I love hearing scientists’ origin stories because they highlight how the interests that draw us to science are as diverse as we are 🌱 For me it was: 1. A 5th grade teacher who taught a lesson on climate change, my first time learning about Earth’s climate system

NASA is making plans to shut down two Earth observing satellites that provide key data to climate scientists and farmers, despite lawmakers telling them it’s illegal to do it. Story by @astrokimcartier.bsky.social eos.org/research-and...

New paper in @nature.com! With @kiseokmicro.bsky.social , Siqi Liu, Kyle Crocker, Jojo Wang, Mikhail Tikhonov & Madhav Mani — a massive dataset and simple model reveal a few conserved regimes that capture how soil microbiome metabolism responds to perturbations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hope this is useful - consensus statement "Guidelines for preventing and reporting contamination in low-biomass microbiome studies" rdcu.be/er3Io

It's been hard for early career biologists looking for postdocs, so I created a Google Sheet where we can all compile fellowships/job boards/postdoc opportunities in one place. PLEASE SHARE WIDELY! If you're a PI looking for postdocs, you can add to the 4th tab! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

⚖️ HUGE day today in the NIH terminations cases There's a trial (of sorts) at 10a ET in Boston today for arguments that NIH unlawfully terminated 100s of grants. It's a 3 hour hearing and I'll post periodic updates. Of note: this is the 1st lawsuit filed against the Trump Admin to go to trial.

Climate.gov, a major US government website supporting public education on climate science, will likely shut down after almost all of its staff were fired. What would be worse is if the website were co-opted to publish climate denial content.

Our paper on the cultivation of a putative sulfur comproportionator from the Frasassi caves is finally out! Jan would have been happy to see this paper published - it's got everything that he loved: thermodynamics, cultivation, weird metabolisms, and life underground. Cheers to Jan! rdcu.be/enlo3

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday 📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

NSF Physics was cut by 85%, basically wiping out most of its capacity for supporting research. NSF Astronomy was cut by 53% Undergrad education was cut by 71% and research on learning by 79% Graduate education was cut by 100% to ZERO. #GiftLink ⚛️🔭 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Altadena community calls on Gov. Newsom, California legislature to protect them from predatory developers. A new report shows that more than half of Altadena land sales since February have gone to corporations. lapublicpress.org/2025/05/alta...

Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My ongoing request: If your NSF or NIH grant was terminated--whether at Harvard or elsewhere--please report it here. NSF: grant-watch.us/submit-nsf.h... NIH: grant-watch.us/submit-nih.h... Our trackers are actively used in lawsuits and are often the only record that terminations ever occurred.

I just created a quick map depicting which portions of the United States are now (as of today) or will imminently be (by early June) without 24/7 local National Weather Service coverage (per Washington Post reporting). #CAwx #CAfire #CAwater #ORwx #AKwx #WYwx #KSwx

The American public is broadly supportive of maintaining federal science and medical research funding, and against punishing universities by taking their funding away, according to a new poll:

Are you enthusiastic about #waterstableisotopes in forest trees? 🌲🌳💧 We offer a PhD position on ecohydrological feedbacks in forests under recurrent drought. Join our team in Freiburg: uni-freiburg.de/stellenangeb... @chriswernerlab.bsky.social @uni-freiburg.de @hydrofreiburg.bsky.social

Timelapse video shows a debris basin filling up fast in the Bailey Canyon area of Sierra Madre in the Eaton Fire burn area. The video is taken over the span of one hour. That basin doing what it was designed for - keeping that mud and debris from going any further. https://abc7.la/4gDtQ7L

I used to regularly access this NOAA page on atmospheric GHG concentrations, so glad to know it’s still available from UCSD ⚒️🌏🧪

Is Photosynthesis-Derived NADPH Really a Source of 2H-Depleted Hydrogen in Plant Compounds? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

How does light structure microbial mats? To explore this, we studied #Cyanobacteria and Chloroflexota from hot springs. Using simple synthetic communities, we found that these species cooperate, forming stronger #biofilms and moving further together. Paper now in PNAS: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Happy to share a new paper, "Effects of Hot Versus Dry Vapor Pressure Deficit on Ecosystem Carbon and Water Fluxes," led by the amazing Miriam Johnston w/ @mallorybarnes.bsky.social and others agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

There is *a lot* going on right now. My hot take, as I try to keep up wrt our planet: “These executive orders will make our air dirtier, make people sicker, make energy more expensive, and make our communities less prepared for extreme weather.” apnews.com/article/trum...

My heart is breaking for all the local K-12 students who have known one disruption after another throughout their primary education. I’ve been so lucky to get to know many vibrant, bighearted young people in Pasadena public schools. Hoping they can soon regain a sense of normalcy and safety ❤️

The war in Gaza has carried with it an “immense” carbon footprint. The vast majority of war-linked emissions were due to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, as well as US cargo planes delivering war supplies to Israel. By @ninalakhani.bsky.social for @theguardian.com

This Maxar Technologies sat image with SWIR shows what was on fire in Altadena, California this morning at 10:45 a.m. local time. Nearly everything.

