Scientists! SSE members! Everyone! Reminder to comment on OMB's proposed rule, sign the SSE letters, write your congresscritter, and alert EVERYONE in your network! 👇👇👇👇👇

The list of Ecology/Evolution/Marine Bio Labs recruiting grad students for Fall 2027 is live! PIs enter your position info here: forms.gle/MAGd4ohyPeoY... students (and PIs not recruiting) share the composite list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... Please share widely! 🧪

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.

Most of our district, including the triple deckers everyone loves, was technically illegal to build. That's not an accident. It's the result of decades of rules that quietly banned the cheapest housing we ever built. Cambridge changed it last year. Every city in Massachusetts can too.

Here's a National Science Foundation paper I worked on that will be impossible under the regime's proposed rules. We study evolution, which happens across the entire globe. We had collaborators in Argentina, in Australia, in Germany. We cannot do our kind of science in one country.

🧵 Public science in the US has taken some heavy hits over the last year, but the White House OMB is proposing a series of changes that will result in a TKO for science as we know it unless we fight back. Here's what's happening, and why it matters. 1/n

Trans people have been around your whole life. You’ve been sharing bathrooms with them your whole life. They’ve been in your communities your whole life. They’ve even been playing sport your whole life. And you didn’t care *at all* till a few years ago when every right wing org decided you should

UVic is hiring a Terrestrial Plant Ecologist Assistant Professor! Come join our department! We're nice and Victoria is awesome. www.uvic.ca/science/biol...

“Dr. Antaki, a biomedical engineer, had been building an artificial heart for babies and young children, a pump the size of a AA battery, and he was getting close. But with his research grants stopped, Dr. Antaki slowly drained his lab’s rainy day funds, and he was forced to lay off all his staff.”

In the 1920s, a New Jersey pathologist coined 'punch-drunk syndrome' to describe the tremors and slurred speech he kept seeing in career boxers. For decades we assumed it took boxing or American football to do that to a brain. Soccer players' brains tell a different story. 🧵

Students, if you’re thinking about dropping a note to that teacher or professor about what their class/project/mentorship has meant to you, but you worry it will be cringe or cheesy, let me just tell you they will coast on the fuzzy feelings prompted by that note for months, if not years

Chad Johnson is CEO of 'Grain Weevil'. His son did robotics competitions in high school, which inspired this little fella that breaks up hardened surfaces & levels grain to ensure it behaves like a liquid, avoids clumping. This probably saves 10-30 human lives a year. NO BOOTS IN THE GRAIN.

The Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute at @ucdavis.bsky.social is announcing a new Postdoctoral Fellowship opportunity! Priority review starts June 15, 2026. Help us spread the word to the #MarineScience community. Details and Apply ➡️: recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07627

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

A student who sets out to write a research paper will now encounter chatbots who will offer to do their work in their word document, in their learning management system, in their email, in their web browser, and in certain library database interfaces.

Botanical parasitism of an insect by a parasitic plant: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

NEW: Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth The vitamin K shot, a lifesaving injection given to newborns to prevent uncontrollable bleeding of the brain and intestines, has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.

Now accepting applications for our 2027 Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution! These awards support students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs to conduct #ecology and #evolution research. Deadline is June 30, 2026: bit.ly/4umYKZd #science

Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:

Bring out your bug for #inverteFest The seven-spot tiger beetle is a stunner (and I always think it's a piece of foil litter on first glance)

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

I'm looking to sponsor an applicant for a Canada Impact+ Postdoctoral fellowship in my lab. The project will explore how methylation patterns change during aging in rockfish with rapidly evolved lifespan differences. Check out tinyurl.com/impactpostdoc for a description. DM for more details.

