What are you gonna do, tackle him?

Surprisingly, the phylogeny implies (equivocally, to be sure) that the Elegans Supergroup of species, which includes C. elegans, is derived from American ancestors, and that a lot of the groups diversification may have taken place in Oceania, prior to subsequent invasions of Asia.

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

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

Vaccines are battle training for your immune system. If you could give it intel on the enemy, why would you withhold that? Give me ALL the vaccines! I want to be prepared for everything!

Obligatory sharing of John Oliver's take on this administrations fight against research and Universities #academia youtu.be/xk94il8L820?...

Nearly all PhDs take 5 years--with finishing in 4 a rare outcome. This is deliberately designed to eliminate the international powerhouse that is US postgraduate training.

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

There are a lot of details in yesterday's sweeping executive order, but the bottom line is that it gives political appointees immense power over scientific grants, which have until now been stewarded by career civil servants and experts. My reporting: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@emilydriessen.bsky.social and I wrote a letter in Science calling for us to lean into our communities and increase support for change agents during this time of adversity and funding cuts. #DBER #BioEd Community support for inclusive US education | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages

Why isn’t bell hooks’s writing around men and love not seen as a progressive text on how men can get laid, i.e., form healthy romantic relationships with people in their lives?

NEW: 18,500 children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. The Washington Post has just published every single known name. A seminal moment.

STEM ed has been foundational to NSF's mission & mandated functions ever since its founding in 1950. Ex: Remember the Magic School Bus? NSF funded that. Bill Nye the Science Guy? Zoom? Reading Rainbow? NSF was a key funder in all those [with others like the imperiled Corp for Public Broadcasting]

Normally write whatever comes to mind, but the editors specifically requested, if I had the time, to breakdown the meteorological factors that caused the Texas Floods. Here’s my take on 5 key ingredients www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

To Craig's point, I always bring up the CRAZY stat buried in Morgan et al. '22: Babies of profs become faculty ~9.5% of the time, while the overall prob a STUDENT IN A PHD becomes faculty = ~12%. One would hope ≥20 years of work & commitment toward a goal puts you far ahead of babies, but no.

My deep dive on whether there were adequate weather warnings for the catastrophic flooding in Texas. Mentions Alan Gerard Balanced Weather and Jordan McLeod. I am really interested in your thoughts on my take. www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

It's hard to avoid recalling this passage from the English historian Tony Judt:

Yes, misunderstanding ‘trans’ in molecular biology leading to grant cuts is bad. But so is cutting grants studying actual trans people, and cutting grants based on broader impacts aimed at DEI. It’s all bad!!

First time ever hanging out in federal court today. Stay tuned for an update on the anti-DEI lawsuit. Here's @alander.bsky.social recap from yesterday. www.al.com/news/2025/06...

I miss Fridays

Difficult to overstate this. It seems that many in core science and math fields feel that they will be able to hunker down and wait, but the infrastructure for ALL science is being diminished. This will diminish US higher ed in ways that will not be apparent for another 12-18 months.

Alabama voters banned prison slavery — but prisoners say it hasn’t stopped As a lawsuit from incarcerated workers tries to stop a forced prison labor program, a beer distributor is defending its own participation www.whatimreading.net/p/alabama-vo...

Another day testing the limits of resilience. The Alexandria NSF building was designed for the NSF merit review process (gold standard), complete with a floor devoted to panels. Now we aren’t allowed to have in person panels. The loss of US science leadership will haunt this country for decades.

The recording of my IDEA talk is up on the #Evol2025 YouTube channel, and I've thrown that together with a PDF copy of the slide deck and a bibliography: lab.jbyoder.org/2025/06/21/a...

Now hearing Joseph L. Graves putting the Scopes trial into its context in the Jim Crow era, a connection we don't often make #Evol2025

Using anti-DEI policies to dismantle education: A new front in a really old battle - a perspective with @kzutaustin.bsky.social and @hormiga.bsky.social | PLOS Biology journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

This is going to be an excellent symposium!

A US judge has ordered hundreds of terminated research projects at the US National Institutes of Health to be reinstated, calling the processes that led to their cancellation “bereft of reasoning”. https://go.nature.com/4kOmXDy

We've got action in Auburn, AL

#nokings in Auburn, AL ..hundreds of people

Despite warnings from the law enforcement not to attend today’s No Kings rally after this mornings shooting of Minnesota lawmakers with the killer on the lose, the No Kings Rally is happening at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul.

@governorwalz.mn.gov: "The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you're overreacting."

For non-scientists: the funding rate is somewhere between 7% to ~25% (rare) for NIH or NSF grants, depending on where you are applying. Grants are reviewed by a panel of peers who read the grants, score them, then debate the ratings for 1-2 days to rank them. It is INCREDIBLY competitive already.

race does not equal genes www.statnews.com/2025/06/05/n...

I’m not sure if you can overdose on schadenfreude but we’re about to find out

The brain drain will be when scientists are forced into other careers/jobs so that they can keep paying the bills. They will never return. There aren't enough science jobs in other countries to absorb even a fraction of those laid off.

You wanna see something really scary? open.substack.com/pub/amandagu...

1. Florida banned cities from lighting up bridges rainbow colors for Pride. So the people of Jacksonville did it themselves using flashlights and gels. They opened the drawbridge to block them. So they marched to a different bridge. The latest from S. Baum. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

To get Pell Grants, students will now need to take 15 credits (5 classes) instead of 12 credits. Students with limited finances also have to work! This will guarantee failure for many of these students making the difficult transition between rigorous colleges and less rigorous high schools

I just can’t. They do not care at all about merit and I’m so tired of the lies. As a student who had NOTHING going into college but was very bright, even with Pell grants I still had to work to pay for basic needs. A bill like this would have ensured my likelihood of success shrank to near zero.

the revealed position of the republican party is that it thinks broad expansion of higher education — and especially its expansion for certain americans — was a mistake that must be rolled back

an overwhelming percentage of cuts at the NSF are to STEM education. experts see it as part of a broader attack on DEI, as well as on education as a whole. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/s...

“you should have a choice” means “we get to choose for you”

happy NSF Friday to all who are in therapy about it

"Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants. Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant."

NEWS: I just led 112 of my colleagues in demanding answers from the Trump Administration on their funding freeze of the National Science Foundation. Cutting off NSF funding threatens vital research, stalls innovation, and risks ceding global scientific leadership to China.

62% of Americans strongly or somewhat favor maintaining federal funding for scientific and medical research at colleges and universities. apnorc.org/projects/few...