Mitch Hedberg: "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an 'Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order' sign, just 'Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.'" RIP

This thread says scientists on blue sky stoke political flames, rather than build science communities, as evidenced by viral posts being political. The problem w/social media is the optimization target--but we evaluate the success of domain-specific science discourse by virality metrics? Huh?!?

The rampant violations of academic freedom and intrusions on extramural speech are escalating rapidly. Faculty members have the right to speak or write as citizens, free from institutional censorship or discipline. Expression of opinion as a citizen does not constitute grounds for dismissal.

We write to remind leaders of colleges & universities of their fundamental duty to protect academic freedom & the absolute necessity to ensure that the freedom to discuss topics of public import without constraint is not curtailed under political pressure. 2/4

I am recruiting a PhD student this application cycle to explore questions on the evolution of morphological variation and phylogenetics. I'm especially seeking folks interested in fossil marine inverts. Please reach out to me if interested! Portal opens Nov. 1 eeb.utoronto.ca/education/gr...

“There’s a hyperparasitoid (Hypopteromalus tabacum) on a parasitoid (Cotesia congregata) on a Sphinx (Ceratomi catalpae) on a tree (Catalpa sp.) by the pond in the middle of VT.” Fun find this week. My mind is all children’s songs these days but the lyrics might need some work….

I'm hoping to take 1 MSc & 1 PhD student next year in the areas of Phylogenetic, Computational, and/or Evolutionary Paleobiology. Please reach out if you are interested in joining the @oupaleobiology.bsky.social, especially if interested in working on fossil echinoderms. Link for more info below. 🧪

🚨 🐜 is there a Bluesky starter pack for researchers who don’t study ants but who get lightheaded every time there’s an awesome ant paper? CC @mariusw.bsky.social @jrichardalbert.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Registration is now open for #SSB2026! I'm so excited to see many of you here in Baton Rouge in January! We're going to hear great talks, discuss the immeasurable value of natural history collections, and continue to strengthen our scientific community. ssb2026.github.io @systbiol.bsky.social

Another exciting #SSB2026 workshop to highlight: A Primer for Phylogenetic Causal Inference with @oschwery.bsky.social & @pseudacris.bsky.social Also, lots of new info on the website and more soon: ssb2026.github.io Follow for the latest updates! @jembrown.bsky.social @systbiol.bsky.social

🚨Woo our new paper now out in accepted form in @systbiol.bsky.social - We use phylogenetic analyses to argue that the evolution of diverse social contexts has reshaped avian life histories. academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

📢 deeptime: an R package that facilitates highly customizable and reproducible visualizations of data over geological time intervals 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/2096... Fully #openaccess in @bigearthdata1.bsky.social with insight about deeptime📦 development and code examples! #rstats #geology #paleontology

“When you peel back all the connections, it’s hard to imagine this is not orchestrated. How can faculty feel safe, not just to exercise their academic freedom, but safe in their personhood, when you have extremist board members siccing their orgs on us.” — Bethany Letiecq, @aaupmason.bsky.social

A little belated but I've started a faculty position at Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology department at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social. I'm absolutely stoked! I'll be recruiting at all levels and will be at #Botany2025 Reach out! www.martinezgomezlab.com

These are some of the most odious people alive.

Relying on the viewer to immediately identify from the data 1) the two causal processes that can plausibly produce these data and 2) immediately rejecting one of them given assumptions & knowledge of the system. Weird how the joke relies on causal inference to dunk on causal inference?

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.

Did you attend #evol2025 in Athens? Fill out the survey! Were you unable to come? Fill it out anyway! The organizers of @evolmtg.bsky.social are soliciting feedback on challenges to attendance to inform decisions in future years.

Come join us in Corvallis! Great colleagues, a wonderful location for plant science of all types, with the added benefit of the beautiful surroundings of Oregon!

Vegetation might not be able to keep up with current rates of environmental change, given data from the pollen fossil record. Fun doing this work with David Fastovich in the lead, but sobering www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The DNC and leadership is not a serious organization and being ineffectual is their brand.

