Happy pride 🦇🦠🦟🏳️‍🌈

Important update: This morning NSF removed its internal flags on 3 of the 4 universities (Princeton's remains). We've updated our story to reflect this and the release of the new awards to Harvard and Duke.

Small update: Since yesterday afternoon, when our article was published, 4 new awards have gone out to Harvard PIs—the first since December.

Excited to share two new PNAS papers on Botrytis cinerea—the fungus that spoils nearly everything. Together, these studies explore how the pathogen infects diverse hosts and how plants respond across evolutionary diversity.

This is an incredibly good statement from the University of Ghent philosophy and moral science department on the hiring of Nathan Cofnas. So good I'd shrivel up and die if my home department wrote something like this about me

Wemby innocent!

I’m a dark money/disinformation reporter. I can indeed confirm this is better framing.

Could just one journalist try to not be a credulous rube with these obvious con-artists?

The Gad, the Saad, and the Ugly

FIRE is a right-wing dark money outfit. Let’s be absolutely clear about this. It presents as libertarian, but its real agenda is imposing right-wing ideology on schools.

This is the destruction of federal funding for scientific research & universities as we know it. A total, comprehensive politicization of the process & an end run around Congress.

BREAKING: New proposed OMB regulation, applying to all federal grants, requiring grant reviews by senior political appointees and re-emphasizes that "peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion". #standupforscience public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-10817.pdf

NEW PREPRINT: You may recall Joshua trees started flowering fully four months early this year. Was that due to climate change? Well, @colincarlson.bsky.social and I called in Chris Callahan to formally test that hypothesis, and the answer is... it probably wasn't! doi.org/10.64898/202...

Scoop: NSF has been quietly blocking new funds and grants to four top universities: Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Dozens of proposals from PIs at these universities—and their collaborators—have been stuck at the Office of Award Management awaiting finalization for months.

Wondering how many words I could wring out of comparing James Harden to Bari Weiss

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

Wemby’s Shaolin training is kicking in

The far right is being racist. Here's why it's the left's fault. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK

lmao, imagine quitting your job as an environmental humanities professor at a fancy liberal arts college to write faux contrarian takes about Miller Lite

Two Book Reviews this issue: "The long and difficult history of the path between Darwinism and Lamarckism" by Günter P Wagner academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... "Evolution of adaptation’s evil Doppelgänger" by Erik I Svensson academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

Be sure to read the Invited Commentary by Brian Charlesworth, "How is variation in fitness maintained?" academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

This month's Editor's Choice article: "Additive genetic variance for fitness maintained by balancing selection" by Tim Connallon and Peter Czuppon: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?

Head's up SSE members: Virtual Evolution is next week! Join us for the SSE Presidential Symposium on May 21 for talks from SSE leaders and past presidents on sustaining research, supporting trainees, navigating funding uncertainty, and strengthening evolutionary biology. Pls RT!

First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?

With @remyfurrer.bsky.social, a new piece in Nature Human Behavior. The standard description of a polygenic score as a "genetic predisposition" essentializes a statistical construct. It's not language policing: PGS are a new kind of entity; now is the time to think carefully about what they are.

critically this was the case in 1870 when the 15th amendment was ratified! there is literally no such thing as partisan gerrymandering and manipulation of voting rules in the south outside of the context of “white reactionaries want to neuter black political power”

What is happening here as well, is that many career scientists at e.g., NIAID are transitioned to Schedule P/C, meaning that they can be terminated at will. The purge across our scientific and public health institutions continues, as congress is completely asleep at the steering wheel.

Super cool work @epigenci.bsky.social ! academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

Man you really can’t say anything even slightly negative about the open science guys

Great new work by @evangiangrande.bsky.social tracking how race scientists exploit preprint servers to legitimize and spread their work

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

UNION COUNTERDEMO TRAFALGAR SQUARE 16 MAY, 10:30 MOBILISE NOW website: tuff.network whatsapp channel: whatsapp.com/channel/0029... instagram: www.instagram.com/tuff.network/

Love this quote: "We used to make fun of Edgar Anderson by saying that he was finding hybrids under every bush. Then we realized that even the bushes were hybrids." academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

Unfortunately, a lot of race and IQ stuff

#Tansleyinsight: Somatic genome-doubling is the most parsimonious route to allopolyploidy @robinburns.bsky.social, @alisondawnscott.bsky.social & @pnovik.bsky.social 👇 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #LatestIssue #PlantScience

I have spent some time considering it in depth and I think I have figured out the reason why the Lakers are losing to the Thunder: the Thunder are a much better basketball team check back in soon for more basketball insights

People have got to wake up to how bad the situation in US science is right now

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

I'll just note that critical race theory predicts quite a lot about the current racial retrenchment and for being *correct* it was pilloried in the press and by some academics.

How did the US become a land of opportunity? The country's pioneering role in mass education was key to its rise in intergenerational mobility, from Lukas Althoff, Harriet M. Brookes Gray, and Hugo Reichardt www.nber.org/papers/w35152

It’s telling that Alabama took 14 years to implement Brown (you MUST desegregate) and < 14 days to implement Callais (you CAN eliminate Black districts if you call them Democratic, but you don’t HAVE to).

BBC Projected National Share of the vote for the local elections with the change from last year. Despite the fanfare in the media for Reform this echoes their steady decline in the polls. Reform 26% -4 Green 18% +7 Labour 17% -3 Conservative 17% +2 Lib Dems 16% -1

The rise of polyploids during environmental upheaval: Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

A short piece about what "the pangenome" is and is not. open.substack.com/pub/profmcin...

Pander to Reform, lose voters to the Greens, hand the seat to Reform. Strategic genius at work.

Damn, labour’s gonna have to find some more minority groups to betray, and quickly.

as per melissa's thread, it is really important to understand that a major goal of this administration is the resegregation of key institutions of american society