What if animals emerged by installing a new biological operating system that repurposed what already existed, much like the rise of the smartphone? Here's our new paper in @embojournal.org @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social @melisupf.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🧵 1/?: Switching a Research Desktop to Linux (Intro & Prehistory) 1/ This is the first in a series of threads/mini-tutorials I'll be posting on switching a real academic research & development desktop to Linux. Not a “open source rocks” 🧵— this is about doing actual science. #ChemSky #AcademicSky

Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing. Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n

That’s not a barrel, that’s a tower!! Awesome picture.

Last night, I watched one of the best nature videos I have ever seen, from Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I have been in love with hornbills since I lived in Indonesia and Malaysia and saw them every time I went out in the jungle. You really owe it to yourself to watch this.

Now that we have the most powerful computer on our lil’ campus… let’s do some marine science 👏 🧪 🪸 🖥️

Building a robotics and AI lab on a Caribbean island certainly has its challenges, but we are settling into our new home quite nicely! 👉🏻 follow @the-vicar.bsky.social if youre interested in robotics and AI for ecological conservation 🧪 #NSFfunded

someone should make a website for liberals who don’t hate technology

If you're lucky enough to be financially stable and have a few bucks to spare, now would be a really good time to donate to America's food banks. They've already lost a ton of funding this year and with SNAP on the line, more are going to need them in the coming weeks.

Latest from ours: www.cell.com/cell-reports... This is two stories in one: a case study/cautionary tale on developing genetic tools in new organisms, and the first hint at a gene regulatory network for choanoflagellate multicellular development (which turn out to involve a Hippo/YAP/ECM loop!) A 🧵

Day 1 of NSF sponsored Diadema antillarum scuticociliatosis time series in Brewers Bay, St Thomas, USVI with @drchriskellogg.bsky.social @viromegirl.bsky.social @aquaticmicrolab.bsky.social and Prof Marilyn Brandt at UVI. After months of planning it was time to figure out what makes sense from

🚨Big news🚨 A Pocket Guide to Scientific Writing and Publishing is out🎉 This is the book I wish I’d had 20 years ago — short, practical, and designed to help researchers write & get their papers published I hope it helps many Please share with anyone who might benefit! 👉 mybook.to/ScienceGuide

Perks of working a little past 5☀️

"Sponges are the only animals that if broken down to the level of their cells, can reassemble themselves. A sponge is passed through a sieve to break apart its cells. The cells recognize each other and reform into small new sponges." #shapeoflife #spongeThursday youtu.be/ORV3qV8GFF4?...

🚨 Paper alert! 🚨 After >1 year in review and six (6!) reviewers, I'm thrilled that this paper is finally out! Here, we provide the first data-based record of marine dissolved organic carbon in the geologic past. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Quick detour on the way to work this morning

NSF employees are being forced OUT of their office by the same goons who forced them back IN to their office a few months ago. 🧪

Protest in paradise #nokings #usvi

#nokings on St. John usvi 💙

energy and water use per chatgpt query is absolutely trivial

Happy 18th birthday ggplot2! #rstats

Trump's Budget is out. For NOAA, it's exactly what the previous passback document showed. Trump administration eliminations NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research in its ongoing fight against science and reality. www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

Did you get the educational discount? slack.com/intl/en-gb/h...

My heart hurts for Harvard-bound students who lost GRFPs and teams everywhere who have had grants terminated. A senseless waste of blood, sweat, tears, late nights, strained relationships, abandoned hobbies, frequent moves, financial instability, and mental health. 🧪

Wolverine is the formal word for wolf 🫣

Michael does not approve of the robot hogging the couch. Sorry bud, firmware update. 🥺🧪

Hard agree! Those old American naturalist articles took me on ADVENTURES 😍

important historical perspective on the value of federal funding of basic research at universities: "These are the building blocks of America's extraordinary strength, created over the last 100 years, and they are now being dismantled in 100 days" 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qk4...

This is important research funded by #NSF looking at how sponge filter feeding changes the molecular makeup of seawater, with important implications for coral reefs and even bioremediation. Great to see continuation of my PhD research! And I’m glad they moved the lab indoors 👍🏻🤣 🧪

Since we are still talking about interactions, I worked with some ecologists a couple of years ago on measurement scale, interactions and interpretation issues. I think some problems arise from failure to distinguish prediction from inference, a chronic problem in ecology imo doi.org/10.1111/brv....

As the Trump administration fires government researchers, cancels scientific grants, and targets universities with funding freezes, scientists who might once have welcomed public attention for their work or spoken up on issues affecting their field are instead opting for silence. scim.ag/4jLxA9E

☝🏻But only in males? Study based on male mice only? What’s up with that? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mastering typefaces and fonts in #rstats has always been harder than it should. I have tried to collect much of my relevant knowledge in this deep-dive blog post so you can spend your time picking the right typeface instead of cursing at the computer

OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/

Find a hobby that you genuinely enjoy but aren’t naturally great at.

needed this

🧪

Journal editors struggling to find reviewers — there are some bloody good reasons why I used to think it was merely a post-COVID19 hiccough, but the extensive delays in receiving reviews for submitted manuscripts that I am seeing near constantly now are the symptoms of a much larger problem. That…

I can only hope that the current science funding situation will be met by a massive equal-but-opposite-reaction the world has never seen, 4 years from now. Massive investment in science. A la 90s sci fi. You want twister? Done. Genetically altered makos? One deep blue sea coming right up 🧪🔥

Dr. Scholin’s presentation was fantastic!

it's evocative of the government agency most directly responsible for the existence of cryptocurrency and "AI" is being destroyed by people who are mindlessly obsessed with tearing things down in favor of cryptocurrency and "AI"

"NSF staff expect hundreds more grants to be terminated Friday" 🧪

Home alone, AirPods dead, so I dared to play music through the speakers on my year old Macbook pro. WHAT is this black magic?! How am i just now discovering it? PSA to anyone who has ignored laptop speakers since 2007 🤣

These guys got the first living footage of the Indonesian coelacanth! Amazing work. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m not going to retweet that NOAA propaganda post about deep sea mining. Instead, I’ll tell you that I don’t know a single NOAA scientist who would promote deep sea mining in this way, because the available science we have does not justify exploitation of deep sea habitats for minerals.

Exclusive: The director of the National Science Foundation announced his resignation today, 16 months before his 6-year term ends, in a letter to staff obtained by Science. scim.ag/42vc3fn

The cherry on top of the dystopian sunday is paywalling articles about NSF grants being killed @science.org 🫠 🧪

An assessment of existing coral restoration projects finds that accessibility drives the choice of restoration sites more than environmental and ecological factors, and most restored reefs have been or will soon be impacted by severe bleaching www.nature.com/articles/s41...