It's not just administrative bloat. It's disinvestment by the state. In 1996, 32 percent of the U's revenue came from the state. Now it's only 16 percent. If the state isn't funding it, how is it considered a public university? More about the University of Minnesota's upcoming employee pay cuts.

Protect Affordable Health Care for University of Minnesota Employees

The University of Minnesota is planning to increase deductibles 400%, introduce 15% coinsurance, combine pharmacy and medical out-of-pocket maximums, increase those maximums by up to 60% for individua...

docs.google.com

Sara@saralovesyou.bsky.social · 2d ago

They snuck it through so people didn’t have a chance to fight it. But it also didn’t give people time to budget for it (or look for new jobs). Honestly, it’s just a shady move.

Wow, there seems to be no end to the editorials that blame scientists for “lack of public trust”. And that completely ignores governments and politicians and billionaire media owners who attack science and lie about science. We cannot communicate our way out of this.

Nature@nature.com · 6d ago

Questions of public trust can be addressed only through better communication and research that meets society’s interests, says Peter Gluckman go.nature.com/4xekdFo

If “party leadership and centrists immediately fall behind El-Sayed to defeat the Republican” does not align with your priors about the Democratic Party you should both reflect on why and also update those priors

Very proud of the special issue of Animal Behaviour I worked on with @wascherclaudia.bsky.social and @nicolakoyama.bsky.social on addressing biases in animal behaviour. Thanks to all authors- plenty of cool papers to read. Here's our editorial: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @asab.org

Claims of sex-dependent effects in the behavioral and brain sciences are infrequently supported by valid statistical comparisons www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

See our explainer here: www.maneylab.org/sex-specific...

Sex-specific effect | Donna Maney

Sex-based research in the biological sciences: Rigor in crisis?

maneylab.org

Most published claims of sex-dependent effects in the neurosciences are missing statistical evidence that the effect differed by sex. We can do better. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @ossdcomm.bsky.social @sbn-bsky.bsky.social @emoryuniversity.bsky.social @pnas.org @colbyvorland.bsky.social

I always loved the Mike Rosenzweig paper that framed a frequency dependent fitness landscape as a sphagnum bog (which is like walking on a waterbed) it deforms downward under the weight of the mass of the average phenotype in an evolving population, so there’s disruptive selection wherever you stand

🚨NEW PAPER 🚨 "Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity" published in #G3 (@genetics-gsa.bsky.social) 1/2 The fitness landscape has been among the most influential instruments in evolutionary theory for nearly a century. But we often treat them as fixed and static.

Relatedly: If you're a college professor, and you assume that all of your students can type quickly, efficiently, and accurately on a keyboard, you're almost certainly wrong.

Jess Calarco@jessicacalarco.com · last wk.

I wonder if students today would be less likely to lean on AI for writing assignments if schools had made sure they could touch-type (at least 60wpm) before having them submit all their assignments online. 1/🧵

Our study on the effects of running wheel access on female mouse social behaviors has been published! @cornellpsych.bsky.social journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... bsky.app/profile/kati...

Presence of a home cage running wheel, but not wheel running per se, decreases social motivation in adult C57BL/6J female mice

Physical activity offers myriad benefits to health and well-being, in humans and other animals as well. In rodents, voluntary wheel running can attenuate the effects of both physical and social stress...

journals.plos.org

Katie Tschida @katietschida.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It turns out that home cage running wheels impact the social behaviors of female mice, but not for the reasons we thought! Thanks to our reviewer for a great control experiment suggestion. Please RT! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... bsky.app/profile/kati...

Under what conditions can the evolutionary interests of a gene differ from those of their host organism? Very cool conceptual/mathematical synthesis here!

Gaurav Athreya@gauravathreya.bsky.social · 2w ago

wanna read the latest overview of “internal evolutionary conflicts” — scenarios where genes spread despite being organism-deleterious? and wanna learn how to model them? look at our new preprint! we introduce unifying ideas, and try hard to write accessibly. small 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Awesome #SICB interview with @yuchenchen0531.bsky.social about our recent collaboration with @elizabethhobson.bsky.social to study sex variation in aggression in monk parakeets!

Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology@sicb.bsky.social · 2w ago

Watch the #SICB student journalist chat that accompanies this youtu.be/iu1y_26-di8?... #SICB #Student #journalist piece, on Yuchen Chen by Meghan Forcellati sicb.org/sicb-news/th... & read ICB's paper by Chen, @jacanamama.bsky.social & Hobson doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

There's a direct line between this and attacks on academic freedom. Because academic freedom empowers professors to participate in activism by reducing the risk that they'll lose their jobs because of their views.

Jess Calarco@jessicacalarco.com · 2w ago

"Davis, the government says, has attended and facilitated meetings about protests and discussed his anti-authoritarian ideology with other activists. He is not accused of violent acts, taking any specific actions at protests nor having any encounters with ICE agents. He is facing 6 years in prison."

