This 65-year-old British grandma was visiting Yellowstone. She entered the US legally, had a valid tourist visa. Never had a run-in with the law in her life. ICE detained her, shackled her, locked her in a windowless prison for six weeks. Pure evil. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The National Science Foundation’s entire budget is $10 billion.

It is shocking how quickly one of the biggest benefits of U.S. higher education, the ability to recruit the best students from around the world, is eroding.

CORRUPTION WATCH: The family of Commerce Secy Lutnick now gets pay outs of tens of billions or more in tariff refunds. The Fix Is In: Lutnick Family To Make Killing On Tariff Demise talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-f...

Plans for a border wall through the remote Big Bend region of West Texas are causing residents and elected officials to speak out. The barrier would cut through ranchland and small towns as well as a state and national park.

A Cambodian man -- old enough to have survived Pol Pot genocide but too young to die -- is the 7th person to die in ICE custody this year. A Cuban man died of asphyxia in Jan, with witnesses saying guards killed him. A Palestinian woman was shackled after a seizure. www.reuters.com/world/us/cam...

The golden mussel, a highly destructive invasive species that began to plague South American waterways decades ago, has reached the Amazon region, threatening some of the richest biodiversity on the planet. https://scim.ag/4rq3gFz

New paper out examining fish food web degradation in the Anthropocene. We show the structure of aquatic food webs are changing-- even when species richness doesn’t. These signals are strongly associated with decreases in body size within fish communities. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐🐠🐡🦈🐟

“Hanging that banner should put to rest any doubt that Donald Trump has hijacked the independence of the Justice Department. He — not the American people — is the only client DOJ’s current leadership serves." www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

Tenure Track Assistant Professor and Curator of #Mollusca at the Natural History Museum Denmark, University of Copenhagen: employment.ku.dk/tenure-track...

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Federal officials now project that Lake Powell will "most probably" drop below power pool level — meaning Glen Canyon Dam will no longer be able to generate hydropower — before the end of this year: www.landdesk.org/p/the-colora... via @landdesk.bsky.social

New story today on the public battle between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, which is really a fight about the future of AI in warfare: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/t...

@xenolith.bsky.social captured this AMAZING video of a scorpion snagging and stinging a moth near our Stovepipe Wells camp. The alluvial fan around the camp was experiencing a superbloom supporting a big hatch of moths which this scorpion took full advantage of! youtube.com/shorts/FtYHz...

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide. This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

Trump's nominee to lead the National Park Service, Scott Socha, helped run a company that claimed trademark ownership over historic place names at Yosemite—many rooted in Indigenous history—then sued the NPS over name use, costing taxpayers millions. Now he wants to run the agency? Disgraceful.

Not really a thread guy but an interesting thing about the mountains around Cortina and throughout the Italian Alps is that they’re fundamentally shaped by global warming, only it happened 234 million years ago

A little over two weeks left to apply for this postdoc-to-faculty fellowship! It's a great department that's grown rapidly in the last couple years. Happy to chat with folks who would want to collaborate

The current person in charge of ICE's procurement for detention is a GEO Group executive who ran the company's immigration detention portfolio. He was granted an "ethics waiver" from DHS allowing him to hand out contracts to GEO in his new role.

A huge shout-out to Elizabeth M. Dowding (@the.fairest.fowl) for creating this groundbreaking article, and congratulations on its publication in Nature Eco & Evo. Great work and absolutely worth reading: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." –Justice Louis Brandeis Words spoken many years ago that are just as relevant today. We must continue the fight to get big money out of politics.

The interior of Kristi Noem’s new billionaire-class luxury jet is complete with two bidets and a wet bar with a wine chiller. It will be purchased on our dime from the slush fund Congress approved in the One Big Beautiful Bill. open.substack.com/pub/newsnotn...

Censorship takes a big step forward in Texas: aaup-texas.org/blog/f/ut-re...

I think this is paywalled but you can get the gist www.ajc.com/news/2026/02...

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups… “Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.”

wealth concentration is already 200% as bad at is was in 2020. think about that

This is what ICE does every day. Hunt little kids who are here legally. They get sent to a place called the “baby jail” in Texas. Very little of it ends up on video like this. But it’s routine. And disgusting.

The commander in chief telling troops who they have to vote for is itself a presidency ending impeachable scandal.

The stories weren’t played together on A1, but they probably should’ve been. We’ve come a long way as a planet from the Arab spring days when tech bros touted themselves as harbingers of freedom.

Visitors to our country should not face a digital shakedown. @wyden.senate.gov and I are calling on CBP to reverse its invasive proposal to collect five years of social media history from travelers from trusted partner nations.

Homeland Security is said to have sent Google and Meta hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or criticize ICE.

Exclusive: Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation Staff members have been instructed to scrub this topic and ‘biodefense’ from the agency’s website. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

“I’m going to seize control of elections even if Congress blocks me” is comically authoritarian and should result in his immediate removal from office. Yes, he’s deranged, but what’s even more deranged is how we’ve apparently all decided to acquiesce to a dictator because it’s Trump being Trump.

Come and work with our colleagues @bristolbiosci.bsky.social - three new lectureship posts around School strategic priorities - including 'Evolutionary Biology and understanding the evolution of life'

Perhaps dangerously, I've discovered there's an audience for grapolites on here. Thus: graptolite structural models made by E. S. Parkington and by (or inspired by) W. J. Sollas. The perfect dinner party centrepiece. In the @lapworthmuseum.bsky.social collections #FossilFriday

Having spent 5 years writing a book on CO2 my take on it is: it's the source of carbon for carbon-based life, the knob governing Earth's temperature, its behavior on this planet--moving between rocks air water life & rocks again--makes it Earthlike, and when it goes out of control lots of stuff dies

AI agent goes nuts on open source maintainer after having its pull request denied. This is a pretty insane story. Open source development as we've been used to for the last few decades is likely over. 1/ theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

this is comically evil. brazenly anti-social. just absolute black-pilled nihilism. we will not have a republic, we will not be free, until we regulate these companies to the point where — at a bare minimum — they're too afraid to put stuff like this down on paper. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

There are ~90 million people alive today because of USAID. Russ Vought illegally shut it down and now is spending the money on himself. These are deeply evil people. www.reuters.com/world/us/whi...

Tragically, there is now considerable evidence that the administration is violating the Eighth Amendment at scale.

UCMP Short Course on March 7, 2026! We'll explore "Life's Six Great Ways of Being." UC Berkeley scientists will discuss how new methods in molecular genetics give us a new perspective on traditional classification systems. Register for this free lecture series at: ucmp.berkeley.edu/short-course...

Historic #climate news . . .

Fishing ban halts seven decades of biodiversity decline in the Yangtze River | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... A collaboration with Yushun Chen, Seb Brosse, @sjcfishy.bsky.social and other! @uwenvironment.bsky.social @uwsafs.bsky.social

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

Another new paper out now: led by Amy Betz from the @bruceslieberman.bsky.social lab on how a variety functional traits did or didn't impact extinction risk in the Plio-Pleistocene-Recent western Atlantic regional mass extinction Of the 16 traits considered, none was correlated with increased risk

Donald Trump erases the laws of physics

Job opportunities... Newly launched Quantitative Biology Initiative in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park seeks applications for three collaborative postdoctoral fellowships. Best consideration date 3/14. Full Details: umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j...