Encountered a Ryukyu flying fox 🦇 (Pteropus dasymallus) today and luckily managed to film it this time #bat #flyingfox

ATTENTION ALL ACADEMICS: If your university has discouraged you from leaving a public comment on the OMB rule proposal, WE NEED TO KNOW. Comment here, DM me, or email info (@) standupforscience (dot) net to tell @standupforscience.net your affiliation. Screenshots appreciated!

🧵 It’s not so much an instant decapitation of American science as it’s a slow but steady asphyxiation. But the effect is the same. We’re planting the seeds of doubt in the next generation of scientists that maybe this is not what they should sign up for.

The US truly seems to be pushing eager young scientists to reconsider their life goals of research & higher ed. I'm sure these anecdotes are being repeated for many of you & am curious what systematic efforts are underway to catalogue & measure this deterrent effect on future talent

Just got an alert that views for the Biology PhD Stipends database spiked over the past weekend! Lets keep this database up-to-date, if your program increased their EEB PhD stipend, submit an update: mlgaynor.com/BiologyPhDSt...

Greetings from Eriphia sebana (Well, just an excuse to share new crab 🦀 clip)

Migration should be a human right and right to reside in a country should not be dictated by labour you can/cannot do.

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

This is North Korea level bullshit, and a total fucking disaster for science and for the United States alike. It doesn't matter whether it fails to pass; this kind of thinking is already penetrating NIH, NSF, NASA, etc and causing severe harm. NASEM, AAAS, AAUP, etc must condemn unequivocally.

Now I can no longer acknowledge #NIH grants of collaborators based in US in my papers. Not fatal to me since my own work is theoretical/computational, but for many others it'd be much harder (e.g., if they do experimental work). The insanity that's consuming US science is eroding the outer world.

I looked at my past 6 years of papers, out of curiosity. 42 are co-authored with foreign collaborators. 16 with international students or postdocs, some of whom subsequently left the US. Only 26 were by US residents only, less than 1/3 of my scientific work. This policy will kill US innovation

I'm presenting this study for the virtual meeting of @evolmtg.bsky.social on May 22 at 6:15 PM Eastern Time. Please come!

I walked back home today, which is much slower than the shuttle bus but allowed me to encounter some cool creatures, like this colorful #beetle. Probably Sophiodela okinawana (I didn’t find its English common name), a tiger beetle #endemic to #Okinawa.

The timing is kind awkward to me given my time zone, but I highly recommend it (also Haoran’s preprint)!

Yesterday, a new generation of civil rights activists marched from Selma to Montgomery to fight for voting rights. As states across the country try to make it harder for citizens to be heard, we need to learn the lessons of those who came before us and refuse to take our democracy for granted.

This is why I would rather assume the worst is going to happen than be optimistic. There exists a population of morons who’d remain ignorant, cruel, and hypocritical as always no matter what.

I'm looking for postdoc opportunities for the 2026-2027 academic year. If you're looking for a postdoc with a broad skill set spanning evolutionary genetics, bioinformatics, and various omics methods, feel free to reach out. Some recent pubs: (1) doi.org/10.1126/scie... (2) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Indeed, people need to know this, just like they need to know birds are dinosaurs and mammals are synapsids…

Have been working on a Chinese proposal recently (and will keep working on it for some time). It has become clearer that being a native Chinese speaker doesn’t automatically make me good at academic writing in Chinese. 1/2

Reward after a depressingly rainy golden week in #Okinawa: double rainbow 🌈 🌈

I thought science in the US had been dead enough, but this insane admin keeps killing it to make it more dead than dead.

Consistent with my limited knowledge/experience as a straight man, plus details that I'm (unsurprisingly) unfamiliar with. Hopefully this could be an informative guide for people in need!

Ok, lets have a look at this: Over the last few days a new paper in Science has led to MANY discussions in the paleo community and it appears to have breached containment into the wider world, judging by headlines and google results.

He "spent years quietly acquiring his arsenal," @bloomberg.com says about buying a pistol and a shotgun. If the media wants to say people with more than one gun (≈20% of US) have an "arsenal" and are inherently suspicious, fine, but they never talk about Republican gun policies that way.

