A bit of rain yesterday reopened the tap at the sap weep, let’s gooo #sapweep25

I have gotten a bit behind at sharing the lab’s latest work - this paper is now published - check it out! www.cell.com/cell-reports... Long story short: insulin is the major determinant of female fat storage, with a relatively minor effect on males.

Now hiring a computational postdoc (evolutionary genomics, molecular evolution) in my lab at Emory University. If you’re interested in population genetics, fitness landscapes, and viral evolution — get in touch. faculty-emory.icims.com/jobs/151181/...

With Jon Lorsch's transfer from NIGMS to the Office of the Director and the announced (internally) departure of another institute director effective at the end of November, more than half of the 27 institute and center director positions at NIH will soon be held by people in "acting" capacities.

Registration for the SEPEEG 2025 meeting is extended to Sept. 24. Keynote Speaker: Megan Behringer. Venue: Tremont, TN, Oct 3-5. Cost: $200. More info: https://sepeeg2025.blogspot.com/ #conference

My awesome Drosophila colleague Akhila Rajan at Fred Hutch (Seattle) is recruiting both a staff scientist and a postdoc to study fat–brain communication, innate immunity, mitochondrial signaling, and brain senescence. Great team, great environment. Apply here: careers-fhcrc.icims.com/jobs/30062/j...

The FlyBase situation has made the national news www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...

Buttigieg: "We are not getting the leadership we need to bring this country together from the White House ... in order to deprive political violence of its power, we have to reject anyone who would try to exploit political violence. The response to this cannot be for the government to crack down."

A deep dive into the destruction of US cancer research by @jonathanmahler.bsky.social “It’s an absolutely unmitigated disaster,” a former top official at NIH told him. “It will take decades to recover from this, if we ever do.” Gift link: nyti.ms/48iH3Cr

You may have missed this #ant poster at #ESEB2025, but be sure not to miss the article just published in #openacess in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

With iNaturalist, GBIF, and an increasing amount of scientific literature online, it is now possible to identify many bugs from all over the world without having to get physical specimens in front of an expert. Last 5 years especially.

How many chromosomes can an animal have? In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Course confusion aside… It appears as though many people are under the impression that an *upper level* university course in children’s literature in an English department is just about simply reading (and not critically thinking about) children’s stories?

A professor at Texas A&M taught… something related to gender that offended a student, who secretly filmed herself objecting. That video is picked up by TX legislators, who demand her firing, and now the dean and dept head have been fired. www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...

OSU insect systematics chair!! This sounds like a DEEPLY cool job with a fantastic collection attached: osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/OSUCareers/j...

The gentleman from Kentucky is right.

breaking news: ant-i normal reproduction! 🐜 The species Messor ibericus seems to produce both its own offspring and those of Messor structor (from another species). With no fathers detected, hybrid workers still appear. Where’s the species line? 🔗🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Molecular evolution of dietary shifts in ladybirds 🐞 expansions of digestive & detoxifying #gene families in the herbivorous ladybirds, & absence of most plant cell wall-degrading enzymes in the ladybirds from the transition to carnivory link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The weird new ant paper that shows queens laying eggs of a completely different species has me thinking that more species are probably cloning sperm in their spermathecae than we’d thought. After all, most queens only mate once and cloning would be a great mechanism for keeping the party going.

It’s not just that the President of the United States posted a video of eleven people being murdered in international waters it’s that the President of the United States ordered the murder of eleven people in international waters so he could post a video of it.

If you know North American ants, you'll know exactly what this scene smells like.

9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

The private sector has a billionty dollars in AI. AI doesn’t need to take half the public money for all the rest of science too.

#NIH is hanging by a thread. The #CDC has been decimated. #RFK Jr. and Russell #Vought are psychopaths--I don't say this frivolously--they are cold, calculating, inflicting violence on millions through public policy. It is where we are right now. These men are not normal. 1/

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...

"While Trump may want to be a king, it is still up to us, as Americans, whether we treat him like one..." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/o...

