An increasingly hostile climate in the United States of America (2026) as foreseen in “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” (1978)
Max Berger@maxberger.bsky.social · 3w agoCool cool cool cool cool cool cool
Alison E. King
@alisonelinor.bsky.social
Assistant Professor of Soil Science, University of Maine Soil organic matter, biogeochemistry, agroecology, sustainable soil management Soil Functions and Trajectories (SOFT) Lab https://www.thesoftlaboratory.com/
Max Berger@maxberger.bsky.social · 3w ago
Monday is the deadline for public comment! The Heritage Foundation has been mobilizing its members to leave comments in favor of the rule change, so every unique comment matters (don’t use a form letter or copy/paste—similar comments are batched and treated as one).
Bethany Brookshire@beebrookshire.bsky.social · last mo.There's an OMB rule change that would require political oversight of scientific grants, and could pull any that don't "reflect presidential priorities" Another country has tried this before! It was the USSR and it was called Lysenkoism. By @thsaey.bsky.social www.sciencenews.org/article/omb-...
tech capture of the NSF: “it allows NSF to make awards to nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely for the purpose of receiving the NSF award.”
Jeffrey Mervis@policyhound.bsky.social · 2mo agoBeen wondering why NSF isn't spending most of its FY26 appropriation? A $1.5B tech initiative may be the reason. And big cuts to hundreds of research programs could be just the beginning of the bad news. www.science.org/content/arti...
Is using average soil moisture and temperature a "good" proxy for soil respiration? Not always. The relationship depends on depth, climate, and how strongly soil moisture and temperature are coupled with respiration processes. Excited to see my dissertation work getting published 🤗
JGR: Biogeosciences@jgrbiogeo.bsky.social · 2mo agoJensen's Inequality Quantifies How Temporal Averaging of Moisture Inputs Affects Modeled Soil Respiration Across Continental Scales agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
How good is it when you get that perfect intellectual impedance match with someone and conversation feels like a mind-meld? I swear I could chase that feeling like it’s a solar eclipse.
#StatsPubs No matter how many times you read it, this paper on hierarchical GAMs keeps giving. Clear model explanations together with R code (mgcv). So useful! doi.org/10.7717/peer... Thanks for writing @ericjpedersen.bsky.social, D. Miller, @gsimpson.bsky.social @noamross.net
Today, the University of Maine's Vice Chancellor for Finance and Strategic AI Integration (who made $243,000 last year) sent UMaine campuses an announcement that we have partnered with OpenAI with a contract for ChatGPT Edu. I sent him the following questions:
New paper in Global Change Biol.: soil organic carbon increases crop yields and reduces interannual variability, but largest gains occur under moderate water conditions, not drought. SOC needs water to work. w @muellern.bsky.social @kyoungchoi.bsky.social Jesse Burkhardt doi.org/10.1111/gcb....
Oh, would you look at that: Men are perceived as more creative than women even when competency is controlled for, and more deserving of rewards. Five studies shows men are routinely seen having more 'out of the box' creativity. But not only are women... adalovelaceday.substack.com/p/gender-ste...
ALD Report: Gender stereotypes result in women being judged as less creative
And men being judged as more deserving of reward.
adalovelaceday.substack.com
Some lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic are Deeply Concerned about labeling plant-based products “meat” citing consumer confusion, but I have yet to see even one furrowed brow about bread and butter pickles
Rav@rvbdrm.com · 4mo agoWE NEED BAD IRRELEVANT TAKES IMMEDIATELY FLOOD THE TIMELINE
WHAT! Apparently a piece of the Wright Brothers' plane (first powered flight in 1903) is on the Artemis II's Orion spacecraft! It's a 1 square inch swath of muslin fabric on loan from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. 🥺
The last time human eyes were far enough from Earth to see the whole globe was December 1972. www.nasa.gov/image-detail...
The tech industry props up the richest people on the planet and pays far less than its fair share of taxes. It can absolutely afford its own R&D. But instead, it’s effectively hijacked our public science infrastructure because having more wealth than anyone could ever spend is still not enough.
Leslie Rissler@ljrissler.bsky.social · 4mo agoI am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”
This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.
Food or not? – Although total calorie production increased by 24% from 2010 to 2020, the available calories in the food system for human consumption increased by only 17% as more calories were used for livestock feed & biofuel production: doi.org/10.1088/2976... >>
Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available as food for human consumption
Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available as food for human consumption, West, Paul C, Gerber, James S, Cassidy, Emily S, Stiffman, Samuel
doi.org
I have a joke about carbon offsets but someone else is going to have to tell it to you and a third person is going to have to verify if it is funny while a fourth person argues that the second person was already going to tell the joke anyway
samuel mehr@mehr.nz · 5mo agoI have an artificial intelligence joke and whether or not you're interested, I'm gonna tell you it
Simple information about what the SAVE Act would actually do to American voters. Tens of millions would lose their right to vote unless they spend lots of $$$ and jump through bureaucratic hoops before November.
NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10
I'm funding a launching a new cat show in which I'm the judge. I hug each cat, tell the owner their cat is perfect, and then we all hang out and talk about our cats.
it's like he sees himself as...serving...the public some kinda public servant has anyone thought of this before, i think there's something there
The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory
A little bit late, but I'm looking to hire a postdoc at Cornell to measure the private value of soil health improvements in US ag. A 2-year gig. Well suited for an ag/resource economist or data scientist w/ interests in soil health and solid programming & econometric chops. ad coming soon!
Students applying for NSF funding are having their applications “returned without review” for being “ineligible,” despite their proposed research falling squarely within the application guidelines. eos.org/research-and...
Graduate Students’ NSF Fellowship Applications Are Being “Returned Without Review” - Eos
Graduate students applying for NSF funding have had their applications returned without review—even though their proposed research appears to fall squarely within the fields of study outlined in the p...
eos.org
It’s not left vs right or English vs French. It’s people who have bagged milk vs the godless heathens who don’t!
Mark Shaw@markshawtoronto.bsky.social · 6mo agoGuess the map!
But, as they say, there is no time like the present [OK, maybe the 1930s if you want to nitpick] But, with some data wrangling, my first NSF Funding Curves! 2/3
“A republic, if you can keep it.” ~Attributed to Benjamin Franklin when asked after the Constitutional Convention if the new government would be a monarchy or a republic. Franklin was born in Boston on this day 320 years ago: Jan. 17, 1706. Image: National Portrait Gallery.
So little was known 18 years ago when I started researching climate comms. I'm blown away by how much we now know. This study, led by the incomparable Jan Voelkel with his all-star band, and released today in @natclimate.nature.com confirms that many distinct message strategies can work...
A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages - Nature Climate Change
How to effectively communicate climate change to the public has long been studied and debated. Through a registered report megastudy, researchers tested the ten most-cited climate change messaging str...
nature.com
Doing this challenge called “January” where I try to make it through the whole month of January