Thank Cthulhu, they didn’t propose that the giant cephalopod 🐙 would drag tyrannosaurs 🦖 into the sea…

Affiliate @marcrr.bsky.social loves the control bioRxiv affords researchers over the calendar of publication. Thanks to Affiliates like him, preprints are posted ~48 hours after submission. #openRxiv #OpenScience #preprints #CommunityVoices

I happen to have some nice Argiope photos too… An A. aemula just caught a Syntomoides imaon (a moth w/ partially transparent wings). Taken in Okinawa, Japan.

“It’s about controlling women.” Good point. IMAO controlling women is probably also a key motivation of East Asian misogynists when they resent the apparent birth rate drop and fear-monger.

Congrats to Matt! 🎉 I worked w/ Matt at USC, during which time I started focusing on evolutionary theories and met amazing colleagues like @jgschraiber.bsky.social & @kylethedavid.bsky.social (wait, no one else on Bluesky??)

My favorite is…pretty obvious, isn’t it? But to be fair, our favorites tend to be the “representative” and “archetype” of our favorite groups…Tarbosaurus is fascinating on its own right, albeit named much later than it’s American cousin.

seeing a gharial from the front really helps you appreciate their..... unique beauty, shall we say

Preprint from @haorancai.bsky.social re-investigating an apparent puzzling observation in fly 🪰 wing evolution: alignment between genetic variance & evolutionary divergence despite strong stabilizing selection. It's a topic I've worked on a bit before and it's nice to see more progress!

Some adorable #crabs 🦀 seen today in the #intertidal zone.

Sadly that’s probably a very nontrivial fraction of them😔

I always feel super awkward and don’t know what to say when someone makes a racist, sexist, homophobic, populist etc. speech in front of me. Kinda relieved to know I’m not alone lol

So, thing that is apparently better understood inside academia than outside of it: International students pay sticker price. Most domestic students do not. International students are subsidizing the education costs for domestic students, as per student governmental funding drops.

Virginia: Vote YES! Early voting is open for the next two weeks until Saturday, April 18. As Trump and Republicans try to rig the midterms in their favor, you have the chance to stop them. Make your plan to vote early or on Election Day, April 21, at IWillVote.com.

It turns out science hasn’t been dead enough to satisfy this regime. Please don’t accept this without resistance. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What a rich-baiting title...The article is actually about the validation of Nanotyrannus. It isn't a bigger, badder "Megatyrannus" being discovered.

Another goose barnacle bottle that appears to have drifted from China: it’s a kind of liquor that’s popular in China.

Just received the new articulated T. rex 🦖 from #PNSO. This time a reconstruction with lip. Looking forward to more 1:35 scale action figures from this line…

Public service announcement: Please stop with all the adaptationism. Issue 1: some beneficial traits arise through forces other than natural selection (i.e. they aren't results of adaptation). Issue 2: many seemingly beneficial traits are not beneficial at all (i.e., they don't increase fitness).

New preprint alert! In this study, we tackled a long-debated question: is the genetic basis of convergent evolution predictable? Should we expect the same gene/loci contributing to convergent adaptation to a common selective pressure? Thread ahead 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Finally received the Spinosaurus book by @davehone.bsky.social & @markwitton.bsky.social. It arrived shortly after S. mirabilis was, kinda like how the T. rex 🦖 book narrowly “missed” the revival of Nanotyrannus. It’s hard to keep up with new work 😂

A comparison of the spiky beetle Acantholophus and the ankylosaur Borealopelta, the latter represented by a Kaiyodo gacha figure. Part of the insect art exhibition at @oistedu.bsky.social. Weirdly, the sign only refers to Zuul. Perhaps a different gacha should have been used.

Some cool intertidal zone animals seen yesterday, before sunset. #goby #SeaCucumber #Okinawa

I hope I hadn't been aspired by this many people as a kid/teenager. Who knows how morally impeded they could turn out to be. It doesn't feel good to know each of these incidents, one after another.

Kaiyodo T. rex gacha figures over two decades (no, I haven’t got all of them yet) #dinosaur #tyrannosaurus #gacha

😢

Some trophies from my recent #paleo #gacha figure hunt…