1/16 🚨🚨 New paper!! I am thrilled to share our study that uses fossils, genomes, and a bit of geology to investigate how many times cavefishes evolved, and how they can help us figure out the ages of caves themselves! Link: academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Checking genbank for an obscure clade

Pulling up to #Evol2025

Anytime a fish has stripes or spots, they all have to be painted on at the end, after I’ve nearly completed the painting. It always makes me nervous! This is Percina caprodes, the common logperch. #teamfish #sciart

A large proportion of these canceled awards are focused on broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM, which NSF was mandated to do by Congress. At what point does Congress plan to act to restore the balance of power?

Connecticut has long been a cash cow for the federal government. But now the federal administration is threatening to withhold funds we are legally entitled to - in defiance of court orders. If they do, we should return the favor and stop collecting money for the feds.

Awesome new paper from @prosanta.bsky.social, Melanie Stiassny, et al! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advance-article/doi/10.1093/sysbio/syaf032/8129685?login=true

Immigration policy in my two countries, 2025: 🇺🇸No longer give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, only white people who didn’t like that apartheid ended 🇬🇧Stay away all of you squalid strangers

Even the Trojans weren't stupid enough to get IN the horse.

Diary of Anne Frank, January 13, 1943 These words, though written during one of the darkest chapters in human history, echo eerily in our modern world. 💔A timeless reminder of the consequences of indifference and the necessity of standing up for humanity.

So weird that they're just letting everything fall into the sea - the NHS, universities, people with disabilities, civil rights. They've locked in their own failure. There absolutely was coming back from 2010, 16, 19. Then they got elected and nailed shut their own coffin from the inside.

I am outraged by the unjust arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka earlier this afternoon outside of Delaney Hall in Newark. I am calling for his immediate release by federal law enforcement.

85% of political scientists say antisemitism not a major problem in their campus - in line with the results of our MESB survey - and over 90% see pressure on universities over it as a threat to democracy abuaardvarkghost.ghost.io/antisemitism...

These #fish paintings were created for a research paper led by @chasedbrownstein.bsky.social and published this week in Science Advances. It's always a pleasure painting fish for Chase and his co-authors! Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is how I feel, too. I think a large part of how we got here is that test-based K-12 education is so deeply flawed. There is almost no reading or writing compared to when I was in school. Then, when students hit college they've never practiced those skills, so of course turn to LLM's.

RESULT: Voters in Mansfield, Texas, have ousted three conservative members of their local school board tonight. This is a school board that has been at the frontlines of book-banning in Texas, as you can see here: fortworthreport.org/2025/03/19/m...

Coelacanths illuminate deep-time evolution of cranial musculature in jawed vertebrates. By Aléssio Datovo & G. David Johnson Sci. Adv. 2025 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is a good time to talk about what an absolute beast the measles virus is. Remember the R0 score during the pandemic and how we tried to push it below 1 in order to curb the spread? Measle’s R0 goes up to 18. You can catch measles by stepping into an empty elevator. That vaccine was a godsend.

Just to be clear, this is a violation of the fundamental ethical principle in clinical trial design called "equipoise." Equipoise means that no-one is exposed to excess risk just to test the therapy. That's specifically *why* vaccine trials don't use placebo arms. Ethical violation as POLICY.

Freezing *ALL* science funding? What a way to make a country great. This seems a precursor to something bigger. Total elimination of the NSF and public funding of science? Like with international aid (USAID)? 🚨Speak up, we can't allow this to happen.

i will say again that given the trajectory of the white house so far, strident opposition a la 2017 would have absolutely been the most prudent and effective decision and the absence of that opposition in the first two months made things demonstrably worse.

Something uplifting: yes, I had an NSF grant cancelled yesterday, but I spent today at (via zoom) a @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop where a dozen brilliant colleagues discussed how biological systems acquire, process, store, and transmit information in order to deal with environmental uncertainty.

Not just an inverse correlation, a direct inverse correlation!

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?” - A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

Under Trump, US retreats from global #fisheries and oceans leadership: news.mongabay.com/2025/04/unde...