As Measles cases hit a 35 year high, as a senseless war rages on with no exit plan, as gas climbs to record highs, and the Epstein files remain secret, the U.S. Senate is holding a hearing today to yell at Dr. Fauci and again push horse dewormer on the American public.

This is such a strong effect (Fig 4-5 from the manuscript) - 6 additional female PhD students by promoting 1 woman! Also looks like a positive effect on male PhD students and their retention in science as well (compared to male promotions).

Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽@needhibhalla.bsky.social · 2w ago

From the abstract: “promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions”

!!!

Dharmendra Pradhan: India education minister resigns after Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests

Thousands of young people, led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), have been out on the streets demanding Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation.

bbc.com

🔥🔥🔥 www.science.org/content/blog...

It bears reminding our disgruntled friends in science that everything in this report that addresses your fondest desires isn’t going to work out the way you think. It’s put there as bait to attract you. It will turn to ash in your mouth. Because the goal is destruction and transfer of public dollars

Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽@needhibhalla.bsky.social · 3w ago

“A New Golden Age, in contrast, is a grab bag of political grievances, half-thought-through justifications for policies the Trump administration was already pursuing, and insinuations that scientific experts are kind of annoying and should learn how to fix car engines.”

I think the effort to cast misogynist men as secretly gay is misguided—an attempt to deny the centrality of sexism and gender hierarchy to our definitions of what a man is.

Scott MacFarlane@macfarlanenews.bsky.social · 4w ago

About Pete Hegseth’s talk about testosterone for service members … Rep Becca Balint (D-VT): “There are so many people in this Administration that have some weird, intense homoerotic feelings toward men, while also being homophobic”…

This paper is so freakin' cool. The authors use a combination of comparative anatomy, the fossil record, phylogenetic methods, and morphometric analysis to figure out how (and when) seals evolved "amphibious hearing" that uniquely enable them to effectively hear in both air & underwater

Dr James Rule@palaeo-jrule.bsky.social · 4w ago

Seals have a superpower: they are the only mammals with amphibious hearing! They hear well both in-air and underwater. My collagues and I have a new study in Proceedings B on the origins and evolution of amphibious hearing in pinnipeds 🦭🔊🧪 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

A reminder that today is the last day to comment on the OMB proposal if you are able to and have feelings about funding for US science!

A Rule Nobody Voted On Could Cut Federal Funding to Your Community

The White House budget office is a powerful agency called OMB that most Americans have never heard of.

elizabethginexi.substack.com

In other words: 'Sex is binary and depends on nothing except gametes, and everyone who ever uses "male" or "female" to talk about anything but gametes is just using those words wrong.' 🙃

Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)@jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · last mo.

the reason we argue to be precise about this is that we use the male/female descriptors for anatomy, physiology, behavior, genetics, etc. so saying "ah but it simply means large/small gamete!" is pretty pointedly hiding the ball imo, seeming to attempt to *encourage* conflation.

Biological sex is binary, except when it’s not (isogamy). It’s defined by gamete size, except in large-spermed males. It’s binary, but one can be both at once (hermaphrodites), neither (sterile) or switch (clownfish), and it might depend on temperature (crocodiles) or parasites (Wolbachia). (1/3)

Ben Allen@evodynamics.bsky.social · last mo.

Defining sex based on gamete size is a choice. Perhaps it's the most parsimonious of all binary single-criterion sex definitions. But to claim that gamete size is the "ultimate defining criterion of biological sex" (whatever that means) falls into the naturalistic fallacy the authors warn of.

icymi: the OMB has proposed sweeping revisions to rules for federal funding Please comment like I did: blog.nicholdav.info/posts/2026-0... Resources I used: blog.nicholdav.info/posts/2026-0... from @neurograce.bsky.social @openscapes.bsky.social @elizabethginexi.bsky.social @standupforscience.net

The end of US science.

Douglas Natelson@nanoscaleviews.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🧪⚛️ OMB is not being shy, at all, about wanting to cancel or deny grants based on political preferences. This is very very bad. www.politico.com/live-updates...

This is true for academic papers too!! Can confirm, it feels good to cheer on peers and also helps me remember their paper better!

M.R. Robinson@mruthrobinson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If you have ever emailed a writer to let them know you enjoyed something they wrote, you are among the noblest and best and most saintly in this entire world, and I hope you sleep really well tonight.

Some folks here might enjoy this read and/or - as I did - find it incredibly illuminating and helpful. No tech background required, though some of the language will be funnier if you can read basic code. kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-...

Mental Health (for Humans)

Let me present my credentials. I am sick as fuck. Disabled, in fact. I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, with a side of PTSD. I have watched an...

kennethreitz.org