Anyone know anyone still looking for a PhD for this autumn? Vicky Sleight's lab* here at Aberdeen has a late-breaking vacancy to study mollusc morphogenesis. Deadline July 12, 'home' students only. *And team of co-supervisors, myself included 🤓🐚 sleightlab.com/phd-vacancy-2/

Applications are NOW OPEN for Smith Fellows conservation research Fellowships beginning in 2027! View the Proposal Guidelines and apply here: smithfellows.org/proposal-gui...

Excited to share that our paper on Horizontal Gene Transfer is now out in its final form in @gigascience.bsky.social! 🥳 By analysing 163 high-quality ant genomes, we show that HGT from bacteria is widespread across the ants and likely has adaptive functions! doi.org/10.1093/giga... 🐜📸: Alex Wild

Hey that's my preprint!!! This is the last 3.5 years of my life and research and I'm so excited for it to be out! Hopefully coming to a journal near you soon! 🧪

My friend's NSF CAREER received the highest possible score (Excellent, Excellent, Excellent: High Priority) and it was rejected today. This would have been my friend's first extramural award, 5 years after starting their lab, exactly when grant $ is make or break for an Assistant Professor's career.

😦

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

Does anyone have a citation/ref handy for typical discrepancies between Feulgen cytophotometry vs reassociation kinetics-based genome size estimates, ideally in insects/diptera? The paper I’m reading notes that there’s consistent discrepancy & then cites a 1980 book I don’t have access to. Thanks!

Made a site that takes objects from wikipedia and turns them into endless I Spy > neal.fun/wiki-spy/

Saturday, June 27, join NHM's Dr. Allison Shultz (Associate Curator, Ornithology) in conversation with Artist and Birder David Tomb at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in conjunction with the exhibition, “Summer 2026: Part 1”! go.nhm.org/shultz-0627 📷 David Tomb

This is from a really cool new paper in a fancy journal, but c‘mom folks- there is no such thing as being a “higher” or “lower” organism! (Read more: link.springer.com/article/10.1...)

Riding the high of an amazing week in the field with colleagues, hopping around via sailboat to collect ants, herps, and slugs on the north coast of Santa Cruz Island. 🐸🐜🦎🐌⛵️

Never has a single document more effectively demonstrated the speed of specimen movement in some unnamed insect collections

AVIAN PHYLOGENY researchers! A call for new data!

Huge Fish Curator gig is advertised! Assistant Curator of Fishes at the Florida Museum of Natural History (part of Uni of. Florida) explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/54...

Hey fun friends, does anyone recognize this as any kind of translatable shorthand?

Yeah no. I hate that.

Check out our research on diet composition in tree swallows, out now in Oecologia! We used DNA metabarcoding of over 400 fecal samples from adult and nestling birds to ID the arthropods they were eating. 💩 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

✅ Yes, more articles like this, PLEASE. Not (only) the specific take (which I like), but the honest attempt to clarify a disastrously dubious concept, using history, technical details, clear writing, rhetoric. 'Actually, what is a gain-of-function mutation?' academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

Western US folks y’all know you are gonna need these 🫶🏻

Call your reps -- blue, red, purple, it doesn't matter -- about the proposed OMB science funding rule. The house can stop this. Let them know it matters for your district.

Member action is needed. Please read the email, review the proposed SSE response, and consider signing on before the June 15 deadline. **Importantly, submit your individualized comment to OMB by July 13!** Screenshots of the full message below. ⬇️

🚨SSE members: check your inbox!🚨 SSE has sent an important email regarding the OMB's proposed overhaul of federal grant regulations--changes that could affect peer review, publishing, conferences, professional societies, international collaborations, and more. @sse-evolution.bsky.social

in los angeles county you can find your nearest dropbox here: locator.lavote.gov/locations/vb... elsewhere in california you can enter your address here or look for your county on the list for a link to your local page: www.sos.ca.gov/elections/po...

Fellow Californians! Don't forget tomorrow is voting day. Also, best to vote in person or drop your ballot into a ballot box or at a polling location.

Please take the time to review and sign this petition in support of the U.S. National Fungus Collections, which are being threatened in the face of the USDA reorganization efforts. c.org/KQWY7fNhGw 🍄

If you are going to comment on the proposed changes to how science is done in the US, please use this guide. The rules specify that you have to mention the number associated with the proposed changes, and this blog has those. Here is where to comment: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

amazing thread about our latest paper, out in Therya today!! really cool and unexpected find from my Channel Island mouse dissertation research. thanks @kaycebell.bsky.social for all your detective work in the collections!

If reading through the list gives you the reaction it gave me, pick the three things that scare you the most and specifically mention them in a call to your reps tomorrow

Ant Course is back! This year, in Mexico:

First Ma lab #GMI paper is now online! It‘s a mini-review on insect-induced plant #galls —their coolness and research potential! Plant galls induced by insects: Coordinated developmental reprogramming and defence manipulation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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...

I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.

Fun science remains fun.

remember when Google offered unlimited digital storage to colleges and universities and then when adoption reached the right levels rescinded that promise, capped everything, and started pricing those services without the subsidies? idk man just something I think about a lot

Happy World Bee Day from our collection!

#WorldBeeDay There are ~20,000 known species of bee; 85% are solitary bees like this one. Hardworking single moms with no hive or workers to help. Honey bees are an important domesticated species, but not representative of bee diversity

It’s World Bee 🐝 Day! A day to celebrate these amazing insects, and to reflect on how we can support wild populations of 🐝 🐝 for the future. Museum collections are key in showing where bees used to be, setting baselines to understand impacts of stressors and set restoration/conservation targets

🐟 Something seems fishy.... Dive deeper into our Ichthyology Collection with Assistant Curator Dr. Bill Ludt and learn how the collections can show change in species communities over time!

The best weekend of the year is here! If you’re in LA, come check out @nhm.org’s 40th annual Bug Fair. I’ll be there today sharing incredible specimens from our entomology collection and chatting about all things bug. nhm.org/bugfair

Help needed! Does anyone have experience extracting nuclei from flash frozen tissue? Especially helpful if it is fish skin or tail tissue! We are trying to get some precious melanoma samples processed for snRNAseq but are having issues with either nuclei number and/or quality

A fascinating and beautiful look into the world of @nhm.org‘s own Tim Bovard, the only full-time museum taxidermist in the US. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/s...

A fascinating and beautiful look into the world of @nhm.org‘s own Tim Bovard, the only full-time museum taxidermist in the US. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/s...

"The last full-time museum taxidermist in the US" - Can this really be true? Nice article, regardless! www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/s...

I'm hiring a postdoc to lead sedimentary aDNA reconstructions of alpine plant biodiversity as part of a broader project exploring the mechanisms of alpine plant resilience. Come join a collaborative team working in beautiful places! Bonus: postdocs at UMaine are unionized!

Smithsonian Fish Curator position announcement! Note the application dates of May 12 – June 2, 2026. Should be posted here tomorrow: trustcareers.si.edu#js-careers-j...

Meet IOB co author Allison Shultz. The Shultz lab seeks to understand the #evolution of #bird diversity. Along with being a #scientist, Allison is an incredible #artist: & www.allisonshultz.com/projects-8 & read Shutlz's co authored work doi.org/10.1093/iob/...

"Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking.... The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome's AI features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy" www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-... #AI #infosec

my paper on pogonomyrmex harvester ant biogeography with bob johnson and @corriemoreau.bsky.social came out today! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/MEB3T9...