Please highlight this story. ICE stormed into the wrong house, trashed the place, and made women/girls stand outside in the rain in their underwear. ICE also stole phones, laptops, and cash savings from the family, who moved to OKC two weeks ago. kfor.com/news/local/w...

NEW: Statement from attorney for Judge Dugan. "Hannah C. Dugan has committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career as a lawyer and a judge. Judge Dugan will defend herself vigorously, and looks forward to being exonerated."

Just to be clear, we reached the arresting-judges-and-deporting-US-citizens-without-due-process stage of the slide into authoritarianism today. And the citizens in question included a toddler and a child with cancer who needs treatment in the US.

"Ed Martin accuses [wikipedia] of allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda." Wait, this Ed Martin? "[Ed Martin], Trump's DC US attorney pick appeared on Russian state media over 150 times"

Quote: "Land and sea use change was the most prevalent threat to US imperiled species (82%), followed by climate change (72%), invasive species (52%), pollution (34%), and overexploitation (32%)" academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

1/10 🚨🚨 New paper with @tjnear.bsky.social! Here, we revise the systematics of sturgeons using a phylogenetic approach! We confirm an Early Cretaceous origin for the sturgeon total clade and resurrect several genera for living species!

DOGE's firings, and the ways they did it, will cost the federal government $135 billion this fiscal year, www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/u...

The FBI has *ARRESTED* a sitting judge in Milwaukee, over allegations it obstructed immigration enforcement. abcnews.go.com/US/judge-han...

New paper with Michael Caldwell, Mike Lee, Tiago Simoes, Dalton Meyer, and Simon Scarpetta! In it, we respond to claims that †Cryptovaranoides is a squamate, and show that they are indefensible. t.co/MLjFcy5ivx

1/10 Excited to introduce two new species of darters, the beautiful Gurley Darter and Birmingham Darter in a #NearLab paper led by @chasedbrownstein.bsky.social and made possible by the fish collections at Yale Peabody Museum royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Ugh. This is my former agency, where I spent much of my career on Great Lakes fish research. www.science.org/content/arti...

"On Tyranny" is a #1 NYT bestseller again. I wish the moment were different. But I’m glad the book is useful. And grateful for all the kind words about putting the 20 lessons to work. snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-les...

Let this sink in: the Trump Administration has characterized fighting misinformation/disinformation as "not a priority" for our taxpayer-funded research agency.

At the protest in #Concord, NH today. Larger crowd than the last one! (Wasn't able to get a lot of pictures today.) 🧵 #NoKings #HandsOff #DueProcessForAll

🚨Report your NSF grant terminations! 🚨 We are starting to collect information on NSF grant terminations to create a shared resource as we have for NIH. The more information we collect, the more we can organize, advocate, and fight back! Please share widely! airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni...

The only appropriate response to this is impeachment and removal from office. Every moment the political press spends spinning out theories about 2026 and immigration polling is a minute they are not spending asking Republicans in Congress about their plans to enforce the rule of law

This framing of "dependence" is fucking propaganda. The whole point of the federal government is to build and maintain national institutions that promote public health, education, scientific advancement, etc. The implication here is that those functions are a matter of private not public concern.

Congratulations to lab member Gabi Alves Ferreira who lead us in this fun project! She modeled how range shifts of neotropical frogs with climate change will change phylogenetic diversity and endemism in the new communities. So great to see this published #ProudPI 💪🐸 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is getting fewer headlines than it should. After coming to power promising to help working people, the president is revealing his real priorities by actively making it easier for banks to rip people off.

Can confirm that my NSF grant "How False Beliefs Form & How to Correct Them" was cancelled today because it is "not in alignment with current NSF priorities" Shocking that understanding how people are misled by false information is now a forbidden topic. Our work will continue but at a smaller scale

1. The DOJ has sent threatening letters to several medical journals, focused around whether these journals are spreading misinformation that harms the American people and suppressing alternative viewpoints. I study how the norms and institutions of science facilitate discovery and self-correction.

Per source, NIH has been instructed to hold off from issuing ALL awards to Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, and Northwestern (including med schools) Agency staff have also been instructed to not speak about this funding freeze to grantees and applicants