"cite your sources" is not just an externally-imposed mandate but a personal discipline on thought itself. "cite your sources" is how you keep yourself in contact with reality. "cite your sources" is how you keep yourself from shadowboxing your own imagination."

ancient llama bit me dang head off

This is pretty much everything the vandals accuse federal science funders of doing wrong: money to foreign scientists for a fundamentally unethical experiment on children

Hahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahaha

The new Enabling Discovery through GEnomics (EDGE) Program page is posted. Please contact us at [email protected] if you have questions. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Fall 2024 grad here. Have to say, it doesn't feel great

So proud of the work @alliemartin.bsky.social did leading this study!

+++ Hissscord🐍 NEWS +++ Second call for joining our server! 🐸 Hissscord is open to everyone in the scientific herpetological community, from students to established researchers. 💬 DM me for an invite to the Discord channel, or reach out via email: hissscord[at]gmail.com Please share!📣

NSF GRFP is out 2.5 months late w/key changes 1. 2nd year graduate students not eligible. 2. "alignment with Administration priorities" 3. Unlike prior years, they DO NOT specify the expected number of awards... that is a BIG problem. a brief 🧵 w/receipts www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

While I'm sad our cover submission wasn't selected for our recent human duplication paper, check out the super cool illustration created with @lazaroillustration.bsky.social ! Certainly, you will be seeing Dennis lab members running around with "fishman" t-shirts at future meetings, inspired by Ohno

Yesterday's Tylenol press conference was at "inject bleach" levels of insanity, but it also revealed the plan for cancelling the MMR. Here's how I think this is going to go down. open.substack.com/pub/rasmusse...

🚨 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...

I’m setting up a Discord server for young herpetologists, derived from an idea at #SEH2025. The goal is to create a space for quick help, collaboration, and networking. If you’d like to give input or get involved, let me know! #herpetology

i'm livid we live in a world where this isn't about people with passionate opinions about herpetology

Demand some fucking resignations

Me: this is great, glad to see authors ripped off by AI getting their due. Me after using the search tool: I am one of these ripped off authors. Academics, it only takes a minute. Seven of my papers are in this and I had no idea.

saw a blue salmon swimming upstream to spawn today

We may have a one-year postdoctoral position opening! We're looking for someone with experience in attribution science OR very strong skills in climate epidemiology to come help us launch a Global Burden of Climate Change Study. Remote possible for the right person; aim to raise $ for a second year.

🐍 Florida has 500+ invasive species! We're studying public views on 13 of these "iconic" wildlife species ranging from herps, fish, birds, and mammals— covering your knowledge, opinions & support for management. ⏳️8–10 min confidential survey (IRB #ET00022350). Open to all not just FL residents

Real talk: our lab is at the cutting edge of tracking climate change-related deaths, and we have exactly $0 of external funding to do it. We're getting $0 from NIH and NSF for the next few years. If you're able to materially support our work, it keeps projects like HAL alive.

We maintain the only living database of studies that measure the present-day health impacts of climate change. Please share, and support our work if you can - elbow grease and cash both go a long way for climate-health labs right now. (8/?) www.healthattribution.org/database

CHILDREN OF MEN is going to place “surprisingly” high on the NYT Best Movies of the Century list (like #7) and it’s going to formally occasion the Strange New Respect that we all know is coming so I just want to say I have been riding for that movie since I was a sophomore in high school

I am surrounded by people who are outsourcing their own thinking to ChatGPT and they are quickly and obviously becoming dependent on it for even the most banal tasks. Once again, the "figuring it out" is the important part. Yes, you can use a crane to lift weights but you will not get stronger

I have a PhD and can’t afford to pay for my own healthcare. Since graduating/no longer working as a TA, I have lost my health insurance. Because I made/make/will make so little, I qualify for Medicaid. I’m hoping to be employed again soon but who knows with the current state of federal funding?

