My new startup, GymBot: you hire one of our state of the art ai robots to go to the gym and work out for you.

I have never been more glad that I have resisted the digitization of my classes.

"The Trump Administration has begun the great public lands sell off in earnest." Interior to Sell Off Millions of Acres of Public Lands in Alaska open.substack.com/pub/morethan...

Surprise: A pundit who still thinks it was a good idea for the United States to invade Iraq also thinks it is a good idea for the United States to invade Iran. Another surprise: This is kind of person to whom the New York Times gives space on their opinion pages. www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/o...

Obituary for a great paleobiologist Richard Karl Bambach (18 May 1934–20 June 2025) who infused the large-scale functional approaches to paleobiology and paleoecology. doi.org/10.1017/pab.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents

This is important y’all. This is our chance to save the stars.

What's more shocking than ICE's plan to cram as many 8,500 humans into massive, soul-crushing warehouses? Seeing the actual DHS floor plan that echoes slavery ships and history's worst gulags with no rec space but a gun range for guards My new column on the camps www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

"Many of us who work at universities, not just NYU, have watched in confusion and horror at the way our administrations have approached generative AI and its integration into the systems that we use to teach." AFT has said AI must be a mandatory subject of bargaining.

AN INTRODUCTION TO FORAMINIFERA paleonerdish.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/a...

Thanks to the OBBB, Amazon’s tax bill for 2025 is $1.2 billion, down from $9 billion the year before despite a 45% jump in profits.

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