Jane Goodall challenged what it meant to be a scientist. In this news story we look at three ways she changed science. A loss for science, a loss for the community, a loss for everyone 🧪 #academicSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Staff members at the NIH seem to have done the impossible: spend the agency's $48 billion budget. “Everyone has been rallying together to clean up the mess, but it’s a mess that did not need to be made,” an NIH program officer told me. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I was collecting #quail #embryos this morning and found an individual with albinism! Look at the lack of pigment in the retinal epithelium! Reminds me of finding a leopard #gecko embryo with the same condition during my PhD.

Went to a little workshop on universal design yesterday, and someone shared this document that has been super helpful to A) get new ideas and B) map things I already do universal design intentions. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Happy to share that our paper on the #evolution and #genomics of the most common #color polymorphism in #frogs is now out in @pnas.org! My favorite frogs even made the cover of this week’s issue! 🎉🐸🎉 Read the paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I've been a biology student/professional for like 20 years. I still regularly see things like this that blow me away. What a life.

SquidSim is the coolest package - it let's you build complex hierarchical data structures and then simulate data from the world you create. The best tool for doing proper power analyses and testing how well your models can uncover the 'truth'. I've been recommending it to everyone!

Our paper (with @sreinales.bsky.social) finally out today in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society. It feels like a birthday present 🤪 academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

Hybridization and introgression are major evolutionary processes. Since the 1940s, the prevailing view has been that they shape plants far more than animals. In our new study (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... ), we find the opposite: animals exchange genes more, and for longer, than plants

Really excited to share our latest paper led by @simonaube.bsky.social. Fascinating results examining whether regulatory mutations can lead to adaptation as fast as coding mutations do. #mevosky #evobio #evoSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I have a new office and am delighted to have worked my way up to "has windows" status.

Why do speciation rates vary across the tree of life? Some of the best yet most underappreciated places for this investigation are natural hybrid zones. This preprint takes you to the hybrid zones in the origin of species to find a clue. 👉 shorturl.at/N7FXE #Speciation #Evolution #hybridization

Great story about the Atlantic Coast leopard frog, which I helped identify, name, and describe (I'm used to my work being erased from these stories, it's ok 🥲) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/n...

In the earliest stages of adaptive introgression, beneficial immigration can drive genome-wide changes. In a new preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... colleagues & I document exceptionally rapid genomic introgression in a lake population of stickleback.

I'm a little bit late, but happy to see this new paper led by @imillercrews.bsky.social and anchored by @rosvall-lab.bsky.social now out on bioRxiv. We analyze comparative songbird RNA-seq data using new features in our software package, CAGEE. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣Online NOW! 📄Estimation of demography and mutation rates from one million haploid genomes 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @jgschraiber.bsky.social @jeffspence.github.io @docedge.bsky.social

Small-but-actually-large joys: receiving 1.1 Tb of long-read sequencing 🦎🧬

I've never been more upset at the general trajectory of technology that at this moment, when Outlook offered me suggestions for fixing the tone of my email message.

These kinds of things are still the best

Indiana let's go

NSF staff release their appeal—slightly different format than the declarations of dissent from EPA/NIH/NASA; a more formal petition to Congress to redress attacks on the agency and its employees. 149 signatories (48 named) democrats-science.house.gov/imo/media/do...

🧪 UPDATE: All 63 House appropriators will meet **this Thursday** about science funding levels. They'll deliberate on the proposed multi-billion dollar cut to NSF's budget ($9.0B --> $7.0B). If you think that's bad for our country, here's who to call: appropriations.house.gov/about/member...

"Save The NSF" - a little blogpost I wrote to amplify the #SaveTheNSF mission. The National Science Foundation is one of the world’s premier funders of basic science research; proposed federal cuts would derail how we do science in the U.S. aguidetoacademia.blogspot.com/2025/07/save...

🧪Have a terminated NSF grant? Or been impacted by such a termination? Call your Senators, esp if they're Repub!! An amendment to restore killed NSF grants will later be debated on the *full Senate* floor, after it narrowly failed in committee today. 🧵 Brief thread 1/4

Bill passes 19-10 and is off to the full Senate for consideration. The bill currently keeps NSF's budget flat at $9 billion.

🧪 CRITICAL UPDATE: The House draft version is now out. ✅ Like the Senate's version, there's no cut to NASA's budget. ❌ There's a 23% proposed cut to NSF's budget. 8-page summary: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su... Draft bill: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

🚨Preprint🚨 Sex chromosome identification & genome curation from a single individual with SCINKD www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Incredible work led by @drpintothe2nd.bsky.social in collaboration w/ @drsimonegable.bsky.social @stuartvnielsen.bsky.social @tonygamble.bsky.social SE Keating & CH Smith

The Meselson and Stahl experiment demonstrated in 1958 that DNA replicated semi-conservatively. Meaning, each of the two strands of DNA serves as a template for a new copy to made of the complementary strand. Foundational finding, elegant experimental design.

This rules www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

Asexual Amazon mollies differ morphologically from their sexual hosts, resembling P. mexicana when coexisting with P. latipinna hosts, and vice versa! royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

I miss Fridays

Computers used to scream every time they connected to the Internet. They knew. They tried to warn us. We did not listen.

Call your reps, get in your community, talk about American science.

Standing at my office whiteboard in a My Neighbor Totoro t-shirt when the Chief Academic Officer stops by unannounced to ask why I'm leaving the university. A totally professional and normal conversation.

this is so useful: rpubs.com/dortizbarrie...

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

God, I love this visual abstract for a paper on leafcutter ants www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Today, NSF added another 500 GRFP awardees, bringing this year’s total to 1500 www.research.gov/grfp/Awardee...

Huge news, and a confirmation of what NSF staff have suspected/feared for a while.

Excited to announce our first interactive article on sandbox.bio, about genomic ranges: sandbox.bio/concepts/gen... Move & resize the ranges to see how that affects bedtools operations like merge and intersect in real time!

New STAT story about NIH rescinding the institution-wide anti-DEI term and condition that had been added to Notices of Award. www.statnews.com/2025/06/09/n... 1/n

Got a new op-ed in LNC/LancasterOnline this morning, on the importance of the curiosity-driven science the National Science Foundation is supposed to support lancasteronline.com/opinion/colu...

I'm beyond excited to announce that I will be joining the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor in January 2026! Belasen Lab @ou.edu coming soon 🐸 ❤️

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

Positivity: In our little PUI corner of science, summer is wonderful. Students are learning and becoming so capable. Postdocs are mentoring and being productive. I'm relegated to equal parts wetlab jockey, code troubleshooter, and email command. We all eat lunch together, it is so nice.

Now at @asn-amnat.bsky.social, "Genome composition predicts physiological responses to temperature in polyploid salamanders" A project that @ecophysiology.bsky.social and I talked about since we were both PhD students! Funded by #NSF www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1...

You have 2 days left to comment (by May 23 at 11:59 pm)! Go to the link if you don’t want your NSF or NIH program officers who took an oath to the constitution (not a political party) to instead be subject to the whims of a president and fired if they don’t “conform”.

A poem for my last day working at the writing center for the semester (by Joseph Fasano)

Last day, get in here