boys to confirm their gender,” said another parent. “Once again, the onus is placed on girls to be monitored and regulated, reinforcing the idea that female athletes are the ones who need to be verified.”

Nothing fishy about this timeline.

Another update on the ongoing investigation of NBA team circumventing the salary cap. Reporting by Pablo Torre @pablo.show youtu.be/4_ow9i3obDE?...

Iberian harvester ants are the only known organism that propagates two species by itself, according to new research. Learn more: https://scim.ag/47sVFyS

Our ability to comprehend daily events has been corrupted by a toxic info environment where political & attentional dynamics distort & manipulate our “collective sensemaking” processes. Our “official” sources are now products of that same environment. Reality fractures, along with the social fabric.

🤷🏿‍♂️

The first Aguillon Lab paper is officially out in early view at Evolution!! Led by postdoc @devonderaad.bsky.social, we’ve explored the hybrid zone between black-headed and rose-breasted grosbeaks in the Great Plains. #ornithology #hybridization #speciation #evolution doi.org/10.1093/evol...

And yes, now is the right time. New for @undark.org "The fundamental problem with the tenure process is that it has struggled to recognize that knowledge is curated, created, and consumed differently today than even a decade ago." undark.org/2025/09/11/o...

Stephen Jay Gould was born OTD in 1941. “Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table.... Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.” 🦫🦋🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci #EvoBio

After a 4 yrs, colleague & I in collab w/ grad college to revive our GRFP grant writing workshop we ran through the ISU+KU SACNAS chapters, 2016-2021. Friday evening: lightning talks. Saturday: grant writing panel, broader impacts 2025, & 1on1 coaching with faculty for Grad students/Senior UGs.

Applying to the NSF-GRFP (or another fellowship) on a tight deadline? We built a 7-week guide + timeline to get you from draft to submission. It’s not too late — you’ve got this! ✨ 🔗 cientificolatino.com/apply-in-7-weeks #NSFGRFP #GradSchool #Fellowship

Welcomed 33 new STEM Scholars on Friday, students with passion and dreams to have a positive impact on their families, communities, and the world. It remains to be seen if they will they have a wide variety of pathways toward a career in science?

Oooh, just subscribed to a podcast about the history of Black people told by comedians. Kind of a mix of Drunk History (without the alcohol) & Code Switch (with more comedy). On season 1 ep 4 I learned that Langston Hughes is also Native?!?! thesecretadventuresofblackpeople.com/our-ancestor...

I ordered a used go-pro so I can take a crack at filming myself doing science and manually teach more people how to become taxonomists. We won't make any money, but at least we can hang out about it

Bernie: "[Umpteen medical organizations] disagree with you. Who are the organizations that are agreeing with you?" RFK: "Marty Makary, Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr Oz." This is a thing THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Buffalo are returning to their ancestral homeland in South Texas to revitalize the earth and strengthen indigenous connections. Hear about the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project with co-founder Lucille Contreras and Ellen Gass of the Conservation Fund. @texaspublicradio.bsky.social shorturl.at/D14po

The insinuation that he was trying to get anything right is frankly offensive

Sequence data from the new Ebola outbreak in DRC suggests it is indeed a new spillover. And just incredible to see the virus sequenced and the data publicly shared less than 24 hours after confirmation of the outbreak. #IDsky 🧪 virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

The theatre around RFK is great and all, but his holding a position as HSS Secretary is failed state behavior, and everyone who facilitated it should be drummed out of public life.

First memory of Graham Greene was a small but memorable part as a PTSD vet in Poe Wow Highway. RIP.

On September 1, 2025, we lost a true legend. Graham Greene, Oneida from Six Nations Reserve, walked on at the age of 73. Over the span of more than 175 acting credits, he gave us characters that were unforgettable, complex, and real. redpopnews.com/remembering-... #redpopnews

Michelle Obama: “Eat more veggies and exercise!” RFK Jr: **bans vaccines** Tom Bartlett: “These are the same thing.”

I have *way* more followers here than I did on Twitter (a fact I admit I am not fully happy about) - but more importantly, the interactions here have been overwhelmingly more positive than they were on late-stage Twitter, even with heavy curation.

This transition I think is really hard for faculty who become Dept Chair and/or Dean. Many faculty become Dept chairs because it is "their turn" or no other senior faculty can/want to do it. This somewhat ad hoc process creates obvious organizational problems.

Full resignation letter from Demetre C. Daskalakis, a CDC leader, does not hold back. "The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud."

I debated writing this. It can feel tempting, upon encountering yet another instance of this administration’s racism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet we have to write it down, if for nothing else, so those who come after us know we were against it.

I know my position within the academy is different. I’m keenly aware. I know what the attacks on HE look like and that we are in no way suited to defend them. I’ve tried to hold my mule. But this? This makes me want to pop out so badly. You don’t have an ethical responsibility to use A.I.

I have NIGMS R35, impact score 12 NIHGRI R21, 4th percentile NHGRI R01, 7th percentile (co-I) and it seems like none will be funded. 0/3. PO (who has been very helpful) said "Unfortunately, I do not expect this application will be selected for funding in FY25." 😭

It is impossible to explain to civilians how it feels to finally, FINALLY, land a clearly within-payline NIH grant score and then have it go unfunded because of all this regime bullshit. You all have my sympathies. Unfair doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Sometimes I lose faith in the book but then I go in to do a little edit and I’m like wow, I love this book I hope you will too 🤓 www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746817...

Every time you feel tempted to judge an organization for using Instagram to circulate urgent information about on the ground ICE activity, consider signal boosting their message on your platform of choice instead And asking Bluesky to create a Live broadcasting system

I've also been thinking of Lysenko recently, and the history lesson of how pseudoscience in service of a totalitarian regime destroyed tens of millions of lives. Rasmussen makes that comparison sharper by holding Lysenko's pseudoscientific journey up to Bhattacharya's.

They always have. Eugenics, especially in educated and wealthy American circles, never died out after WWII. And there is no more environment more fertile for a true resurgence than Silicon Valley. People who think they are gods gift to the world, untrammeled by conscience, ethics or reality, really

URM faculty received 7% more negative votes & were 44% less likely to receive unanimous votes from P&T committees -evidence that P&T decision-making processes contribute to the sustained underrepresentation of URM faculty in tenured faculty positions www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Just confirming that I have already blocked H. Jeffries. Confirmed.