New opportunity for PhD fellowships at interface of ecology & evolution from the Simons Foundation. Application deadline June 30, 2026. My interpretation is that this applies to prospective PhD students & those accepted/not yet matriculated. Full details: www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

What is the mutation rate in natural vs laboratory populations? What are the typical divergence times among and within species? In #GENETICS, Wei et al. analyzed the evolution of clonal #Celegans genotypes collected and sequenced in Santeuil wood, France.🪱 🔗 buff.ly/1rINY0W

Wow shocker, the eugenics company doesn't care much about actually seeing if their snakeoil worked

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.

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Spending on new medical research by the National Institutes of Health has fallen roughly $1 billion behind the pace of years past, delaying thousands of scientific projects. Story by Ben Mueller & @irenatfh.bsky.social Gift link: nyti.ms/4ctOSqM

In practice, aligning NSF with administration priorities means 1. Downshifting everything (i.e. slowdowns) 2. Moving money out of directorates (i.e., funding shifts) Both will slow the progress of science, undermine our diverse research portfolio, and undo American leadership.

NEW: NSF has been funding research at a fraction of its historic rate. Last week, the agency finally began distributing money to its directorates and is now likely to pick up the grantmaking pace. But these allocations also amount to substantial cuts across the sciences. My reporting:

Always good to have more data on gender, childcare, and parenthood gaps. Still, Ugh! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I wrote about why every lab should have AI use guidelines, and how to do it. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

@averydb.bsky.social @annalisepaaby.bsky.social et al. show that cytosolic transfer RNAs genes in three Caenorhabditis nematodes carry signatures of high rates of historical transcription-associated mutagenesis and of purifying selection. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag053 #genome #evolution

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉 An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊 Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #DataViz

Now published @genomebiolevol.bsky.social: our paper showing that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences! academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

This is devastating

if you want to know the history of this kind of policy, I made a podcast two years ago that explained why these tests make no sense, how they were already used and eventually abandoned by the IOC in the 80's and 90's, and the devastating impacts they have on real athletes: www.tested-podcast.com

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

How long until this reduces the prep time we're allotted for each class? How long until it's used as a reason to increase class sizes because we are no longer grading? I worry that admin will use this to overload faculty with classes whether we use it or not.

Integrated small and long RNA sequencing reveals piRNA mediated transposon repression during human oogenesis www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting announcement! My new department is launching a postdoc fellowship in quantitative biology. Fellows will be co-advised by two Bio faculty, one that is quant focused (not me) and one that is not (me???). I would love to co-sponsor a postdoc and build a collaboration so please reach out!

2/10

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

If measles vaccination rates continue to drop just 1% annually for the next five years, the cost to the U.S. could reach $1.5 billion a year, according to a new report from the Yale School of Public Health.

Sobering, important new study about how GA's abortion law's 'exceptions' fail to ensure critical care. I was interviewed for this study and shared the hoops my doctors and I had to jump through when I was hemorrhaging and my water had broken much too early at 18 weeks. amplify-ga.org/denialofcare

Quite rare to see a chart that says quite so overtly that no one involved has the slightest clue what’s happening here

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right. Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement. This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

BREAKING: Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming after the state Supreme Court struck down laws, including the first U.S. ban on pill abortions.

As far as I can tell, RFK Jr.'s latest antivax stunt runs counter to the WMA Declaration of Helsinki. Withholding HepB vaccination clearly does not meet any definition of clinical equipoise. Doing it anyway, overseas, is straight up colonialist medicine. Details in Dr. Jacobs's thread below.

“The changes permit as few as one outside review rather than the current minimum of three, end the routine use of expert panels to discuss those individual reviews, and give program managers greater authority to recommend which proposals should or should not be funded.”

Cruel, unpopular, health and life endangering (as in *checks notes* my own life)

(Also, I'm generally curmudgeonly about the push for academics to be All The Things (entrepreneurs, scicomm experts, journalists, Thought Leaders, etc) without institutional support or protection. E.g., "scicomm" is a specialty in itself, not something just any researcher can do)

Getting a COVID Vaccine while Pregnant Slashes Risk of Premature Birth, Major New Study Finds www.scientificamerican.com/article/gett...

Truly, hormonal depression and anxiety are prevalent and devastating. I speak from experience. Taking away tools to manage them at critical vulnerable periods - without evidence - is shortsighted and cruel. ('shortsighted and cruel' could be a tagline for RFK's policy proposals writ large.)

the proximate reason i post here — beyond the fact that i like a lot of you and enjoy reading your thoughts and jokes and observations — is that this is a non-algorithmic platform where people share lots of stuff and people read what is shared. that's still valuable even if it doesn't "influence!"

Intersection of the month: I'm a huge @askamanager.org fan and our dept is currently working to hire a new Chair (and I have a small child). So, naturally, I'm re-reading and re-cracking up about story 10 The Dean: www.askamanager.org/2024/08/the-... Do yourself a favor and read it. Delightful.

I had some serious issues with decisions made while Claudine Gay was president, but I appreciate the very clear example of the normalization of pushing Black women out of their jobs and moving right along

Public education was never meant to be the sole source of education for our children. This is why there's a long history of supplementing public education with cultural programming to pass down languages, histories and political education (think: freedom schools).

We pay taxes and public education is a collective good. May as well benefit AND be part of making it better (e.g., fighting for better work conditions and pay for public teachers, because their work conditions are our children's learning conditions)

As a (to me very enjoyable) part of this paper, we worked out what mutation-selection balance looks like in finite populations with varying degrees of inbreeding.

Also folks arguing that they don’t need Gen Ed/any Ed outside of topics directly related to a chosen career are doing the work of fascists for them. There’s a reason they don’t want us educated and only want “skilled workers”

Cool, so where's the maternity leave? Where's support for working mothers? What about one's who can't nurse for whatever reason? Or is the goal just to keep us at home and out of sight?

Many of us need to keep writing federal grants (both for political reasons and as a Hail Mary to keep people employed) despite the feeling it's a waste of time, so... if you got an NSF or NIH grant funded this year, would you mind bragging about it in the replies, so it feels like the odds are >0%?

In which Julian tries to separate out the “bad” kinds of eugenics so we can keep the good stuff. This will work for a while if you are determined not to think it all the way through

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Remember when they fired the president of Harvard for… two inadequate citations in her 30yo dissertation?

"We’re pleased to introduce some cutting-edge yet profoundly user-unfriendly technology."

Anyway, if you want to follow people like me who are actively confronting racist pseudoscience and want to hound them into starting a nonprofit that can structure and support this vital work, check out this starter pack from my friend @jowiph.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/jowi...

bro are you fucking kidding me

The world

Men