I am happy to share the conversation I had with @mgurven.bsky.social about the evolutionary aspects of humans living seven decades. Hope everyone enjoys! @princetonupress.bsky.social convergingdialogues.substack.com/p/449-living...

#449 - Living for Seven Decades: A Dialogue with Michael Gurven

Listen now | In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Michael Gurven about humans living for seven decades.

convergingdialogues.substack.com

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

docs.google.com

🏞️𝐅𝐢𝐞𝐥𝐝𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡? Our new study looked at fieldwork policies and risk assessments from 90 UK universities offering environmental science courses. The results are eye-opening: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Improving university policies and risk assessment to support inclusive fieldwork in environmental sciences

Among 90 UK higher education institutions, there was patchy mention of protected and other identity-related characteristics in fieldwork policy and risk assessments, and very limited consideration of....

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Just one week away until SEVEN DECADES is born. Not too late to preorder (code PUP30 for discount): tinyurl.com/efpaxtex I hear from friends that the preorders are already arriving! @princetonupress.bsky.social

My department is hiring an assistant professor of environmental behavioral sciences. The research area is open but we are particularly interested in people with research on collective action or computational social sciences. Happy to answer questions about the Doerr School or the department.

Do you have field work experience? Do you want more? Our team wants YOU to manage our field site studying Kinda baboons in Kasanka National Park, Zambia! Start date is this August 2025 so apply ASAP! Job ad here: tinyurl.com/KindaBaboon

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

Are we great yet?

A long long time ago, in a far away galaxy... the US used to tax the rich

Trump proposes unprecedented budget cuts for US science in next fiscal year NASA cut by 24% NIH cut by 40% EPA cut by 55% NSF cut by 56% Analysis from @maxkozlov.bsky.social @dangaristo.bsky.social @alexwitze.bsky.social and @nature.com team www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Trump proposes unprecedented budget cuts to US science

Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and the scientific pipeline, critics say.

nature.com

🤷

NEW: An NIH policy coming in the next week will target — and at least temporarily stop — funding outside the US, threatening thousands of projects and collaborations on topics like infectious diseases and cancer. Some NIH staff have already been told to hold all subaward funds for foreign labs.

Exclusive: NIH to suspend funds for research abroad as it overhauls policy

Move by US biomedical agency threatens thousands of projects on infectious diseases, cancer and more.

nature.com

📢 Today I was supposed to be in DC, highlighting what the NSF Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences delivers to US taxpayers. NSF had one of the highest returns on investment (ROIs) of federal grantors 👏🏻 (1) and NSF SBE funded 63% of US social and psychological science research (2). 🧵

My dear health equity peers, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is doubling down on their DEI efforts. 💪🏽 Here’s a grant opportunity tinyurl.com/3pnxhy2d with a rapid response option those whose “health equity research projects have lost federal funding.” ⭐️ Please share ⭐️

Research to Advance Racial and Indigenous Health Equity

We seek to build an actionable body of evidence to construct fair systems that determine resource distribution and support health equity. Deadlines: Rapid Response brief proposal 5/28/25; New Research...

tinyurl.com

🚨Report your NSF grant terminations! 🚨 We are starting to collect information on NSF grant terminations to create a shared resource as we have for NIH. The more information we collect, the more we can organize, advocate, and fight back! Please share widely! airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni...

Thirty-eight of 43 experts cut last month from the boards that review the science and research that happens in laboratories at the National Institutes of Health are female, Black or Hispanic, according to an analysis by the chairs of a dozen of the boards.

Women, minorities fired in purge of NIH science review boards

Scientists, with expertise in fields that include mental health, cancer and infectious disease, typically serve five-year terms and were not given a reason for their dismissal.

washingtonpost.com

🚨 New pub 🚨 On the energetics 🔋 of cellular immune activity 🦠 in juvenile arboreal primates 🐒 (not toads and snakes) and its costs 💸 in terms of growth 📈 in lean body mass 💪. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Costs and constraints of cellular immune activity during development in an arboreal primate | Royal Society Open Science

Evolutionary life history theory predicts that, during development, investment in immunity must be balanced with the demands of growth. How, and at what time scales, this balance is negotiated is unclear. In this study, we examined the potential energetic ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

how good is your Rhythm Radar? 🥁 one of our honours cogsci students, Maxx Shearod, is keen to find out if metrical perception, the hierarchical processing of rhythms, is consistent across listeners globally help him find out at www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/down... [this game is in beta!]

