To read the university’s triumphant all-campus email about restored NIH funding, you’d think UC administrators made it happen. But that’s not true. In fact the UC *Faculty Association* organized the lawsuit; administrators kept their heads down and hoped it’d go away.

Truly impressive number of birds migrating tonight. More than 800 MILLION birds up in the air right now❗ #BirdMigration

If the purpose of this PSA is to remind ppl that Ferruginous Hawks have feathered tarsi, mission accomplished

Nothing says “land of the free” like armed agents of the state saying “show me your papers if you want your daughter back” bsky.app/profile/nbcb...

Mammatus clouds, but my 10-yr old called them “skeleton fingers” #NewMexico

Intense ivory poaching has led to the evolution of tusklessness in some African elephant populations, which might reduce poaching, but also happens to be an X-chromosome–linked dominant trait that is lethal to males #EleFunFactFriday #TheMoreYouKnow 💫 🧪 🐘 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is a massive, history making abuse of your power. It will define your legacy and one day you will come to regret punishing free speech and trying to destroy democracy.

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

And yes, now is the right time. New for @undark.org "The fundamental problem with the tenure process is that it has struggled to recognize that knowledge is curated, created, and consumed differently today than even a decade ago." undark.org/2025/09/11/o...

The BLM is seeking to eradicate the Public Lands Rule, which allows the conservation to be included in land use planning. There are a lot of areas of critical environmental concern in BLM land. It's in the federal register and the public commenting period has started. Please comment!

Germany’s famous study showed over 80% insect declines in farmland over 27 years. “Those findings were often blamed on pesticides and habitat loss. Sockman’s work shows something different. Insects are collapsing even in a meadow with little human pressure. Climate itself may be enough.”

Beyond supergenes: the diverse roles of inversions in trait evolution www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Like woodpeckers? Or population genomics? Or three-species hybridization? Or selective sweeps? Then this is for you! The typeset version of "Evidence for ancient selective sweeps followed by differentiation among three species of Sphyrapicus sapsuckers" is published today: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

What are we even doing?

ICE kidnapping a mother as her child begs the officers not to take her. Heartbreaking 💔 😢

After a heated US Open match, tennis star Taylor Townsend was told she had “no class, no education.” This is bigger than sports — this is about respect. Continue to let your racket do the talking, Taylor. We stand with you. 🎾✊🏿

Are they f***ing kidding: the immigrant-hunters go into a fire zone and arrest people actually fighting fires? This is sheer insanity. www.cnn.com/2025/08/28/u...

Many people may not feel the immediate brunt of what RFK Jr. and Vought have now wrought. But it will be extensive and long-term. 3/

“The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive...“ -Demetre Daskalakis, Director, Natl Center Immunization & Resp. Diseases, CDC www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/the-resign...

beautiful article on Wilson's Phalarope migration and Mono Lake www.latimes.com/environment/...

our paper on how light pollution affects bird vocal behavior is out today in Science!! w/ @brentpease.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Pushed out by Trump, New Jersey ecologist launches bid for Congress | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Rare bird fails to move Overton window

RFK Jr promised that he’d determine the causes of autism, by September. Instead, he gutted the agency and effectively shut down the area assigned to autism research. But maybe it will all come together in the next 10 days or so. www.propublica.org/article/rfk-...

Nature: Cancelling mRNA studies is the highest irresponsibility go.nature.com/3HDx4wD cc Jay Bhattacharya

🇺🇸 National Guard soldier speaks out: “I swore an oath to defend our constitution… seeking refuge is not an act of violence. Locking people up for it is.”

Absolutely the fuck not. Any senior administrator who even entertains the possibility of a $1 BILLION DOLLAR SETTLEMENT has no legitimate place overseeing researchers.

Deaf guy tried to show ICE his ID. An agent grabbed it and didn't return it. So he tried to type a message about his disability but an agent grabbed his phone. He was left w/ no way to communicate w/ the men seizing him. He was a DACA recipient (a "dreamer"). He spent nearly a month in detention.

