Becca Ralston

@rebeccaralston.bsky.social

PhD student studying avian responses to climate change @nathist.bsky.social and @helsinki.fi 🐦

A thing I've been working on is out now: I wrote the cover story for the summer issue of Living Bird! Scientists have sequenced the genomes of almost all 25 (!) song sparrow subspecies AND connected their genes to how they're each likely to fare under climate change.

The Secret to Song Sparrows' Extraordinary Success Lies in Their Genome

This ordinary-seeming songbird species is teeming with subtle genetic diversity, which allows local populations to respond in various ways to a changing world.

allaboutbirds.org

An absolute stunner of an Archaeopteryx fossil preserves SO MUCH soft tissue, including scales on its toe pads and a group of flight feathers never seen before in Archaeopteryx. Known as tertials, they lie between the elbow and the body, and play a key role in powered flight for modern birds 🧪

A rare Archaeopteryx fossil was kept from scientists for decades. Its first-ever analysis reveals how the ‘first bird’ took flight | CNN

Scientists were finally given access to a remarkable Archaeopteryx fossil that’s allowed them to better understand exactly how the earliest known bird could fly.

cnn.com

“It’s extremely alarming that grants that have been vetted by the scientific community and deemed important and impactful to understand the world are now being cancelled because of political ideology,” says @lkfazio.bsky.social. “This is direct censorship of scientific research.”

Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants

Studies that touch on LGBT+ health, gender identity and DEI in the biomedical workforce could be terminated, according to documents obtained by Nature.

nature.com

"The diversity of sexual phenotypes across species is vast and spectacular" & so is this delightful story. Thanks to @professormaney.bsky.social for showing how white-throated sparrows are more proof that we shouldn't "flatten nature’s wondrous diversity into two categories, male and female." 🧪

Professor Maney@professormaney.bsky.social · 2y ago

Do white-throated sparrows have four sexes? This bird challenges us to think carefully about what "sex" even means. Check out this article in Scientific American for my two cents: sex means many different things. www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-ba...

"In every living thing there ticks a clock...": @david-farrier.bsky.social superb & unsettling on how "wild clocks"––spruce saplings, oyster colonies, reindeer herds––are falling out of synchronization as the Earth transforms. It’s becoming harder to keep time. emergencemagazine.org/essay/wild-c...

Wild Clocks – David Farrier

Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as “wild clocks” fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live and ...

emergencemagazine.org