With this budget, ICE would have as much money to build concentration camps as all NIH biomedical research in this country 😳

Update: Latest estimate confirms between Medicaid cuts and ACA rollback, total health care cuts in the Republican budget bill are now OVER $1 trillion.

We are dismantling American higher education & scientific research & health care & all the other things to fund concentration camps

My favorite so far is Dr. Joseph Yoda @pseudacris.bsky.social #evol2025

Had such an amazing time at the 2025 Evolutionary and Quantitative Genetics Workshop! Thanks so much to the amazing organizers and participants @pseudacris.bsky.social @lauraalencar.bsky.social @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social Patrick Carter, Jacqueline Sztepanacz, & Joe Felsendtein

This. Never blame the powerful people doing the pickle-braining for their own gain. Applies to academia too where we're supposed to "regain the public's trust in higher education and science" because we failed to prevent brain-pickling, when we all know who is making the brine.

One important difference being that the Republicans know how to harness the energy of their ultra-ideological flank, while the Democrats spend incredible amounts of energy and money trying to neutralize theirs.

Had a wonderful group for our 2025 EQG workshop at Mountain Lake Biological Station! Huge thanks to the instructors, participants, and station staff for helping us pull this off! If you're interested in what we talked about, materials available here: eqgw.github.io/2025/schedul...

Send any questions you may have for the reddit AMA I'll be participating in this afternoon! Thanks @umdscience.bsky.social for the invite! Should be fun! 🐝🪰🧬🌸

What a great week at the 2025 Evolutionary and Quantitative Genetics Workshop! This was a fanstastic opportunity to practice scaling from micro- to macroevolution from some of the leading researchers in the field (in-between herping excursions, of course). Looking forward to reuniting at #evol2025!

We hope you had a great time learning about some our early career members. We’ve collated all the society-sponsored events in one handy cheat sheet on the website: www.systbio.org/evol2025-che... Consider it your one-stop shop for the big events, as well as links to archived virtual #evol2025 ones

I finally got a chance to listen to the whole episode and it is truly excellent and well worth a listen! Goes through many things often not covered, including multiple journalist failures that you should know about. Top notch ⭐, @michaelhobbes.bsky.social! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...

If you're gonna do it, at least register the surveilled students for an experiential course or something and use this money to pay some GTAs to do the following. That's like 16 GTA lines or something!!! Has to be cheaper than these private contractors.

This story of the University of Michigan spending $800K to hire private investigators to trail and harass their own students is pure insanity. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

This framing continues to bug me. Aside from the unexamined nationalism, global R&D capacity is being *lost* not just moved somewhere else. Honestly, other countries carrying research (and research careers, via a brain drain) forward apace is a *best* case scenario at this point.

It took just 15 years to get from Citizens United to this

In full sincerity, now is the moment to emphasize that undoing the changes implemented by DOGE is good for America, and increasing investment into NASA, NSF, NIH and other agencies will keep Elon from profiting off taxpayers.

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

The cowardice of our scientific institutions and our apparent inability to exert any influence over them does indeed forebode doom.

It's back! The Society of Systematic Biologists is running Year 3 of the Mentorship Program! Find community, support your colleagues, and talk trees. Apply by June 10th, 2025. Program info: www.systbio.org/mentorship-p... Application form: forms.gle/QtD22C9dtfRF... @systbiol.bsky.social

More details coming soon, but mark your calendars ... Breakout meeting for @systbiol.bsky.social‬ The Society of Systematic Biologists - will be Jan 9-11 in Baton Rouge! Topic is 'The Importance of Natural History Collections' @jembrown.bsky.social is primary host/organizer ssb2026.github.io

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

"Kagan justifiably mocks the 'bespoke Federal Reserve exception' saying that a simpler way not to spook the markets would just be to not give Trump new powers by overturning precedent." Why the Supreme Court decision on firing independent agency heads is a big deal open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

All NSF GRFPs to students choosing to attend Harvard in the Fall were just terminated

Great place to do a postdoc