Ben de Bivort

The Church Evolution Lab (CEL@NYU) is hiring a postdoc! We have several new projects to study the genomic basis of biodiversity in model clades – especially Hawaiian Drosophila. apply.interfolio.com/179354

Come join our new group, you can study bugs and live in NYC! Feel free to share widely!

A pretty stunning attempt at rewriting the last year. While there are exceptions, legal challenges were largely led by faculty, AAUP, and state AGs, while university leadership and scientific societies almost uniformly attempted appeasement and acquiesced in advance.

Summing up: the donor class is creepy and debased. These people should not be allowed anywhere near our research, academic programs, or campuses, because universities and academics can't be trusted to exercise any judgement when confronted with wealth.

so much of photography is serendipity. Not being able to set things up seems inherent. Maybe you can set it up if you're Leibovitz.

good work!

STAC Statement Thanking President Donald Trump for Signing the Senate Amendment to H.R. 7148, the Consolidated Appropriations Act

Except from Peter Drucker’s autobiography about scientists asking the new Nazi commissar for funding, after they expelled every Jewish faculty member.

MERE HOURS after the President of the United States posted an AI video of the Obama’s as monkeys, the Science Tech Action Committee (led by @aaas.org and @researchamerica.bsky.social) posted a THANK YOU to TRUMP for SIGNING THE BUDGET.

Shot. Chaser.

sciencetechaction.org/aboutus/

I'd add @chanda.blacksky.app @gregggonsalves.bsky.social @wiringthebrain.bsky.social (all good afaik)

Blue and black ink painting of a black hole

Yes, everything is terrible, but I painted this and it kinda rocks #sciart

what a bummer — sorry!

This is a pretty sad end for what was once one of the premier bioscience fellowship programs.

Artists, quote with your most detailed art

Maybe the most? Not fully certain. But up there.

Ascent in elite circles is typically a selection process for maintenance of some pretty fucked norms.

this selection was disrupted, by demands for diversity, equity and inclusion and the inclusion of more marginalized people, and we are living through the backlash

Recognition of distinct sleep states in Drosophila uncovers previously obscured homeostatic and circadian control of sleep Understanding the mechanisms underlying homeostatic sleep regulation is a central, unmet goal of sleep science. Our comprehension of such regulation i…

Sleep-like states occur across the animal kingdom. A study @currentbiology.bsky.social describes 3 distinct sleep states based on inactivity duration criteria in 🪰💤. Ultradian oscillations of fly sleep states were reminiscent of mammalian sleep cycles. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This Tool Searches the Epstein Files For Your LinkedIn Contacts EpsteIN—as in, Epstein and LinkedIn—searches your connections on the social network for names that match those in the released files.

A new tool lets you search the Epstein files for mentions of your LinkedIn contacts. Tried it out, does work. Outputs a report with links to the material on the DOJ website.

www.404media.co/this-tool-se...

A line plot with the numbers of NSF awards for fiscal years 2021-2026. The curve for fiscal year 2026 is quite a bit lower than those for 2021-2025 while the curve for fiscal year 2026 (in red) is much lower than all through the same date.

But, as they say, there is no time like the present

[OK, maybe the 1930s if you want to nitpick]

But, with some data wrangling, my first NSF Funding Curves!

2/3

Dear Friends of the MBL, I am reaching out with news about the Marine Biological Laboratory's relationship with the University of Chicago. Today, MBL and the University of Chicago announced that, following a 12-year affiliation, MBL will once again be a fully independent organization, effective June 30, 2026. MBL will continue to collaborate closely with the University of Chicago across education, research and graduate training, with the University of Chicago remaining one of MBL's valued academic partners. The University has made extraordinary programmatic, leadership, and financial contributions to the MBL. University leaders, including presidents and provosts, served as active members of the Board of Trustees. We are grateful for this support and look forward to continued academic collaboration. This partnership has fueled significant research collaborations and publications, as well as joint programs established around common research themes. Examples of these include the MBL/University of Chicago Graduate Research Fellowship Program and scientific collaborations that resulted in the development of innovative instruments, enabling high-resolution, three-dimensional visualization of cells and tissues. The outlook for an independent MBL is bright. For example, our efforts in recent years have significantly raised the ambitions of MBL's fundraising. In August of 2025, the Marine Biological Laboratory received an unrestricted gift of $25 million from MBL alumnus Mark Terasaki, the largest private contribution in our 137-year history. Additional substantial funding has been received for graduate training, named positions, facilities, courses, faculty hires, scholarships, and lectureships. Together, these extraordinary investments reflect our donors' confidence in MBL's mission and future and strengthen our financial foundation as we move forward. They build on a commitment MBL made in 2023 to achieve financial self-sufficiency, supported by the expansion of our Bo…