I don’t know if this will happen but if it does, I see it as an extension of this super flawed but pervasive idea that our PRIMARY (only?) identity is being a scientist and that we should do anything, go anywhere, in service of THAT identity, over all others. For many of us, that simply isn’t true

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

this is a day for those of us who have spent the last six months terminally online. this is for us and honestly, we deserve it.

We are so back

Congratulations to @jenna-n-palmisano.bsky.social and the rest of the team on a really cool pub! This novel PCR assay majorly increases our ability to detect the invasive parasite Raillietiella orientalis in North American snakes from fecal samples and cloacal swabs. doi.org/10.3389/famr...

Everything sucks, but I had a reviewer give respectful, pertinent feedback that will make my paper better. So. Small wins.

I wish more people understood that grants aren’t handouts. They are payments for services the government can’t provide without contracting with nonprofits & universities. We are out here doing the work of keeping people safe and the country functioning. The government needs us. The country needs us.

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but the orcas now have two F/A-18 Hornets

The "yeah that sucks" and nothing else from a lot of tenured professors regarding the impact of federal funding cuts is giving "thoughts and prayers"

The “brain drain” will be a primarily domestic phenomenon, w/ STEM-trained people moving into non-STEM occupations. There are not remotely enough STEM jobs abroad for our *millions* scientists, and even if there were, moving is hard, expensive & dependent on multiple intersecting privileges.

Excited to share a new article "Evolutionary Immunology". Typeset version just posted @ Annual Rev. Ecol Evol Syst. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... Thanks for the collaboration @grahammunology.bsky.social @laurenfuess.bsky.social @nataliesteinel.bsky.social, Grace Vaziri, Imroze Khan

Important to remind everyone that this is an ILLEGAL DIRECTIVE from the Executive Branch (impoundment).

Here is a fancy bird for your Friday evening, a male Golden-browed Chlorophonia. They are found in Central America, in Costa Rice and Panama, and Birds of the World describes them as short-billed, chunky tanagers. San Gerardo de Dota, Costa Rica

🚨 Practical URGENT tip for NSF grantees: Out of an abundance of caution, I would right now go into Research.gov and… 1. Download your NSF award letters. 2. Print PDF your annual reports. 3. Screenshot the status table for annual reports. NSF is planning maintenance tomorrow to Research.gov

This #EarthDay I see that the Turtle Survival Alliance is launching their 5th Annual Turtle Month so I thought I would share these two prints 🐡🧪 they commissioned of turtles supporting the Earth featuring endangered turtle species of special focus: one for turtles from North America, 🧵

Thrilled to share our globally pioneering research on DNA metabarcoding of spider egg sacs! A proud moment for Indian science - revealing novel host-parasitoid complexes and trophic networks. #DNAmetabarcoding #IndianScience #Biodiversity #Hymenoptera #Spider www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This cut is “a heartbreaker”, says Rob Denton, a biologist at Marian University in Indianapolis, Indiana, who has previously reviewed applications for the fellowship. https://go.nature.com/3Yp58Sh

Quick look at NSF GRFPs awarded 2021-2025. Overall 50% drop from 2024, with biggest absolute decreases in engineering, life sciences and chemistry. (sorry about the meh viz, in a hurry)

Well that’s sucky news. I’ve used CIRPES to run phylogenetic/evolutionary analyses from grad school to present. Such an important computational resource for the evolutionary biology community. What a loss. 😢

The sweet moment of a White-eye resting on a blooming plum tree, savoring spring’s arrival. #birds

Really sad to hear that CIPRES will be shutting down in March 2026. End of an era. @verourgiles.bsky.social and I use it in our undergrad evo bio class teaching students about alignment, model selection, and tree building, and I've used it heavily in my own research. I'm going to miss it.

In so far as it's a sign, it's a sign that elite academics enjoy mobility that 99% of their colleagues do not, given the absurdities of the academic labor market. If you wanted the "direst sign of bad things to come," that was probably when Mahmoud Khalil got detained.

Opinion: Five years ago, early career researchers needed help to survive the pandemic. Now they need it again www.statnews.com/2025/03/24/e...