This always blows my mind. Dude mapped qtl for a quantitative trait to a chromosome in 1923!

Our constitutional order is rotted out. There’s not much left once you start sending military personnel to police your own people in peace time.

My former department at Mississippi State University is recruiting an Assistant Professor position in Forest Entomology. They are a great group to work with and the Mississippi forests are a truly fascinating environment in which to work. explore.msujobs.msstate.edu/en-us/job/50...

CNN story on the Katrina Declaration www.cnn.com/2025/08/25/p... 1/3

This is patently unconstitutional. For one, 18 USC § 700 has been void since Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) under the First Amendment. Second, there is no federal authority for an anti-flag burning statute. The national government does not have a general police power.

Interesting survey of evo bio folks who leave academic track for other kinds of jobs post PhD. Topline: they're employable and happy but could use training in ppl and project management.

There are too many reasons to have every meeting/session online for free: some can’t attend for health reasons, can’t afford it, don’t have childcare, etc., and everybody in the public should be invited to attend; open access doesn’t mean just publications; meetings can’t afford it? Figure it out.

You know what's crazy? There have been no op-eds or editorial statements in major newspapers this year calling on Trump to resign. None calling for his impeachment. None asking if he's medically fit to be in office. Not one in any major newspaper all year.

The practical upshot is that justice delayed is justice denied; or to be more precise, a lab which had to fire all of its researchers and halt work on groundbreaking research isn't going to be able to ever restore itself to the same position it would have been without a multi-year pause in funding.

Many of us are using LLMs in coding and scientific writing. They are very helpful tools, but we need to be thoughtful as we integrate them into our work flows to preserve accountability, voice and trust. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan.... An editorial at @evolletters.bsky.social for discussion:

That was one of the most batshit press conferences of Trump's public life. He brandished a photo of Putin and promised to deploy the US military to occupy Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. A sane country would be moving toward impeachment and removal right now.

Yesterday the Supreme Court issued a convoluted, 36-page emergency order about NIH grant terminations. Two main takeaways: -$2 billion (not the government # of $780 million) in NIH grants will likely be re-terminated -future legal challenges will be much harder w/ @maxkozlov.bsky.social:

Watching the United States dismantle the scientific infrastructure it built across half a century is astounding. An incredible act of self-sabotage, one that leaves the country poorer, its people sicker, and hands the future to adversary nations.

AI is exactly good enough to destroy higher education without being good enough to reduce the need for educated people. The fastest possible pathway to intellectual collapse as a society.

🆕 ✨ New publication out: Chromosomal Inversions Mediated by Tandem Insertions of Transposable Elements We find that transposable elements are the likely mechanism of (some) inversions in cod fishes! academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Donald Trump's unhinged posts over the past 24 hours makes clear that he believes Republicans rule by right and those who engaged in election fraud on his behalf are martyrs. This is why the 14A bars anti-democratic insurrectionists from holding office and Trump should be on trial in Fulton County.

Actually that's just JD Vance's life because people yell at him everywhere he goes

New Malaria Case Prompts Testing of Mosquitoes in New Jersey www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/n...

#OnThisDay in 1858, a seminal journal article comprised of papers by Alfred Russel Wallace FRS and Charles Darwin FRS on the theory of evolution by natural selection was published by the Linnean Society, the first public announcement of the theory of evolution. bit.ly/3k8fq4u

TIL: you can smuggle ants. Ty @knibbs.bsky.social! www.wired.com/story/usda-a...

I am going to lodge a prediction: the AI bubble is going to start to deflate in the next 18 months. Chatbots have edge case utility, but are not themselves transformative. Agents are as controllable as an alcoholic rabbit; not fit for serious work. Foundation models are no longer improving rapidly

Are the mRNA vaccines incredible? YES! Are the mRNA vaccines perfect? No. Have the mRNA vaccines saved millions of lives? YES! Can we make the mRNA vaccines even better? YES! Can we use mRNA vaccine technology to prevent and treat many other diseases? YES! Fund mRNA research!