Submitted a grant recently to IOS in the NSF and got this recent email. I’ve tried to stay up to date on the how the NSF has had to “restructure” after draconian budget cuts, but has anyone heard if IOS has been closed? The IOS solicitation/webpage is still nominally open.

Sotomayor’s dissent is an obituary for science, NIH, and NSF. “Seldom, if ever, has this Court worked such a profound bait and switch on a coequal branch: For more than 90 years, Congress believed, with this Court’s express approval, that it was allowed to create a workable Govern- ment…”

Has anyone at Colossal provided even a remotely plausible about how de-extinction is supposed to work without habitat protection or restoration? If they don't have some robust plan then you can probably bet on this company going under at some point and all these samples being lost.

Exclusive: The National Science Foundation is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by roughly 20% to 30%, even though its overall budget is down just 3%. https://scim.ag/4xY2KCm

NSF uses staffing cuts to strip Inspector General's office of its ability to investigate research misconduct www.science.org/content/arti...

Truly the death of science as we know it, as well as any societies and journals dependent on funding from U.S. scientists. **Public comments accepted through July 13.** 🧪 🌍 Email and call your representative every day, on top of leaving public comments here: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

Worked at JPL while studying at Caltech back in the early 1990s. This is a nightmare-level theft of a planetary science & exploration powerhouse. It makes no sense whatsoever. Republicans' continued vandalism of NASA's science centers is intolerable.

Happy to see my PhD work on birdsong complexity published today! doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 🐦‍⬛ 🎶 ⬇️ Why are some birdsongs simple and some extremely complex? The answer is long thought to be ‘sexual selection favouring complex signals’. But - really?

How do courtship dances evolve? Paper out now in Behavioral Ecology 🪰 "Courtship choreography is stabilized among genetically isolated populations" doi.org/10.1093/behe... Video of our study species the dancing dune fly (Apotropina ornatipennis) below.

If you click through to the 'contact' info for this program you'll see the contact email is "[email protected]" and the contact phone number is "(blank)". The actual text of this solicitation is barely coherent. 100% a scheme to funnel critical NSF money to private companies with no oversight.

This is basically harassment of scholars willing to question the Trump administration’s targeting of Chinese colleagues. Innes already had the FBI investigate his lab and was given the all clear. Now USDA is shutting down the Lab, which focuses on making fungus-resistant plants.

Research from the lab on the evolution of size and plumage dimorphism in birds! Grad student Catherine Alverson examined how species move between size and plumage dimorphism categories. While those results largely recapitulated previous work, there was an intriguing new finding [1/3]

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

NSF LTER program “archived”. LTER=“Long Term Ecological Research”. This program has been incredibly successful, incredibly frugal for what they accomplish, and…of course…targeted by evil know-nothings. My heart is breaking.

It was.

Are you (or something you know) looking for a PhD? Like trait macroevolution but also yearn for an applied topic? Think plants are neat? Want to live in beautiful northeast Scotland?! 🌊🐬⛰️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 I'm advertising a PhD in my lab! Deadline April 22, email me any questions. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

🚨 Hiring a postdoc (2 years)! We’re looking for someone with skills in data science, remote sensing, or computer science: 🛰️ Build next-gen nighttime light products 🦅 Link light spectra to migration & collision risk Apply or reach out! aeroecolab.com/opportunities

In the last two weeks, 1% of new NSF awards were in biology. Just one grant of 97. One. Biology in the US is on hold until there’s a regime change.

Well damn, this is cool. Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea | Chia et al., 2026 | Ecology Letters onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Russ Vought hates American innovation and scientific leadership and is committed to destroying it

Hey Buffalo!! Despite the fact that we have been relegated to the “& MORE” category while Madison gets two mentions, we are going to be LOUD as hell!! Join us March 7th, 1PM, Niagara Square! 😂😂

This is why Democrats rightly didn't stand in response to Stephen Miller's gross pledge of mindless nationalism at the State of the Union last night. When these crimes are being perpetrated by the state, the citizenship status of the victims is irrelevant. www.investigativepost.org/2026/02/25/b...

But, as they say, there is no time like the present [OK, maybe the 1930s if you want to nitpick] But, with some data wrangling, my first NSF Funding Curves! 2/3

If you thought regular bird listing was for nerds, wait til you get a load of phylolisting. @snacktavish.bsky.social

executions in the street.

"Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” her mother said. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.” www.startribune.com/she-was-an-a...

Y'all, I just got out of the NSF-BIO webinar where they explained changes to peer review. It's not good. 🧪 scienceforeveryone.science/changes-to-n...

A good time for a reminder that the BIO Directorate will hold a Virtual Office Hour on Thursday www.nsf.gov/events/nsf-b...

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” 🙃

New paper out now in @jexpbiol.bsky.social! Led by star PhD student @miaryras.bsky.social, we tested the effects of winter warming (a constant increase as well as fluctuating temps - see pic) on common wall lizard behaviour and physiology. journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

I’ve released a tool to sketch and edit phylogenetic trees! yawak.jp/PhyloWeaver/ Load a Newick file and intuitively add/remove/resize branches. Useful for quick conceptual trees, extracting subtrees, or turning ideas into Newick.

Looking for a PhD opportunity? I'm hoping to recruit someone to my group at Durham University to work on a project combining fieldwork and labwork to study speciation in rubyspot damselflies: iapetus.ac.uk/studentships... Get in touch if you want to chat!

New paper on deep-sea fish diversity out now in @sse-evolution.bsky.social, with @cmartinez.bsky.social and @sarahtfried.bsky.social academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Ornithology is all about the process. #GoBills | #BillsMafia

What do you get when you cross a blue jay with a green jay? That’s not the start of a joke, but the subject of a new study that aims to describe a hybrid bird never encountered before in the wild. https://cnn.it/3WcFnDd

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...

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

our paper on how light pollution affects bird vocal behavior is out today in Science!! w/ @brentpease.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🥳 New paper out in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society! Manakin’s moving melody: the interplay between courtship dance display and vocalization as a predictor of hybridization in manakins (Aves: Pipridae) academic.oup.com/biolinnean/a... #ornithology

Further consolidating control over federal research funding under Russell Vought and a cadre of apparatchiks. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

New bird tree who dis. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Devastated to see the NSF postdoctoral research fellowship in biology archives. This is a transformative creative opportunity and a path to the professorship for many (including myself). Postdocs are highly trained and often in the newest techniques which spur innovation. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

“With these considerations, we expect to fund through the 4th percentile.” There it is, in black and white, the destruction of cancer research in the US.

NEW: In an unprecedented move, the NIH will soon disinvite dozens of scientists about to take positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant funding. NIH staff were told to select others aligned with the Trump administration and told to expect placements by political appointees.

String manipulation is a critical daily task for bioinformaticians. Here is a cheatsheet using stringr: rstudio.github.io/cheatsheets... I probably use stringr::str_replace() once every other day... to clean up metadata (of course!) #rstats

A couple presentations from the lab at #ABS2025! The first is a poster by Catherine Alverson during the first poster session, tonight (07/09). Catherine will be discussing her research on the evolution of dimorphism across thousands of bird species.

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years. NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."