In addition to the potential unfolding WUI wildfire disaster in Spokane, WA, numerous other large & fast-moving fires (existing & new) are blowing up under extremely critical fire weather conditions & severe drought conditions from eastern slopes of Cascades eastward into ID/MT.

Bordeaux, France, has now recorded more days above 40°C in 2026 alone than during the entire 105-year period from 1920 (when observations began) to 2025. This is deeply shocking.

I am pleased to announce that we are inviting applications for a Lead Laboratory Coordinator at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. Review of applications will begin on September 15, 2026. For details and to apply, visit arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

"Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well."

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

⚒️ Article: Fern savannahs especially susceptible to wildfires spread rapidly following the collapse of forest ecosystem during the end-Triassic mass extinction www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Continental-scale fern savannah wildfires during end-Triassic greenhouse warming - Nature Geoscience

Fern savannahs spread rapidly following the collapse of the forest ecosystem during the end-Triassic mass extinction, setting the conditions for widespread wildfires, according to an analysis of the d...

nature.com

Looking for collections experience? Love plants? Living in the Chicago region? If YES! then be an @mortonarboretum.bsky.social short-term research technician position in the Herbarium and Forest Ecology Lab's wood collection. Msg with questions, apply today: careers.hireology.com/themortonarb...

Chaco Canyon in modern New Mexico, a major urbanized cultural center of the Ancestral Puebloan culture between 900 and 1150 AD, has had previously protected areas around it opened up for fracking under a new Trump plan via the Bureau of Land Management, threatening an archaeological and sacred site.

BLM fast-tracks proposal to open Chaco Canyon to oil and gas drilling

The Bureau of Land Management wants to repeal a buffer around Chaco Canyon that barred oil and gas drilling.

azcentral.com

Market theory goes like this: even the best of us can fall prey to selfishness and rationalization, so let's arrange society so people acting on their most selfish impulses end up producing benefit for all of us. That'll be easier and more reliable than convincing everyone to be more generous. 1/

If you don't drill for oil or gas this year, it will still be around next year. If you destroy an irreplaceable treasure this year, it won't be around anymore or ever again. This asymmetry suggests erring on the side of protection of irreplaceable assets. www.npca.org/articles/114...

Trump Administration Moves Closer to Revoking Chaco Canyon Protections

The Department of Interior is giving only 14 days for the public to weigh in on a proposal that could devastate the landscape surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park

npca.org

A native fish species is eating some of the most damaging invasive species in the Great Lakes…AND making a significant impact! Freshwater Drum: The overlooked native fish that has been crushing trillions of Zebra & Quagga Mussels in Lake Erie www.canr.msu.edu/news/freshwa...

🚨reporters working on stories about the NAS extreme event attribution report 🚨 DO NOT FRAME ANY STORY AS "CAN WE BELIEVE EXTREME EVENT ATTRIBUTION RESEARCH?" THE ACTUAL STORY IS: FOSSIL-FUEL INTERESTS ARE WETTING THEIR PANTS ABOUT THIS AND WILL DO ANYTHING TO TRY TO STOP IT.

Attn paleoecologists & community ecologists: July 23, 3-4pm BST there will be a workshop about multinomialTS, a new state-space time-series model for testing hypotheses about the environmental and biotic drivers of community dynamics. Register now! www.britishecologicalsociety.org/content/mult...

Prevent damaging changes to the federal grant process Submit your comments by July 13, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. ET www.aps.org/initiatives/... 🧪🌐

Comment on OMB proposed rule for federal financial assistance

Make your voice heard on the Office of Management and Budget's proposed federal grant funding changes and defend the scientific community from this existential threat. Submit your comments by July 13,...

aps.org

We tend to think of EVs as just transportation. Increasingly, they're distributed energy assets. Every battery on wheels can provide backup power, run equipment or help communities during disasters. As millions more EVs hit the road, that resilience scales automatically. #Bettrification #EVs #V2L

How EVs, hybrids are powering China's flood victims via V2L tech

With widespread power outages, residents are turning NEVs into makeshift power stations, giving them a lifeline to the outside world.

carnewschina.com

Take a look inside the GCR and see how it supports the scientific community through world-class facilities, advanced analytical equipment, and one of the world's largest collections of ocean drilling core samples. Thank you to the TAMU DOR Communications team for putting together this video! #GCR

Academics at the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute have been placed under threat of redundancy, with the university proposing to scrap its geography degree course, it has been revealed ⬇️

‘Damaging cuts’: University of Exeter environmental academics face redundancy threat

Academics at the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute have been placed under threat of redundancy, with the university proposing to scrap its geography degree course, it has...

endsreport.com

Almost every European plant species is out of equilibrium. Climate change is only part of the story—disturbance greatly shapes where species actually occur. 🚨Our new paper 🌱in @natecoevo.nature.com analysed 3,047 species across >1.1M European vegetation plots. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social that presents multinomialTS, a state-space model to test hypotheses about environmental and biotic drivers of community dynamics. Designed for irregular time series. Led by Quinn Asena&Tony Ives, me, et al besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Statistical analyses of ecological multinomial time series to identify environmental drivers and biotic interactions

Understanding the drivers of change in communities is a major goal of paleoecology and community ecology, but statistical inference from multivariate time series is challenged by relative (rather ...