Woah www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Uzezi Okinedo and @brooklebee.bsky.social characterized pleiotropy in local adaptation in endemic sunflower populations that exhibit bimodal life-history strategies. Their results support a model of ecotypic divergence under gene flow. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag098 #genome #evolution #PlantSky

GET SALTMARSHED IDIOT 🧂

K isn't real! What are we doing here? Why is a textbook wasting their time with these racist freaks and their nonsense

📣 EvolDir is now managed by @eseb.bsky.social! We are delighted to be taking the reins and express our gratitude to both Brian Golding who began this service to the community in the mid-1980s and to @rdmpage.bsky.social who ran this account until now 👏 You can now find evoldir here: evoldir.net

“NSF Plant Biology Act.” H.R. 7949 www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c... This bill would expand NSF funding for plant and microbial biology grants with $150 million authorized each year from FY2026 through 2031. Reach out to your representatives. www.house.gov/representati...

For a project I started nearly 17 years ago, today I submitted a revised manuscript, responding to a R&R decision from a journal. Pretty good feeling! 🥂 I'll add that the work genuinely improved for all the time it took to get here #slowwork

I've seen this, this semester. Our large core bio class exams are timed, on paper, in person, and at least a few short answers were structured as, "*Positive statement about question.* I understand you are asking about *rephrasing of question.*" before maybe actually answering the question!

Among Healey's 32 District Court nominees, "18 (56 percent) come from law enforcement backgrounds, almost all former assistant district attorneys. Just three (9 percent) come from legal services backgrounds, meaning institutional public defenders or legal aid attorneys. That is a ratio of 6 to 1."

Updating my birthrate fan chart. Since 1989, birth rates for US women age 15-17 have fallen 87%. For those age 40-44 birth rates have increased 146%. The total (not shown) has fallen 23%.

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”

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...

In my own K-12 education, we somehow never got past WWII. It would always be the end of the semester and the teacher would be like, "oh I guess we don't have time for that." Never covered the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, etc etc etc. Definitely felt like ancient history!

NOW IS THE TIME FOR GIANT BUGGES WE HAVE THE OXYGEN WE CAN REBUILD THEM

Taking a break from quiz grading to stand on a soap box for a moment. So, with apologies to George Box: All species concepts are wrong; some species concepts are in this thread.

Staff and administrators saw one final year of pay raises exceeding inflation this year, but that won't happen again for a while. Tenure-line faculty have had raises below inflation every year for the past decade. Tenure and promotion boosts are often modest (3-10%), and only happen twice.

“11 sperm whales huddled together at the surface, strangely still and taking occasional shallow dives. After about an hour, the animals seemed to start thrashing, and a plume of blood reddened the water. The researchers feared trouble, maybe a shark attack. But it was something else.” WHALE DOULAS!

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

The fact that Americans thought Auxin was a “Hoax from Europe” rightfully got some attention in my latest #PlantScienceClassics post. But it’s actually even funnier if you learn about the context & consequence of White speaking these words to Went at the AAAS Meeting in Pittsburgh. #PlantScience 🧪 🧵

Time sensitive: this is the last day to submit comments opposing the Bureau of Land Management's clearcutting of Oregon's ancient forests. This is a tool that educates you on just how diabolical it is, and it helps you submit your comment. morethanjustparks.com/oregon-old-g...

A new paper suggests that grant terminations from the NIH over the past year may have further punctured the so-called "leaky pipeline" because women were more impacted by grant terminations than men www.statnews.com/2026/03/23/n...

Can I tell you about one of my new favorite apples? We're still not entirely sure we know what it is, but it's wonderful and we have some good leads. And in a wonderful twist, it turns out I've been eating it since I was a kid.

It's amazing that, despite the exorbitant APC's authors pay, you can download a PDF of a 2026 open-access article from a @nature.com portfolio journal and find that it's totally untagged and inaccessible. What kind of "open access" is this if they're invisible to screen readers?

the nature of my work is that sometimes I'll check a citation on wikipedia for a basic history fact, only to find that "source" is actually citing another source, so I'll check on THAT only to find, after reading 90 pages, that the basic fact is absolutely not in there. Thus there is NO SOURCE.

"The research suggests that generalizations about human behavior are often flawed because they rely on samples composed largely of White individuals."

A very thoughtful exploration on the value and limits of statistics in understanding the past!

Last point on this article: the two NSF admin guys more or less straight out admit they're going to follow Trump's 2026 budget for the agency, not the actual budget passed by Congress. Which is, you know, not legal.