Forget Chatbots. You Need a Notebook. - Cal Newport

The inner workings of a paper mill:

Amy Angert and I are recruiting a #postdoc to participate in a collaborative NSF-funded study of demographic responses to climate across the geographic range of the scarlet monkeyflower. Please repost! jobs.ncsu.edu/postings/224...

Faculty got a standard of living increase from the University of California this month. I used mine to donate to the Sacramento Food Bank, because the majority of politicians in the US do not want to feed those in need. www.sacramentofoodbank.org

A man collapsed in the Oval Office. The internet got the story wrong.

The National Association of the Deaf is celebrating a legal victory against the White House. A judge ordered ASL for briefings conducted by the press secretary or President Trump.

"[LLMs] learn to bluff because their performance is ranked using standardized benchmarks that reward confident guesses and penalize honest uncertainty." www.science.org/content/arti...

Bring back LUCA you cowards

📢 Ento job klaxon! Texas A&M University are advertising not one but TWO faculty positions in #Arthropod #Systematics and #Biodiversity 🪲 Full details and to apply: ➡️ apply.interfolio.com/175600

The newest from Hadley Wickham “genzplyr is an alternative syntax for dplyr that replaces boring old function names with GenZ slang. Your data wrangling is about to hit different.” - hadley/genzplyr: dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap

If you know an undergrad that would like to spend the summer doing research in my philosophy of biology lab, encourage them to apply to the U’s SPUR program. Includes a $5,000 stipend and subsidized housing to work in my lab. Details and how to apply here: tinyurl.com/SPUR-PhilBio...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a titan of this institution. This country is stronger because of her patriotism, her example, and her unwavering belief in America’s promise. I wish my dear friend, Speaker Pelosi, and her beloved family every happiness in this well-deserved next chapter.

How Men and Women Spend Their Days – Not surprisingly women spend a lot more time on household activities. Men spend more time on work and sports.

Prepping some material for a transposon lecture, I ran across this quote from McClintock in 1971. She was ahead of her time in many ways! (From Nina Fedoroff, doi.org/10.1002/9781...)

Records of great spotted woodpecker, extinct in Ireland for centuries, but which reintroduced itself naturally to the east coast and has been moving west ever since. Still waiting for them to make it down to my place in Beara, but looks like it's only a matter of time! Nature CAN come back!!

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

And we have another open position, this time with a focus on Genome Biology! Join a great community in Vienna to bring your research to the next level!

The old men admiring themselves in the water, by William Butler Yeats I sometimes fear that I am becoming an old man.

Every single woman you know has had this happen to her. Even the goddamn president of Mexico.

Funds available for grads and postdocs to visit @burkemuseum.bsky.social collections! Applications due Dec. 15th. Please share!

When I joined the UW Biology department in 2001, everyone else had a nice nameplate on their office door — but I got a piece of paper with my name on it taped to the wall. It was a newly implemented cost-saving measure, I was told. You cheap-ass bastards, I thought. Anyway, now I feel better.

On the cover of our #LatestIssue: Photo of a Joshua #tree (Yucca jaegeriana) at dawn in the Mojave #Desert. Image courtesy of Karolina Heyduk. 📖 See Heyduk et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The 5th of 6 faculty positions in UNC Biology is posted. We're working with the @ncbg.bsky.social to fill a joint position as Director of the UNC Herbarium at @ncbg.bsky.social and as Associate Professor within the Department of Biology (BIOL). Please share 1/n unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/308...

Grateful to spend two days on the Klamath watching chinook, liberated by dam removal, return to streams from which they’d been precluded since the Titanic sank. Fish are everywhere, in numbers that stagger the mind & locations that biologists figured would take years to repopulate. Too beautiful.

If you’re interested in statistics and football (soccer to those of us in the US), here’s a book you might find interesting. - Predictive Modelling for Football Analytics is available!

David Weakliem - “By the late 1970s, there was a feeling that maybe our problems were too big for anyone to solve. Now there's a feeling that the leaders aren't even trying to solve problems, but are causing them.”

BREAKING: Colorado voters approved a ballot measure that would raise state income taxes on higher-earning households to fund free meals for all public school students. Follow AP for live updates.

What does it say about the world that these two papers appeared in the same issue of Science? www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/content/arti...

It’s Tuesday folks, and you know what that means:

It's surprising that this is even a question, but was anyone asked about "de-extincting" the dire wolf? - Should scientists be allowed to bring distant human ancestors back to life? journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Join us on Nov 18 at 2:30 PM MST to learn about CAMBIUM grad fellowships in biodiversity informatics & climate change @uarizona.bsky.social. For incoming Fall 2026 students interested in big data, ecology, evolution, climate adaptation & more. Register: events.trellis.arizona.edu/en/f44lNu67/... 🌵🧬🌐

The Department of Biology at @eastcarolinauniv.bsky.social seeks to fill a tenure-track faculty at the Assistant Professor level with expertise in evolutionary Biology! Come join us! ecu.peopleadmin.com/postings/89839

Sympathy, by Paul Laurence Dunbar

The end of an era: the Tree of Life Web Project is going dark after 3 decades. Anyone interested in communicating phylogeny online should read David's account of goals, history, and future. @bembidion.bsky.social subulatepalpomere.com/2025/11/02/t...

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

My university sent out an email at 8 AM this morning asking that we pause all spending of federal grant funds except for payroll due to the government shutdown (with some exceptions). Is this happening elsewhere?

Trump Funding Plans Could Harm Top Research Universities

Tales From the Collections - Featuring the biodiversity collections, the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History, and the botanical conservatory at UConn

BioOne and Max Planck Society Sign 3-Year Agreement to Include Subscribe to Open Pilot - BioOne Publishing bioonepublishing.org/press-releas...

Florida’s Public Universities Should No Longer Hire Foreign Employees, DeSantis Says

I have a number of colleagues who think that LLMs will be very useful as individualized tutors. One of their arguments is that unlike previous generations of AI tutors, LLMs have the full context window of the conversation and that’s better understand what a student knows and doesn’t know.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

Writing Classes Are About Writing, Not AI-Aided Production. - And not just writing classes. Students need to engage with the process of thinking. Instruction should focus at least as much on how we know as on what we know.

I know other media outlets around the country are running with "diseased monkeys with COVID, herpes and hepatitis are loose in Mississippi!" And yes, it makes great clickbait. Those posts have thousands of RTs. But it's just not accurate. Our factual report by @nickjudin.bsky.social:

Not great, but, alas, his seems so appropriate for 2025.

Aurora, by Katrina Porteous

Great visit to Colby College, hosted by @kristennolting.bsky.social. Good hang with the gang of UConn EEB alums on their Bio faculty - incl @suegenenoh.bsky.social + Dave Angelini. #iamabotanist #plantpeopleFTW