Congrats @maratimes.bsky.social !

Thrilled to share our #Comment in @natmicrobiol.nature.com A collaborative effort by a fantastic group of researchers across disciplines! 💬We explored how interdisciplinary microbiology can thrive when early-career researchers are included and supported. 📄 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

It is so much fun to work with @yunqianhu.bsky.social, who is an incredible interdisciplinary scientist! 🔬

Not your Grandfather's summer. Changes in July temperatures from 1950 to 2024. Enough of the "it's just the same summer it's always been...." narrative

reminder of amazing fellowship opportunity!

I'm running a seminar in the fall for senior undergrads in Evolutionary Ecology. I'm hoping to curate a reading list mixing classic and new papers that illustrate how combining ecological and evolutionary perspectives can lead to new insights. Do you have a favorite I should consider?

Big up to @rdzombak.bsky.social for bringing eyes to this story. 🧪 So many people beyond my little cohort of fellows are impacted by slowdowns at NOAA. America is rapidly losing footing as a leader in climate science and we all are paying the cost.

So excited to announce the GRUMP paper is published! This global dataset provides relative abundances for plankton spanning Archaea to Zooplankton from unfractionated (>0.2µm) water samples using 3-domain universal primers that amplify 16S and 18S in one PCR reaction. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Future grad students starting in Fall 2025 or Fall 2026 in ecology and evolution should apply to this excellent opportunity from @simonsfoundation.org!

There is one month left to apply for our Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution! These awards provide support for students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs with a plan to perform research in #ecology and #evolution. www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons... #science

hey, @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social this is a good idea

The total amount of public land that Trump wants to make available for sale is equivalent to more than TWICE the size of CALIFORNIA. All to pay for tax cuts to some of the richest people in world history.

Based on some quick math, this alone could fund the NSF Plant Genome Research Program for ~4 years; the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, which was totally axed in the NSF budget request, for ~9 years; and ~ half the total NSF GRFP budget

RFK Jr.‘s extreme anti-vax views — and his related conflicts of interest — were a huge problem during his confirmation process. So he promised not to change the vaccine advisory panel. Today, he fired every single expert on that panel. It's a public health disaster.

This parade will cost at least the equivalent of 180 years worth of an NIH biomedical research grant.

Hot take. The government isn’t subsidizing university budgets. Universities are lending subsidized expertise to research and development that contributes to the public good. It’s called partnership.

I am honored to have been named a 2025 Howes Scholar by the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship committee! www.krellinst.org/csgf/about-d...

I don't think anyone outside of universities, pharma and biotech, independent research institutions have any idea of what is happening right now. If you haven't sounded the alarm among your friends, family and colleagues, now is the time to do it.

Friday PM attempted massacre... of science. The fight is not over. There are things to do. Organize with @standupforscience.bsky.social Get informed: scienceimpacts.org Call your representative & ask: what are they doing to stop the self-destruction of American's innovation economy?

Today was a perfectly colorful day 🌈—on the way to sample coccolithophores, we stumbled upon a pink lake. Under the scope, I found green algae and diatoms in a “forest” of pink! 💗💚🔬 #protistsonsky #CoccoChannel #HRZZ

its crazy how dominant germany was in science (especially chemistry) in the 19th century, it was basically the international language for scientists, people came from all over the world to train at heidelberg etc, and then....

A lot of people know about the Germans in the space program, but the more relevant engineer might be Qian Xuesen, the MIT/CalTech aerospace professor who co-founded JPL and was sent to recruit the Germans. We deported him the 1950s. He became the leader of China’s missile program.

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday 📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations! These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs. Save and share the post!

Bioinformatics folks: check out our @biorxivpreprint on a new, very efficient and accurate system for automated genome annotation, EviAnn, led by my colleague Aleksey Zimin: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

NSF to ONLY fund research in five areas: artificial intelligence, quantum information science, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and translational science. Can this be happening? www.science.org/content/arti...

Exclusive: National Science Foundation staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced.

Important 🧵 if your research depends on genome assemblies from long (PacBio / ONT) reads. As @merenbey.bsky.social says, these may not be the genomes you are looking for. TLDR: the assemblers are wrong and predict too many small circular contigs.