So we have this database for wildlife disease surveillance, and we made a data standard, and an R and Python package to help you clean your data, and two years in we just still cannot get first adopters, so here’s my new bit: I will personally Venmo you $20 of my personal money to share a dataset

Just to give the TL;DR on this one: *The* main purpose of the EO is to move funding priorities and decisions away from experts and career professionals over to political appointees. With the ultimate power held by Vought / OMB.

Those mRNA vaccine programs that RFK Jr. is killing because he claims they don't work? The people who invented them got the f***ing Nobel Prize. And they've saved literally millions of lives already. www.pbs.org/newshour/hea...

Why would NYT cover a severely under-powered study with a preliminary negative result? They should consider who stands to suffer if they are shouting a false negative conclusion from the rooftops www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

I assumed exotic bird introductions were a relic of the distant past but apparently the government tried introducing dozens of game birds between 1948-70, and basically all of them failed. I wrote about the Foreign Game Introduction Program in my latest post. birdhistory.substack.com/p/welcome-to...

The super intelligent will save us, i’m sure, right after they finish this important research

We could have had cancer vaccines, and instead the United States will contribute nothing whatsoever to mRNA research, condemning millions of people worldwide to unnecessary illness and death

Elon Musk was today awarded a $29 billion "interim" pay package by Tesla's board of directors. *There are fewer than 100 people on earth with a net worth of $29 billion. *Most state budgets are smaller than $29 billion. *It's way more than NASA's budget. *It's enough to buy most of Ford or GM!

Are anteaters the new crabs?? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcini...

Early this morning #Whimbrel POTSKAR landed in Guinea, W Africa, after flying 7000+km from St-Petersburg, Russia. It took POTSKAR 5.5 days of NON-STOP flight, varying altitude from 10s of meters over the Baltic and the Med, to >5km over land. #ornithology www.globalflywaynetwork.org/tracks/speci...

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

New paper out on the dangers of using patterns across spatial climate gradients to predict what will happen with changing climate. That includes species distribution modeling. Space-for-time substitution can be misleading in sign, not just the magnitude of effects. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New research from our lab documents important drought impacts on desert bird communities in the SW United States 🌎🐦 25 years of bird data across the Mojave & Sonoran deserts, show drought drives clear declines in bird abundance & species richness. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/3

Check out our new special feature: Monitoring and Restoring Gene Flow in the Increasingly Fragmented Ecosystems of the Anthropocene www.pnas.org/topic/574 #biodiversity #evolution #ecology #popgen #ClimateEmergency

The politically weaponized "lab leak" theory is destroying both pandemic preparedness & all of American science. Grateful to @kgandersen.bsky.social, @arambaut.bsky.social, @eddieholmes.bsky.social, & Bob Garry for their courage & commitment to our field. theconversation.com/how-conspira...

🚨 NEW today in Nature Genetics: the LISTEN principles are a FAIR-compatible framework that will allow genetic sequence databases to seamlessly participate in new multilateral access and benefit-sharing systems, such as the CBD Cali Fund and the WHO PABS System. 🧬🧪 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Love this story. How a Peruvian in Rome became the papal barber

The NIH’s 2024 budget of just under $37B generated $95B in economic activity in 2024 alone. 99.4% of new pharmaceuticals approved from 2010-2019 came from NIH-funded research. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that generates as much direct economic benefit as our NIH did before they destroyed it

This lying monster. NIH created and funded therapies his own daughter with cystic fibrosis benefits from.

Yep, that was the point. Clear for a long time before they took power, and yet very little resistence or at least introspection from the media &polizical elites on the left and center who happily did their part in legitimizing the false lab leak myth to the public.

Here’s the ‘lab leak’ family of Covid conspiracy theories, all of which are utter BS, being used to justify Project 2025’s destruction of federal science (Also, leaf-blowers-on-lizards was NSF funded, not NIH, and it was both cheap and clever)