The Music Lab

We do citizen science to learn how the human mind creates and perceives music.

themusiclab.org

Colossal Bioscience did not revive dire wolves, despite a sensationalist Time Magazine cover story. Making genetically modified animals that are cosplaying as extinct species is not de-extinction.

Riley Black 🏳️‍⚧️ 🦕@restingdinoface.bsky.social · last yr.

Dire wolves were not close relatives of gray wolves. They last shared a common ancestor more than 5 million years ago. What Colossal has done is make something new and slapped a dire wolf sticker on it, as if an organism equals a hypothetical genome.

🚨 New Paper Alert! 🚨 “You Are Married by the Woman” explores how men’s support for women’s empowerment is understood in a fast-urbanizing Tanzanian community. If you're interested in gender, masculinity, and social change, check it out!

“You are Married by the Woman”: Divergent Understandings of Men’s Support for Women’s Empowerment in Northwestern Tanzania - Joseph A. Kilgallen, Alexander M. Ishungisa, Pius Charles, Theresia Marco C...

Engaging men in women’s empowerment is a global priority, yet there is still limited understanding of how men’s support for women’s empowerment is conceptualize...

journals.sagepub.com

Letter from 21 legacy US Digital Service staff who resigned, saying they can no longer work for DOGE. "We will not use use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize American's sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services."

This seems like a good time to re-up this take down of another recent attempt to tech-dredge words like “diversity” for political purposes. This kind of text-mining is very hard and they are very bad at it (sledgehammer, etc). academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Fundamental errors of data collection and validation undermine claims of ideological intensification in STEM

Efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at universities in the United States have emerged as another contentious issue in an increasingly

academic.oup.com

Judd Legum@juddlegum.bsky.social · 2y ago

2. A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Trump already empowering the worst bosses to just.. ignore labor law. Whole Foods workers won their union vote, and now Whole Foods (owned by Jeff Bezos) is saying they simply won't recognize the vote because nobody is going to make them.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private funder of biomedical research, yesterday killed a $60 million program aimed at making universities’ STEM education more inclusive. scim.ag/3EtS0US

HHMI kills program aimed at boosting inclusivity in STEM education

“Inclusive excellence” program had committed $60 million to 104 institutions

scim.ag

35+ Dems plan to hold the Senate floor all night to oppose the confirmation of Musk-Trump funding freeze architect Russ Vought. THIS is how we fight back while in the minority. (via @schatz.bsky.social)

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

This is a clear case of work NSF scientists should refuse to do. Skip the meeting, call in sick, lose the email. Do not make a list of grants flagged because they mention "women" or "people of color." Don't. It's unethical.

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · 2y ago

NEW: We obtained the directions NSF program officers are following to review all grants for compliance with the Trump EOs and the turmoil it has created in an agency mandated to broaden STEM participation. Our story: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"leadership [has nothing] to do with charisma...instead [it is] focused on substance and relationships, and [is] ultimately about building mutual trust and respect"

Darren Dahly@statsepi.bsky.social · 2y ago

Revisiting the Marine Corps Leadership Principles and wondering how many would align with this shitshow of ignorance, bullying, and criminality. It's zero, to say nothing of enemies foreign and domestic. statsepi.substack.com/p/some-thoug...

TOMORROW: We’re rallying at the Treasury building with @moveon.org to stop Elon Musk’s hostile takeover and tell this unelected billionaire to get his hands off our money. We hope you can join us if you’re in the D.C. area.

We Choose to Fight: Nobody Elected Elon! · MoveOn

**Rally at the Treasury building to stop Elon Musk’s billionaire takeover.** Nobody elected Elon! We need everyone to fight this hostile takeover at every level—that includes Democrats in Congress, wh...

mobilize.us

If you can, do something, speak up and act up. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Scientists as political advocates

Science, both teaching and doing, is under attack. The recent US presidential election of a person and platform with anti-science bias exemplifies this. The study of climate processes and patterns and...

science.org