🧪 Our Terminated NSF Grant Tracker is live 🧪 🔴 114 NSF grants listed so far 🔴 Cancelled grants focused on → Training scientists → Misinformation → AI → Climate change Credit to @noamross.net for all the work to build this & to all PIs who submitted their info. Link: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni...

Thank you everyone who came to see my talk at #ASLO yesterday! Been having such an inspiring time hearing, seeing, and talking about amazing aquatic science! Also Charlotte has been so beautiful this spring! So much fun exploring with @akrinos.bsky.social and @kjehickman.bsky.social!

Had an amazing time at #Eco-DAS2025 here in Oahu, Hawai’i! Much scientific scheming was had & new collaborations were made - stay tuned for the pubs to come from the phytoplankton ‘omics team with @akrinos.bsky.social & others!

Post from a few weeks below... & below for cancellation of NIH Summer Internships program (one of many). College students & their parents should be calling their representatives and asking them why a mega-billionaire is shutting down career opportunities nationwide. www.reddit.com/r/NIH/commen...

Graduate admissions being put on hold because of the chaos...

I'm seeing a different graphic based on data from the same source going around, but this one should circulate, too. itep.org/a-distributi...

Counting matters. Equally relevant: costs are far greater once accounting for (i) job loss; (ii) harm on local economies; (iii) knock-on effects from closed labs & projects + halt to discoveries. Whose side is DOGE on? 👇

Here are some cool animations I made a couple years ago for teaching DAG-based causal inference Confounding!

The operational costs at NSF are low -- less than 10% of the Congressional appropriations. Most appropriations are returned to universities in the United States, ultimately benefitting students in all regions while promoting an educated workforce. (13) nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Budget...

3 of the top 4 institutions receiving the most NSF funding are for earth, ocean, and atm science 1. Leidos(MD): McMurdo Station on Antarctica 3. UCAR(CO): National Center for Atmospheric Research 4. WHOI(MA): Ocean Observatories, Deep Submergence, research ships dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/top50inst2/d...

🔥🌊 The #Mediterranean is undergoing a rapid ecological shift! Our new study in Nature Communications reveals that #MassMortality events have caused a substantial loss of benthic #trait #diversity in just 5 years Read the full study: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #ClimateChange #MarineEcology 🌍🌐🧪

Dear US scientists, We've been hearing a lot of questions of the form "Why aren't universities doing anything!? They need to speak out!" We can explain. It's bad news. We're on our own. But understanding why can help us all figure out our plan. Read along in thread 1/x 🧪

Check out this piece, which combines laboratory observations on within-species variation with simulated traits in the global Darwin model - w/ @nekton4plankton.bsky.social, @skshapiro.bsky.social and several others not on 🦋. By far my favorite research article so far & excited to build on it!

Enhancing microbial predator–prey detection with network and trait-based analyses microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... #jcampubs

⚠️ Global meta-analysis shows action is needed to halt genetic diversity loss https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08458-x 🐘🐅🦜🐋🪲

To update people on the NSF PRFB situation: despite the court challenge and rescinding the original memo, the NSF has continued to comply with the executive order. They have not communicated with us at all and our paychecks are still canceled indefinitely. I know people who cannot pay their rent.

New paper from me + @lauradee.bsky.social on using causal inference methods and concepts in ecology! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (1/5)

📣#MTTM (on Tues!) Dr. Arianna Krinos (@akrinos.bsky.social) is a C-CoMP Postdoctoral Fellow in @maratimes.bsky.social's lab at Brown University. Arianna uses insights from 'omics & culturing in models to understand phytoplankton community interactions & ecosystem implications of genetic diversity.

I'm very happy to report that Matt Schechter's PhD work is now online as a pre-print: "Ribosomal protein phylogeography offers quantitative insights into the efficacy of genome-resolved surveys of microbial communities", www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here's a little 🧵 about it.

Stoked about this manuscript, many years in the making. We present an original resource of ~700 highly curated plastid MAGs of marine pelagic algae. Among these we found a novel deep branching group of plastid genomes; we informally call them leptophytes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...