Have never seen wind like this. Trash cans blowing down the streets, already very smoky down here in Pasadena from the #EatonCanyon #Fire

Confirmed reports now of "hundreds" of cars that were abandoned by drivers on Sunset Boulevard amid frantic #PalisadesFire evacuation gridlock earlier. (Folks made it out on foot.) CalFire/LA County bulldozers are in process of clearing path for emergency vehicles. #CAwx #CAfire

Census of Deep Life is the largest compendium of subsurface microbiological samples sequenced together to-date. We found some pretty cool microbial trends across major provinces of Earth's subsurface. Nice job pulling this together, @emilruff.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

Planning your climate or environment syllabus? I like to show short videos so students & I can visualize some of the things we're talking about. Here are some of the ones I like:

Let's kick of the New Year like an acantharian with a little #protistsonsky fireworks magic. Happy New Year 2025! 🦑

Shoutout to the IL state flag submission that highlights the state fossil, the Tully Monster

Top 4 misconceptions about science 1. It fills knowledge-gaps (discoveries are unknown unknowns) 2. It proceeds along a straightforward path (discoveries are not predictable) 3. It looks for answers (new questions are crucial) 4. It is only rational (requires night science leaps)

One last classic: heating at the lower boundary. tinyurl.com/4rhc5k3u Video clip doesn't show the full development of the convection cells but I am absolutely mesmerized every time.

Methane is such a potent greenhouse gas and (aside from the urgent need for an energy transition) we could make a dent in emissions just with better industrial standards/regulation—capping old wells, fixing leaky pipelines. But of course industry won’t even accurately measure and report emissions.

The absolute wonder of walking onto a glacier like the Perito Moreno (SPI, Argentina) 🧊🌊😍 After decades of frontal stability this iconic glacier is retreating since 2019 and monitored by IANIGLA for the last few years Pic Lucas Ruiz 1/

Well, this is fascinating. The good people at @cplusc.bsky.social have found that voters with incomes under 100K overwhelmingly support fossil-fuel phaseout! So much for the myth that climate change is merely an "elite" preoccupation of the affluent, college-educated, dare I say "woke" voter. 🧵

Is it a repeat? Sort of, but this is a radiolarian in motion! I wanted to see how dynamic the symbionts are. They mostly stay still over a couple of minutes. With @micrott.bsky.social and @evocellbio.bsky.social #protistaday #protistsonsky #marinelife

Do you study soil microbes and their response to climate change? Consider presenting your research at #EGU25 at our session SSS4.5, which is in its 5th year. I hope to see you in Vienna!

The Salton Sea is another sacrifice zone to extractive agriculture with long term problems that we have not even began to tackle. A super engaging piece by @virginiagewin.bsky.social here.

For a festive #FossilFriday here's a thing I wrote a few years ago about Christmas trees. (I'd say a bit more about fossil pines if I wrote it now.) 🌲🌲🌲🧪🌎⚒🦕🌲🌲🌲

Wishing everyone a happy #WorldSoilDay! My favorite soil fact is that, as long as it’s not submerged in water, any given soil is probably consuming methane from the atmosphere. Yup, even in the desert! Pictured: a Mojave field site where I’ve measured active microbial CH4 uptake from the air. 🌍🧪🦠

Happy Isotope Day everyone! 🥳On this day in 1913 Nature published Federick Soddy's paper "Intra-atomic Charge" www.nature.com/articles/092... in which he introduced the term "isotope" (coined after a dinner conversation in Glasgow with Margaret Todd the classics scholar). how will you celebrate?🧪⚒️🌊

I am a soil ecologist 🦠🧬🖤 But design is also one of my passions! Here is my collection of crops and cover crops 🌱 s-ink.org/crops-and-co... The collection is available under CC BY_NC_SA 4.0 licence via @s-ink.org

Excited to share our new study in @naturecomms.bsky.social showing that soil fungi, unlike bacteria, remain fully active under severe drought conditions, and also invest in synthesis of storage compounds. Led by the amazing @loutsi.bsky.social and Alberto Canarini. Thread 1/2 rdcu.be/d1Tyg

Science takes time - a lot of time. Time that is more and more difficult to make available because of increased workloads. Time that exceeds the temporary contracts of postdocs and PhDs. I'll illustrate this using our paper published in Nature yesterday. 🧵 (1/x) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Volunteers counted 10,000 overwintering monarch butterflies last year in lighthouse field.. fourth largest count in California.

I’m obsessed with the delicate stippled patterns on the petals of Calochortus, Mariposa lilies. Below are two of my lifetime favorite finds, including the only rare species I’ve spotted in nature: Calochortus excavatus, Inyo County star-tulip. Even the names are so evocative 🤩🌷