Seth Finnegan

Many museums are currently under threat of being closed. The Academy of Natural Sciences, the oldest natural history museum in the US, is no exception. Please take the time to read our statement on this matter.

Absolutely not

Brazil’s results tonight are a big endorsement for the idea that every country should have a second “are you you sure about that” election a couple weeks after the first one for the important stuff

This has all become so normalised and yet... this is not normal.

Yesterday, a mooring in Monterey Bay measured an oceanic temperature anomaly of 4.57°C (8.2°F) at 60 meters (nearly 200 feet!) This is the warmest subsurface temperature anomaly measured at the station since the very strong El Niño of 1997.

Watch the #SanJuanRiver near Mexican Hat, Utah go from ~700 to ~17000 cfs in this timelapse made from images at the nearby #USGS river gage location. Final frame is from this morning. A higher #flood peak of ~33,000 cfs is heading this way, moving through Farmington, NM as I type...

What we all knew was coming has finally begun www.semafor.com/article/10/2...

Me: "It cannot be stated often enough or vociferously enough: the Trump Administration is helping Russia to conquer Ukraine. The United States of America has taken the side of an aggressor against its innocent victim. We are helping our actual enemies" www.aei.org/foreign-and-...

JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

“Fur farms are to produce pelts purely for luxury goods, to make fancy coats,” he said. “It’s absurd that we’re willing to gamble with the lives of millions of people just to keep an industry alive.” You'd think government officials would have learned something after covid, but...

1/ Two really fun reviews just landed back to back in Current Biology, both on a question I never get tired of: why did animals take over when they did? One argues animals engineered their own world. The other argues oxygen and temperature had to line up first.

The Ecology and Evolution program at the University of Montana is hiring an assistant professor! We are interested in candidates who study chemically mediated interactions among plants 🌱 insects 🪲🐝🦋 or microbes 🦠 Apply by Nov 15! apply.interfolio.com/195612?appli...

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

“.. The difficulty in distinguishing between a human and an unauthorized bot is forcing banks to block the technology and rapidly rewrite their terms of service.” @axios.com www.axios.com/2026/10/22/a...

The @burkemuseum.bsky.social is offering funds to support graduate and postdoctoral research visits to the collections, including our University of Washington Herbarium! Please help us get the word out! More information is available here: www.burkemuseum.org/collections-...

Brian Stone, acting head of the National Science Foundation (NSF), is retiring at the end of the year, along with chief of staff Rebecca Keiser. 😐

🧪 “The National Science Foundation, one of the biggest sources of federal research funding, withheld $1.4 billion that Congress had intended for research over the course of the past year, according to internal data reviewed by The New York Times.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/u...

It's Philip K. Dick's world; we just have the misfortune to live in it.

🚨Jobs Alert 🚨‼️ Multiple #geology positions with the US Bureau of Land Management. Including Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, Winnemucca, Nevada ⚒️ www.usajobs.gov/job/889070100 www.usajobs.gov/job/889068800

Immunology Institute Could Get $4 Billion From a Ballot Measure. It Has 3 Workers. www.medpagetoday.com/publichealth...

The U.S. is the only major economy where planet-warming pollution dramatically increased last year. The United Nations warns the planet is on track for catastrophic warming. n.pr/4zb8sRp

As a biologist, I'm strongly against Prop 38 here in California. It makes no sense for billions to go to one unnamed research institute. Vote no.

the routine, pay for play pardons are all by themselves one of the worst corruption scandals in american history!

Ukraine was winning the war, so Trump kneecapped Ukraine to help Russia. I wish it weren’t that simple, but it is. Our president is in bed with our enemies.

He stopped Ukrainian interceptor drones in flight, letting Russian missiles and drones through that were aimed at civilians.

ICE arrested a 56-year old green card holder, i.e. a lawful permanent resident, and detained him in the Rio Grande Processing Center, where he died. www.texastribune.org/2026/10/19/t...

“A plausible paper can now be produced in a day, and the process of producing it does not necessarily enhance knowledge, build a resource, train a student, or advance any other goal of biology research.”

The Last Interglacial (125,000 years ago) is a powerful analogue of future global climate. Molluscs have the best fossil record to learn what the Mediterranean looked like at the time. Thus... a revision of the mollusc fossil record in the Last Interglacial! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New in PN: Who wants to visit an authoritarian America? "Data shows the US on its way to being as unpopular a tourist destination as Russia, & for roughly the same reasons. In both countries, a tourist who runs afoul of the govt might spend months in a freezing warehouse without no legal counsel."

Atop a methane seep from the Cretaceous seafloor, looking out at other methane seeps, made of clams and tube worms 75 million years ago at the bottom of the Western Interior Seaway

In competitive authoritarian countries, regime allies limit and control mainstream media visibility to opposition figures and media. We're not there yet, but this is what it looks like.

Elon Musk is single-handedly funding the Ken Paxton campaign:

1/ There are a ton of cool papers coming out on evolutionary transitions in individuality right now! Here are five recent ones I've really enjoyed, spanning Snowball Earth, volvocine algae, plasmids that fuse into a new individual, the relatives of animals, and... water kefir

Congratulaions to my aweosme colleague @mexpositoalonso.bsky.social !!!!! www.packard.org/insights/new...

Only 3 more days to apply for our Assistant Professor in Arthropod Biodiversity position! The application deadline is October 9, 11:59pm! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05523

Please share! My lab is recruiting a postdoctoral scholar in evolutionary development. For more details feel free to email me.

"The Trump Administration is proposing to repeal the Roadless Rule, opening 45 million acres of national forests to road construction, destructive timber harvest and energy development." Today is the last day for public comment. Weigh in: defenders.org/roadless-rule

About half the oxygen you breathe was made by phytoplankton. A year of them from orbit, Sept 2025 to Sept 2026, on a map where every ocean is one body of water. Watch the polar night swallow each pole in turn. Data: NASA Ocean Biology DAAC #oceanography #phytoplankton #dataviz

The article in Journal of the History of Biology, published today, is open access and in the notes there is a link to Franklin's notebooks online: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

👇👇👇

On cheilostome cyclostome distribution through time with @nhmbryozoa.bsky.social and @jgsaulsbury.bsky.social thanks @andrejpaleo.bsky.social I didn’t even see it was online.

A 10K contribution and a $900 million return. The scale of the graft in Homeland Security is a) off the charts and b) possible because no-one believes they will face any accountability

My inbox is being flooded with fully AI-generated emails from prospective students. I tried to work out why I can't bring myself to read them, and ended up with some thoughts and advice for writing cold emails in the age of AI. My new post: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-i-am-n...

Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.

The administration has found yet another way to fuck with solar power.

Re-evaluating molecular clock maximum age calibrations revives pre-Ediacaran divergence estimates for animals | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...