MBL's existing academic programs and collaborations with the University of Chicago are expected to continue as before, including research collaborations, participation by University of Chicago undergraduate and graduate students, and University of Chicago-affiliated courses and programs. The academic links that we have built over the last 12 years will serve both institutions well in the future. There are no significant changes to MBL's budget, staffing levels or operations and MBL will retain full ownership of its endowment. University of Chicago representatives will step down from the MBL Board of Trustees in June 2026, which will otherwise remain the same. I am deeply grateful for your continued engagement and belief in MBL. Your support and connection to this institution make this next chapter possible, and I look forward to sharing more in the weeks ahead as we continue our work together. With appreciation, Nipam H. Patel, Director Marine Biological Laboratory

Interesting news: The Marine Biological Labs at Woods Hole (MBL) is once again becoming an independent institution. University of Chicago will remain a partner, but only one of many. MBL is an amazing place for science and science training and I hope it will thrive in this new status.

Someone said Republicans are school shooters and Democrats are the Uvalde cops and man…

I do not have enough superlatives to describe the fierce brilliance & tenacity of this woman. My God.

I have heard this often "they know our value and will step up." I realize such arrangements take time, but I also haven't heard even whispers of any.

I'm not even asking about the capacity to close the gap. Obviously not there! Instead I'm wondering if we're even seeing hints of a positive delta in private philanthropy in this era.

Not as far as I am privy to.

all-in

Hi #causalsky - Has anyone done a dynamic DiD set up when we have accumulating treatments or multiple events with cumulative effects? Some units are true controls, some have one event, some have multiple at different points in time. @jmwooldridge.bsky.social @pedrosantanna.bsky.social please Repost!

Very cool Katrin and team.

Are there any hints that private philanthropy is stepping up to close the gap?

asking sincerely.

When folks in our world talk about pivoting to private philanthropy ... what are they talking about? Universities have been chasing that private money forever.

What juice is left for the squeeze?

Jeffery Epstein is seen in conversation with Professor Marvin Minsky, known as “the father” of Artificial Intelligence.

Nine More Higher Ed Names in the Epstein Files

Through coffees, phone calls and private flights, at least nine more academics are linked to Jeffrey Epstein in the latest disclosure of documents from the Justice Department. https://bit.ly/49UlU1U

#EDUSky #HigherEd #AcademicSky

Looks interesting. Here's the paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The first paper from the lab is now out in Science Advances: Multimodal social context modulates larval behavior in Drosophila
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
We find that fly larvae keep their distance to conspecifics in the absence of food, enjoy reading! @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de

The decline effect (Protzko & Schooler, 2017) is an observed phenomenon where effect sizes in experiments apparently diminish in size from the first paper demonstrating the effect to later replications. This has been taken as a symptom of an unhealthy scientific ecosystem, possibly caused by the "winner's curse" (selection on significance and regression to the mean), publication bias or opportunistic analyses. I show that decline effects can arise as an artifact from a much simpler source: the original article determining the sign of the effect in a meta-analysis. Moreover, such artifactual decline effects will show correlations with some of the same experimental properties that one would expect from biases from poor behavior, such as the sample size of the original study.

New draft: "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox". In this manuscript I show how a common practice in meta-analysis (eg the 2015 Open Science Collaboration) creates artifactual signatures of poor scientific behavior. PDF: raw.githubusercontent.com/richarddmore... 1/x