Scientists are supposed to be happy when their predictions are skillful, right? Why do I not feel happy?

Today was the last day for our SPRUCE experiment. Bringing it to a close after 10 years! mnspruce.ornl.gov

Some grim projections in here jimehansen.substack.com/p/global-tem...

More shit going down... www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The preprint for a new study is now available on biorxiv! Day late for #worldsoilday, but out none the less! Stands of Populus trees were studied over the steep temp/rainfall gradients of the Cascade Mts of Washington State to understand their effects on microbial interactions

#WorldSoilDay Healthy soil = Healthy food = Healthy humans = Healthy planet 70% of our soil is already degraded. Let’s act before it’s too late. #SaveSoil SaveSoil.org

Stealing idea from another on here. In honor of #worldsoilday, reposting my first paper. Was just talking with an intern today about the ancient TA cloning/sanger sequencing techniques we used back then, but I've basically doing the same research for over two decades now! doi.org/10.1126/scie...

🪱🐜 Happy #WorldSoilDay!! 🕷️🪲 Although we celebrate soil everyday, today is a great reminder to appreciate the breadth of diversity beneath our feet. Check out the GSBI atlas to explore the organisms that call soil home! www.globalsoilbiodiversity.org/atlas-introd...

Happy world soil day to all those "dirty" nerds that celebrate! Some pleasing pics of few times I got away from my desk to get dirty! - www.un.org/en/observanc...

I have a standing search from google for ORNL research stories. This one lit up my feed today :( Unfortunately my unofficial guess is that 12% probably cost even more in energy than the humans would!

Great new study about a group of fungi first reported in my dissertation work! -- Short‐ and long‐read metabarcoding of Archaeorhizomycetes reveals high phylogenetic diversity structured by vegetation and climate --New Phytologist @newphyt.bsky.social nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Final peat coring campain of our decade+ effort on the SPRUCE experiment in MN this last week. We had a big team effort to complete 4X as many cores as in past campaigns (more replicates and archive material!),

Just pulled out my plots/sensors from Oregon on Wychus Creek the week before last. Last night 1 of those sites looks to have burned (top center circle) in Flat Fire, and fire is approaching another site just decommissioned at Camp Polk (bottom left circle) and outskirts of Sisters OR.

Field work! Weedy edition… Can you find the Populus deltoides?

Keep sciencing. We are living through a time when looking at a rock and wondering how old it is qualifies as an act of resistance.

Come work at the UMich Biological Station as a Michigan Fellow (you don't have to be a biologist)! Apply today: societyoffellows.umich.edu/uncategorize...

And on the 6th day the lord created Illumina, and he said, “Damn, that craps expensive!”

Kenyon is hiring a TT microbiologist! Please share widely. I’m the search chair & am happy to answer any questions. careers.pageuppeople.com/695/cw/en-us...

Chaos on the way home from the beauty shop! FYI - photos were taken at pickup and in driveway. No laws were broken during drive. 😉

Isn’t this lovely… :( news.sky.com/story/inside...

“Highlight”…. Not a single Regional office or Research station in the PNW. States with most majestic forest and some greatest producers of forest products

New paper alert! We are in the last year of the of our SPRUCE project now. Hope to get a few more from data in hand and collected this summer! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dismantling these departments that warn us about the weather is in Project 2025, and the core reason is they say these departments (RIGHTLY) drive “climate chang alarmism”, which “is harmful to future prosperity” (aka BIG OIL PROFITS)

This is the age we live in… they are just trying to punish all those involved in seeking truth. joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/on-sticks-...

Just took a walk on the trail along the Columbia River here in Richland. Pretty much every Populus I saw appears to be introduced or naturalized Eastern Cottonwood (Populus deltoides) rather than PNW native Black Poplar (P. trichocarpa) - 1/2

Good friday afternoon read! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Our oldest serving -80 is on its way to the scrap heap. Inherited it when I got to ORNL in 2003 although I think it’s at least 5yrs older than that. RIP old faithful!

The Trump administration’s proposed budget slashes about 90% of the funding for one of the country’s cornerstone biological and ecological research programs. 🌐🧪 www.nytimes.com/2025/05/31/c...

An analysis of the presidents budget impacts on Science. Overall DOE Office of Science seems to fair a little better but even this new budget release fails to detail where the nearly 14% cut is going to fall.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic. Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come. But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget. Speak up now before it is too late. (inflation adjusted $-s below)

This represents a systematic dismantling of the US STEM ecosystem that will create lasting negative consequences for innovation and competitiveness.

New study out - we developed a pipeline for targeted assembly of genomes from (complex) soil metagenomes to examine the strain-level diversity and ecology of a dominant soil bacterial genus (Bradyrhizobium). Feedback appreciated. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is where we are headed folks… Trump branded “in house” science journals! www.politico.com/news/2025/05...

Setting up a new Populus experiment for our plant microbe interactions project today at a UTIA field site on the Holston River, just upstream from the confluence with the French Broad and starting point of the Tennessee River. This location does not suck!

Proud of this one. Work on this project/paper started over 10yrs ago. Data were interesting, but sat dormant after a team member left. After some effort and bringing on some new folks, we were able to revive and finally see it through to publication. :) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Lovely… www.science.org/content/arti...

Excited to say I got good news today and this study is now accepted (to be published soon) at Nature Communications! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I think I just found may new favorite use case for how AI will be a time saver for scientists. I read a paper yesterday that I was asked to peer review... (1/4)

Excellent article! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

MAGA!

ORNL finally gave us offical access to ChatGPT. Tried to get it to come up with an image of a drought experiment were working on for Populus. This is what it came up with... Those are some scary looking trees!

More field work today on the Caney Fork River today to collect dormant cuttings for propagation.

Definitely more information than Ive heard from our own management... None of it is good of course :( ww2.aip.org/fyi/doe-nati...

Did some field work over the last couple of days collecting dormant cuttings of Populus deltoides along the Ohio River to propagate for future experiments. Hoped to get alot more but the trees were sparse and often flooded, and the cold and wet weather made it difficult.