NPR asked an aspiring scientist in Philadelphia to interview an adult who is living his dream about his career in conservation science. n.pr/3TtUaeQ

We asked a first grader to interview his hero: A bird scientist

NPR asked an aspiring scientist in Philadelphia to interview an adult who is living his dream about his career in conservation science.

n.pr

I'm giving a public talk next Wednesday, August 5, on approaches to studying mid-water animals in situ. It will be light on technical details, and more conceptual and a journey to the deep than a regular science talk. Please join if you are interested! #marinelife www.bigelow.org/news/cafe-sc...

More on the Trump / Kratsios "Golden Age of Science" report, from @theverge.com

The tech-broification of American science has officially begun

Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI. 

theverge.com

Cool video about the nitroplast that’s also a testament to why basic science is important! youtu.be/g9B3gBhcwqM?...

This cell just changed biology

YouTube video by Grist

youtu.be

I went Salish Sea seaweeding for #PhycologyFriday, and saw *so* many nifty species! But I gave myself ID’ers block and hesitated to post in case I made a mistake. But I want to share the beauty! I’ll put tentative ID’s in alt text: corrections welcome since I’m learning🦀Ogden Point, Victoria BC 1/

Excited to share that our paper on Horizontal Gene Transfer is now out in its final form in @gigascience.bsky.social! 🥳 By analysing 163 high-quality ant genomes, we show that HGT from bacteria is widespread across the ants and likely has adaptive functions! doi.org/10.1093/giga... 🐜📸: Alex Wild

This is a cool read.

Dorothy Bishop@deevybee.bsky.social · last yr.

quite extraordinary story. Sometimes I think it’s the weird people that will save the world,

NSF's grantmaking is miserly when compared to recent years, but when compared it to the historical record, we see it's a radical break from the long-term consensus of investing in scientific innovation. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF 🧪

The NSF is on Track for its Worst Year in Generations – Grant Witness

Throttling of science funding is utterly unprecedented and radical when compared to the past 50 years.

grant-witness.us

Tiny unicellular #eukaryotes, big #biomaterial inspiration. Excited to share our Nature Communications study showing that tintinnid ciliates build their chemical- and heat-resistant shells from self-assembling proteins we call Tintinnidorins. doi.org/10.1038/s414... #protistsonsky 1/3

I’m sick of hearing about this and being messaged about it but this article is good. Any scientist with even a rudimentary knowledge of algae could fix this problem fairly easily for under $16 million. You can give that money back to the NSF. In fact, you could fund 100 3-year GRFs with $16M.

What Color Is the Reflecting Pool? An Investigation.

President Trump wanted an American-flag-blue Reflecting Pool. Instead, he got a swamp.

theatlantic.com

1/10 For decades, cellular aggregation was considered an evolutionary dead end. Cells could come together temporarily. But complex multicellular organisms like animals? Our study, led by JP Gerdt, with Ruibao & @jennahed.bsky.social suggests it may be time to rethink that🧵 #ProtistsOnSKy

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link

Police Remove Diabetes Experts From Conference for Distributing Critique of Trump Administration

nytimes.com

The Department of Biology at the University of Iowa is hiring an evolutionary ecologist at the assistant professor level for fall 2027. Come and be my colleague! jobs.uiowa.edu/faculty/view...

1/8 Inside your body lies something ancient. Our @pnas.org paper uncovers the deep unicellular prehistory of blood cell types. See paper and video. @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social @icreacommunity.bsky.social @prbb.org @csic.es @csicdivulga.bsky.social pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Gàlvez-Morante, Berney & Richter report the discovery of a novel lineage within Amoebozoa with intriguing behaviors like the “double-amoeba” and suggest that retention of gene function composition played a key role in shaping Amoebozoa evolution. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag071 #evobio #molbio

The evolution of gene functional repertoire in Amorphea: divergent strategies across Amoebozoa, Fungi, and Metazoa

Abstract. Metazoa and Fungi have been extensively studied to reconstruct the trajectory of Opisthokont evolution. Their sister group, Amoebozoa, provides a

doi.org

I shared on LinkedIn already, but I wanted to post here as well since I've got a different audience: I will be joining the Department of Plant Pathology at the @universityofga.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor on Aug 1!! I will keep studying #Aspergillus & #Fusarium that infect plants & humans 🥰

Who’s at #AbSciCon this week?

American science right now is basically 10,000 of these stories, all with their own heartbreaking specificity Lost careers, lost progress, lost discoveries I feel so sad every day for all we’ve lost and continue to lose 💔

Kathleen Bachynski@bachynski.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“Dr. Antaki, a biomedical engineer, had been building an artificial heart for babies and young children, a pump the size of a AA battery, and he was getting close. But with his research grants stopped, Dr. Antaki slowly drained his lab’s rainy day funds, and he was forced to lay off all his staff.”

I dream to someday live in a world where algae has become so mainstream that google doesn’t change “phycology” to “psychology”.

I am not usually regarded as an optimistic person (lol) or particularly mushy, but I do have an encouraging story I want to share today while basic research is being terminated and the NSF is being reshaped in unrecognizable ways. 🧵

I went to go look, and this time last year, NSF SBE had funded 216 awards. This year, they have funded 2.

1/23 New preprint! Been thinking about the origin of cellular life. Specifically, how protocells (or *any* compartments) just aren't enough to support the evolution of increasingly complex cells. You gotta de-Darwinize the parts! The ribosome/genome do this. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I have THREE active institutional accounts right now and I was still unable to access two papers that I needed today, both written by Carl Woese. The academic publishing industry needs to do better.

Interested in working on the evolution of photosynthetic endosymbioses? Come join us! I have 2 open positions in my new group @cemess.bsky.social in Vienna 3yr postdoc info: tinyurl.com/4emkjpn4 4yr PhD info: tinyurl.com/mtxmsjpy Apply by 1st June! Please share/repost #Protists #Symbiosis #PhD

Horizontal gene transfer is the insurance mechanism. Bacteria swap genes between lineages. Without HGT, costly-on-average genes get purged. With HGT, they sit at stable low frequencies, available when conditions shift. Mean fitness drops slightly with HGT. That dip is the premium.

"With limits on its ability to conduct oversight, the [NSB] turned to its responsibility of advising Congress on science policy" but before they could begin advising Congress on FY27 funding levels for the NSF "they were dismissed." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/u...

Scientists Press Congress on Trump’s Dismissal of Funding Agency Board

nytimes.com

IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models

Abstract. IQ-TREE (https://iqtree.github.io/) is a widely used open-source software tool for efficiently inferring phylogenetic trees under maximum likelih

academic.oup.com

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

Board Ouster Raises Further Concerns About NSF’s Future

The White House axed all members of the board overseeing the National Science Foundation Friday, leaving the agency with no board, director or deputy director. It finally provided a reason Monday afte...

insidehighered.com

Moran et al. in Science Emergent predictability in microbial ecosystems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Emergent predictability in microbial ecosystems

A long-standing hypothesis of microbial ecology is that simple patterns might persist despite community complexity or even emerge because of it. However, the concept of “emergent simplicity” remains partly intuitive. Here, we defined emergent ...

science.org

🆕 Our #LatestIssue is online now! 📚 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14698137... Highlights include: 🌱 Fascinating single cell red algae 🌱 Epigenetic regulation of mycorrhizal symbioses 🌱 Diversity affects microclimate temperature & humidity #PlantScience