Beginning of semester me: *sets aside Tuesday and Thursday for research*

Me now: Spends all of Tuesday and Thursday grading and writing emails.

:(

NSF GRFP solicitation out.
App deadlines now in November.
As others noted, eligibility rules for current graduate students now exclude 2nd year grad students. See the solicitation - they’ve emphasized “first year” and “less than one academic year” in grad program.

www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Reason No. 324 why no-one should think that "AI" (artificial but certainly not intelligent) is an unmitigated Good Thing: it's mathematically inevitable that AI will hallucinate.

We need far more discussion of the risks of all this and less frantic hype. I mean, really, what's the hurry?

CH₄ has a lifetime of about a decade in the atmosphere, whereby it oxidizes to CO₂ and remains in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. More than 99% of the cumulative climate impact (i.e., the radiative forcing) is from its life as CO₂. In the end, it's still CO₂ that gets you. 🥲

New press from Bates on what my summer students were up to
www.bates.edu/news/2025/09...

Read all about our journey across the Maine intertidal :)

I present to you- my lab as trees.
My students said we needed “more whimsy”, so we have it now. Great summer working in mussel physiology with these awesome students

Sounds good. My own experience is that green crabs often have some blue coloring on claws and elsewhere. I’d guess is not a hybrid. But the blue is very blue and there are people who might be keen to test it out!

Can you elaborate on the location (what bay, for example) and how common this blue morph is?

Any more photos?

We can’t even get everyone to read the syllabus 😭

I used to tell biology/forestry/ecology graduate students that being a Federal Agency Research Scientist was a great career to shoot for, but they might not even exist next year.

Everyone is acting like US scientists will just go get science jobs elsewhere and sure some will but there are not anywhere close to enough science jobs elsewhere.

The end result of this will be much, much, much less science, not science happening in different places.

I wrote about chemtrails, Lee Zeldin, and how his EPA routinely brags about its participation in a conspiracy to let corporations poison us
newrepublic.com/article/1978...

Read news, op-eds, and analysis, not AI summaries. Create your own art (even if it's messy) or hire an artist to do it. Do your own homework. Talk to people, not chatbots. Keep your thinking and skills sharp and cherish our messy humanity. That's the new punk rock.

Listen: this is obscenely important. There is a growing complacency that over-achieving solar can make up for under-achieving wind, and it is *not true*.

Wind and solar generate in a complementary way. Solar might max out. Wind needs much more support!!

ember-climate.org/insights/res...

New @sashamtl.bsky.social et al paper - assessing whether machine learning model developers disclose basic environmental / energy information with their models. They mostly do not!!

Grim results for most of the big companies:

arxiv.org/abs/2506.15572

huggingface.co/spaces/sasha...

Yes. I am right. I am seeing how Chat GPT is ruining students critical thinking and writing skills in real time. It is not the future. It is a tool designed to render the populace helpless, to make people doubt their innate intelligence, and to foster overreliance on technology.

Today on Juneteenth, I am amplifying #BlackInTheIvory anecdotes that were shared by Black scientists 🧪 in summer 2020.

Screenshots from Twitter presented in anonymized format 2025 is the era of the "anti-DEI crusade".

If a human told you things that were correct 80% of the time but claimed, flat out, with absolute confidence, that they were correct 100% of the time, you would dislike them & never trust a word they say. All I'm really suggesting is for people to treat chatbots with that same distrust & antagonism.

But the idea that “the product doesn’t suffer” seems so questionable. And also (per other comments) just doesn’t seem possible

Peer review is slow! This is a pre-print that is ideally in the review process now. Pre-print sharing is common in academic spheres. Though grain of salt required…

No idea if these authors have submitted this for peer review or not.

Super important point here-- privatizing GRFP or really anything funding science makes folks doing the work beholden or at least feel beholden to whatever special interest is funding. This drastically impact messaging, results, and even the questions that are asked.

The Invertebrate Paleontology department at the AMNH is seeking a full-time Museum Specialist.

www.indeed.com/viewjob?from...

This seems accurate to me! Thanks for chiming in :)