Still all quiet on the #NSF front. No new awards in the past week. REMINDER: We still are hearing of trickles of terminations, suspensions, and money being held back from grantees, which NSF isn't reporting. We need your help - please report! 🧪 grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0...

Reminder — UW #Microbiology has an open search for an Assistant Professor, focusing on fundamental problems in #bacteriology! If you or someone you know would be suitable, here's the ad: apply.interfolio.com/185622

My favorite science featured at ASM Microbe, experimental evolution. Chaired by @luiszaman.bsky.social and kicked off by @benwolfe.bsky.social

While I am at ASM Microbe in DC, I will be handing out #MicrobialCentrism buttons and pins. I am bringing 50 each of the lower pins. And 10 each of the fancy enamel pins on top. Come introduce yourself and you can have one. Please promote #MicrobialPR? @microbe.tv @asmicrobiology

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

postdoc alert 🚨! NIH-funded postdoc in my lab to work on Ancestral Recombination Graphs in space. Please spread the word widely in your networks, and please reach out if you're interested! (2-3yr position, start date flexible, pay/benefits good!). details here: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Check out our pre-print led by the fantastic Massimo Amicone, collaborating with the Bollenbach lab! tinyurl.com/4h9p8mfb We build a simple intuition on how ecological interactions affect resistance evolution by expanding evolutionary rescue theory and testing it with two large sets of experiments

Context: $9 billion is more than the entire annual NSF budget allocated for all science research in the US. If the NSF budget had actually been disbursed this year (it has not). www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/u...

"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sharing for no reason www.nasonline.org/directory-en...

To merge or not to merge, that is the question. Awesome work and bluetorial by @jacobmoran.bsky.social on how even isogenic bacterial colonies in space can use autoinhibition to decide a distinctly collective identity of self!

Excited to share our new preprint! In honor of May the 4th: a story about bacterial Clone Wars in space! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I resigned from the National Science Board in May when meaningful oversight became untenable. I respect colleagues who stayed to serve the NSB's mission. Today's news clarifies that was an erosion of oversight and function has become open elimination of the Board itself. 🧵 time.com/7285045/resi...

Come join us in Ann Arbor for the mid-west hub! We'll have keynote talks from Will Harcombe, @beabasel.bsky.social, and @relenski.bsky.social on site, and many others on simulcast. Abstracts are due next week! We'll have a bit of travel funds for students that need them.

Come join us in Ann Arbor, MI for the MEEHubs26 meeting!

REMINDER - Abstract submission deadline for MEEHubs2026 is April 19! Get you abstract in and present at one of the hubs August 3-5, 2026✨You'll be in great company! We have a fantastic lineup of speakers‼️ Links and more info here: meehubs.org

My lab at Pitt is looking for a Research Scientist to help us make phage therapy for patients with antibiotic-resistant infections. Please share and apply! cfopitt.taleo.net/careersectio...

The fact that nobody seriously believes there is an institution in this country that will check the president—that we’re all just sitting here hoping that he gets distracted and fails to follow through on his genocidal threats—is the most damning indictment of our political system I’ve seen yet.

BERMAN: Do you think Congress should have a vote if the United States is going to make a whole civilization die? MIKE LAWLER: John, you are parsing here BERMAN: I was quoting

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

the trump administration is selling this country wholesale to rapacious, extractive industries that will destroy our collective resources for private profit morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...

Listening to law students talk about their use of AI and lack of desire to “do any work” is making me seriously terrified about the future.

Today I'm teaching about responsible AI usage in my Computer Science capstone class. I regularly emphasize the need to understand code and to cite anything AI generated. But how can I make the point that AI is reducing depth of understanding because students no longer have to dig for answers? (1/6)

Happy to share the final version of @oliviamghosh.bsky.social's paper on inferring low dimensional phenotype-fitness maps from high-throughput fitness measurements across environments. Fun collaboration with @oliviamghosh.bsky.social, @grantkinsler.bsky.social, & @petrovadmitri.bsky.social

57 of my fellow students were arrested, academically disciplined, and barred from campus 2 weeks before finals. And then the visas of some of those students were quietly revoked. And then the DEI office was killed. And then we watched our mentors’ grants evaporate over “woke”.

I guess with race science discourse still percolating, I should re-up my starter pack for people who work on the topic

Madness. A bacterium with a 10kb genome, lost replication initiation, translation.., relies on symbiotic host. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share this review🔔, we spent sometime thinking about phage–microbiome–immune–oncology axis for phage therapy in cancer! #phage #phagesky Phage therapy in oncology: opportunities for cancer prevention and treatment: Trends in Molecular Medicine www.cell.com/trends/molec...

If you're a senior PhD student or recent graduate interested in doing work at the intersection of AI and microbial genomics and/or microbiomes, please feel free to reach out to discuss the possibility of applying together for an MIT Novo Nordisk Fellowship engineering.mit.edu/novo-nordisk

Paul Ehrlich has died. Most will remember him for "The Population Bomb." But for many of us, Ehrlich and Raven 1964 was a foundational read that influenced our careers. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country. The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: www.pewresearch.org/...

The FDA “has increasingly issued drug rejections or refusals — about 20 in the last eight months — that underscore a break from decades of general stability… It has advised companies to launch costly and complex studies that could add years to finding treatments for rare diseases with no cure”

New paper showing that bacteria with more genes for cooperation can live in a broader range of habitats and that genes for cooperation are more more likely to be in the accessory genome www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @lauriebelch.bsky.social

Having to negotiate with an AI host agent on Airbnb to adjust a reservation is the worst fucking version of the future I could imagine. Can we make this illegal ASAP.

Thank you again @michaeldgreen.phd for speaking out. I don't know what bothers me more: Director Bhattacharya's callousness that damaging the careers of talented young scientists is "the cost of doing business" for his politics or His ignorance and lack of imagination about experimental design.

I don’t repost CATO lightly…

There’s always a post indeed. Again, with alt text.

This whole Anthropic vs OpenAI shit feels a lot like an elaborate excuse to give OpenAI a bailout (while testing their limits).

I come not to praise Claude or whatever but giving unaccountable robot decisionmaking to thundering dipshits who just shot down their own drone with a laser does seem like wrong side of history business

This week's cover @thelancet.com

In case you missed it: our review titled "Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities" is out! 🚨 Let me hit you with some highlights on why spatial structure matters. (and why you should care!) Sharing is appreciated 🙏 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1093/fems...

Happy 38th birthday to the #LTEE! #BOTD in 1988. Keep on evolving! #science #evolution #microbiology

Provocative? This sounds dangerous. “With a provocative new proposal, an AI company has offered regulators a way to let a broad swath of potentially risky AI devices flood the market… “You run the risk of, proverbially, a Trojan horse,” said oncologist Ravi Parikh”

Spoken like a man who would use you as a battery if he could

Alita Burmeister (@aburmeister.bsky.social) is looking to hire a postdoc (or potentially a PhD student) for projects on phage resistance and evolution. The position description is posted to the Eco-Evo Jobs wiki and also available on her lab's website (arburmeister.weebly.com).

I am looking for wide-ranging mammalian DNA samples for a class I am developing. Especially sought-after would be parent-offspring paired samples. Please retweet (re-skeet?), thank you!

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15 csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

SFI’s Santiago Elena has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. He joins 62 fellows in the 2026 class. His work explores how RNA viruses adapt to hosts and manipulate cellular resources. Since joining SFI in 2008, he has organized several working groups on virus evolution.