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

June 2026 was the second warmest June on record (after 2024) in the ERA5 dataset, at 1.39C above preindustrial levels. While we expect warmer temperatures later this year as El Niño kicks in, 2026 is now increasingly likely (~86% chance) to be the second warmest year on record.

Each Friday night, I write a briefing on US science & higher ed. 🧪  June 26 (Year 2, Week 26) made me angry: - dismantling programs to prevent teen pregnancy & fatal overdoses - Texas adds Bible stories to mandatory school readings - bad $$ news from NSF, NIH & more buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

Year 2, Week 26

Jun 20-26, 2026 – intercropping

buttondown.com

Defining the Anthropocene as a geological epoch captures human impacts’ triphasic nature to empower science and action www.cell.com/one-earth/fu...

Defining the Anthropocene as a geological epoch captures human impacts’ triphasic nature to empower science and action

Defining an Anthropocene epoch from the mid-1900s allows representing human environmental impacts’ triphasic nature within the International Geological Timescale. Such an epoch captures humanity’s cur...

cell.com

Two weeks left to apply!

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Three weeks left to apply to our postdoc position on alpine plant resilience! Us: Three years of funding, an awesome collaborative team, a gorgeous study system, blueberry pie, unionized postdocs. You: A PhD and experience in ancient DNA, paleoecology, and/or plant genetics and genomics.

Many pro astrophysicists receive unsolicited letters from amateurs with new but subtly wrong physics theories, often about relativity and from retired engineers. This cute new paper is a perfect reply & I love how it uses cyclotrons & transponders & radar 🧪🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2605.21660

Relativity for Retired Engineers

We provide some guidance and examples to clear up common misconceptions about special relativity. These misconceptions often come from trying to express the truths of special relativity in Newtonian t...

arxiv.org

Just announced: OpenAI plans to lease a 9.2 gigawatt 100% fossil-fuelled data centre on Ohio. Its emissions will be between 20 - 37 MTCO2-e - somewhere between the total grid emissions of France -> Netherlands As much GHGs as 9.5 average coal plants. Will raise US total emissions by 0.5%

Really makes no sense to extend the natural gas grid for new residential neighborhoods. A single mile of new gas distribution line can cost $500,000 to over $1 million to install, with maintenance costs compounding over decades. Xcel is funding whole-home electrification for approximately 2,200..

The Last Gas Line: Why Utilities Are Betting on All-Electric Communities

A quiet revolution is reshaping how America builds neighborhoods — and the cheapest infrastructure decision may be the one utilities never make.

open.substack.com

Can I just give a shout out to the @ethz.ch researchers who initialised an AI weather model with a cat picture. 👏🐱

Looks like a very informative seminar on the historical phylogenetic biogeography 👇 🧪 ⚒️ #Macroecology #Paleobio

The International Biogeography Society@biogeography.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Join us on May 27th for the next Funk Biogeography Seminar! Dr. Michael Landis from Washington University in St. Louis will be speaking about the use of phylogenetic models to explore the biogeography of the past. Learn more and register here: www.biogeography.org/news/news/ma...

"The unexpected boom in home batteries and the equally surprising surge in rooftop solar installations means that Australia’s target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030 – long dismissed as a lost cause by some – is now very much within reach."

"Blows your mind:" Regulator says boom in home batteries and PV puts 82 pct renewables within reach

Regulator says surge in home battery and rooftop PV installations puts the 82 pct renewables target back in reach because it reduces the burden on large scale projects.

reneweconomy.com.au

Breaking: Trump has fired the membership of the National Science Board, which is oversees NSF. I have confirmed separately with multiple now-former members of NSB.

Ranking Member Lofgren Reacts to Latest Trump Scheme to Undermine Science | House Committee on Science, Space and Technology

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology

democrats-science.house.gov

How can paleorecords aid insights into the risks of extreme events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and droughts? Join the National Academies on April 29 for a webinar releasing a new report recommending a center for synthesis and translation. events.nationalacademies.org/46602 #ExtremeEvents

Functions and Criteria for a New Center for Paleoenvironmental Records of Extreme Events: Report Release Webinar

Register for this event from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

events.nationalacademies.org