ACTUAL GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: The Paleontological Research Institution and the Museum of the Earth have made it through the crisis! Thanks to everyone who shared or donated-every donation mattered! Please share the good news just as widely!⚒️🧪🦑 Together we did #savePRI www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/...

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Currently doing my financial conflict of interest training for work and boy it hits different given the state of things in the US today.

Not unhappy about this...

NSF - Forced reorg - POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements) - Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …) I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing. “Details matter” 🙃

This year, the NSF funded 35% fewer grants in geoscience, with 25% less money. Meanwhile, the Office of the Director spent almost three times as much money as in a regular year. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

i’m not crying you’re crying xkcd: Fifteen Years

field trip this weekend for my Sedimentary Basins course –– we went from earliest Cambrian rift basin to Cambro-Ordovician passive margin to the three main foreland-basin phases of the rest of the Paleozoic (>240 Myr of history in two days 😅) ⚒️

Oh no! Google Scholar is indexing young Earth creationist references?!

I'm not a lawyer but this seems like its a violation of the Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 of the constitution. It would be an ex post facto law that retrospectively changes the legal consequences of action that happened before the enactment of the law. constitution.congress.gov/browse/artic...

Well this would fuck me and my lab over- I wasn't entirely sure because, like many scientists, I collaborate widely and may not even know all of my coauthors (let alone their nationality) but I'm 99% sure it would make me ineligible for federal funding.

This has gotten surprisingly little attention — it's not even on the front page of @science.org right now — but it's really hard to describe what the SAFE Research Act would do to US science and scientists without sounding insane www.science.org/content/arti...

a very large proportion of american scientists have worked with chinese scientists at some point in the last five years

Well if this actually happens, I'm hosed. In the past five years papers I've co-authored at least 10 papers with Chinese collaborators and I've advised a Chinese Ph.D. student. I also currently have project that has a cooperative agreement between the Chinese science foundation and the NSF.

They are really planning to go through with these cuts at Nebraska, despite recommendations not to. Unbelievable. If you want to hire highly qualified, very successful earth and atmospheric sciences faculty in teaching and research, quite a few are probably looking for jobs for next year.

A paper in Scientific Reports presents the origins of vivid colours within the gemstone ammolite — a rare type of brightly coloured fossilised ammonite shell. go.nature.com/48OT5DX #Paleosky ⚒️ 🧪

i don’t know how to cross-post this from FB but this is absolutely heartbreaking. The age of scientific ocean discovery we were brought up in is gone & will never come back. I can’t.

Paleontologists - are these tabulate corals? ⚒️

Doing research has to come with an epistemological humility that accepts you don't already know everything & understands that some things are going to be uncomfortably ambiguous. The 'mainstream' consensus on any issue won't be perfect, but you aren't going to overturn it with 5 min with ChatGPT.

⚒️ The Proterozoic Earth had radically different ocean and atmospheric chemistry, was ruled by bacterial mats, and was possibly being shaped by not-plate-tectonics, or at least different-plate-tectonics. Calling it boring is such a depressing failure of the imagination.

“That name, man,” Riedman says of the boring billion. “We’ve got to kill it. Kill it with fire.” Gave me a smile to see they interviewed you about your work too.

After getting zero firm commitments to this point from the first nine invitees, the Trump administration is extending its proposed compact to all colleges. Expect some red-state publics to say yes.

The Crinoid hat video is up on my channel! youtu.be/ZdPTYamnqQA

Astrogeology and Astrochemistry: Apollo Samples From 1972 Reveal Exotic Sulfur Hidden In The Moon’s Mantle astrobiology.com/2025/10/astr... #astrobiology #astrochemistry #Artemis #astrogeology

Last week I was co-leading a field trip in Utah, to check out some fluvial and eolian rocks. It was exhausting but fun and forced me to think more carefully than before about complex bedforms. This is a 3D model of one of the many stunning exposures of the Navajo Sandstone near Escalante 🧪⚒️

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/...

A reminder to please support non-profit publishers. It’s good for science and scientists. It’s a responsible use of taxpayer dollars. It requires resisting peer pressure to submit to Nature journals. Thanks @bacteriality.bsky.social for this helpful slide for microbiology journals.

Today was a hard day for Ph.D. students who found out that they can no longer apply for NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. "Devastating“ was how one student described it to me. #GradSchool #NSFGRFP www.science.org/content/arti...

For those anxiously awaiting it: the NSF GRFP solicitation is out, with a November 14 deadline for Geoscience applicants: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Wang, H., Li, C., Peng, Y. et al. Two-billion-year transitional oxygenation of the Earth’s surface. #stableisotopes Nature 645, 665–671 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Everyone writing about Perseverance today should be asking how many of the scientists and engineers who were involved in this discovery no longer work for NASA bc of Trump.

We’re looking for a stable isotope geochemist to run our IRMS lab here in beautiful Cornwall! Interested or know someone who might be? Please reach out! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOO041/t...

Paleozoic fossil brachiopod sabotages the stony steps of my office building #FossilFriday

Sed geology text geo.libretexts.org/Courses/SUNY...

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

More dead fish this morning #Chesapeake #Anoxia

🚨 Paper alert! 🚨 After >1 year in review and six (6!) reviewers, I'm thrilled that this paper is finally out! Here, we provide the first data-based record of marine dissolved organic carbon in the geologic past. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I haven't had the opportunity to dive into this, but at quick glance this looks like a great resource –– especially for those teaching at the intersection of climate science and geoscience

If I wanted to spend a bunch of time building cool things only to see it burned down, I would have applied for a federal grant or helped build up a federal lab or sample depository.

2 bits of data from new Economist/YouGov poll..... 13% support for cutting research funding to universities. 24% among Republicans. Polling on this continues to be catastrophic for the Rs, suggests Dems should be learning far harder into standing up for science and our universities. 1/

We’re drafting the bracket next week, so get those nominations in! Voting starts September 1st

Join us on August 18 for the next webinar. www.nsf.gov/events/nsf-d...

Trump's new executive order "looks like an explicit attempt to destroy peer review for federal science grants,” a physicist in Texas tells @dangaristo.bsky.social. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I realize broad science-literacy problems cannot generally be solved just by shoving more facts at people but I really wish more people understood that the entire purpose and mechanism of a vaccine is to educate your OWN immune system, making it about the most "natural" medical intervention possible

"In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change." arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Please stop calling us “mainstream” scientists, we’re not boring we’re just right

9. I simply cannot ethically hire anyone on federal funds under these new conditions, and I will not do so going forward. That hamstrings my research, but worse it prevents the development of brilliant, talented researchers like my former students who are professors, startup founders, and more.

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years. Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.