Dr. Billie J. Swalla

BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.

With the updated RCV totals just released by the Board of Elections, our campaign has officially earned the most total votes in a primary in New York City history.

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Sunset Ireland (July 6th) Cam 1 - Still Shot 9:30pm (West Field) #Sunset #Ireland #Scape #Landscape #Sky #Clouds #SkyScape #Photography

A split-screen image. The left side shows a rhinoceros mother and calf in a savanna landscape with scattered trees. The right side depicts a forest fire scene with orange flames and silhouetted trees against a dark sky. Text reads: "Biodiversity is in crisis" followed by: "1 million plant and animal species risk extinction Ecosystems are collapsing Misinformation slows progress." "Trust the science. Conserve, restore and sustainably use biodiversity."

‘Biodiversity is not declining’ is a claim you may have heard. But science says otherwise. 📉

The @ipbes.net #GlobalAssessment reveals 1 million plant & animal species are at risk of extinction. Misinformation clouds the crisis.

Rely on trusted research to understand our shared challenges. 🌍🧪

Nature is so wild. "Yes, I believe I will evolve to eat the bark of trees, and I'll chop down trees with my teeth to get at the tender bits up high, and I will use the leftovers to make a dam, and to make a house."

What?

Last night at Moth Night, we saw a lot more than moths. The highlight was happening upon this beaver absolutely chowing down on some wood, corn on the cob style. You’re gonna want to put your sound on for this one.

Truly honored and humbled (and genuinely surprised) to be the 2025 IPGSA @ipgsa2025.bsky.social Silver Medalist along w/ the eminent plant biologists, John Bowman and Jenny Russinova. Thank you. Plant peptides rock!! 🥰

The Company of Biologists 100 logo to the left and QR code to the right. Portrait of Christophe Leterrier to the left, text to the right 100 extraordinary biologists Christophe Leterrier Christophe Leterrier, a founding member of FocalPlane’sScientific Advisory Board, authored one of its most popular posts. His beautiful hippocampal neuron image serves as the preLights banner. At Aix Marseille Université, France, his lab studies axonal cytoskeleton architecture using advanced microscopy. #100biologists #biologists100

Our next extraordinary biologist is Christophe Leterrier, one of the founding Scientific Advisory Board members of @focalplane.bsky.social and the author of one of the most popular FocalPlane posts. #100biologists

🧠⚡️Electroporated and glowing!
This E17.5 mouse cortex shows GFP-labeled cells (green), EdU+ proliferating cells (red), and nuclei (DAPI, blue).
Image taken by @agnihotrinitin.bsky.social 🔬
#FluorescenceFriday

We will never be silent. The Trump administration has placed 139 EPA staffers on leave after they signed a letter of dissent opposing the agency’s current direction and policies. Silencing experts won’t silence the truth.

Final vote. 50-50. VP breaks the tie.

One single GOP Senator could have stopped this abomination. Saved millions of parents from watching their child go hungry. Saved the lives destroyed when Medicaid disappears.

They will all live forever with the horror of this bill.

“On the tendency of Species to form Varieties” paper by Wallace and Darwin originally published in the Journal of the Linnean Society of London, Zoology. Read on 1st July 1858 at the Society.

Portrait of Darwin (1809-1882) commissioned by the Society in 1883 which can be found in the Society’s Meeting Room.

Portrait of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913).

Today marks a special anniversary for us. On July 1, 1858, the theory of evolution by natural selection was first presented at a Linnean Society meeting. Papers written by Charles Darwin & Alfred Russel Wallace were read, shaping a groundbreaking idea still powering science today: buff.ly/uBdX7N1

Scientific poster from the journal Development, with the title Stem cell-based models of early human development. It provides a brief summary of recent human post-implantation stem cell-based embryo models, focusing primarily on models that capture the peri-gastrulation, compared with corresponding in-vivo developmental processes.

The latest @dev-journal.bsky.social poster on stem cell-based models of early human development is proving popular at #ISSCR2025. Come and get your free copy at stand 911 before they are gone.

This was such a fun session and I’m so grateful to the folks organizing #Worm25 for inviting me! Hearing about Dr. Padilla’s journey and advocacy and then getting to talk about my own story was awesome! Be kind, communicate with people, fight misinformation, and find your community to thrive! 🧬 💪🏽

VP Vance has cast the deciding vote in the Senate to cut Medicaid, take away food assistance, blow up the deficit, and add tax breaks for the wealthiest.

This bill is unpopular because it is wrong.

Congress votes this week, but it’s our voices - and our votes - that will have the final say.

Woman standing in front of podium with slide showing cell with a cilium & extracellular vesicles

Woman standing in front of a podium showing a slide with the midbody

EVs! The morning #worm25 cell bio session kicked off with @inikon.bsky.social talking about proximity labeling to define #cilia #extracellularvesicle subtypes followed by @ahnaskop.bsky.social speaking on the #midbody - a ginormous RNA translating EV🤯 #celegans

Happy to be the next (and 1st female) @crg.eu director. The CRG always stood out to me, for its excellence in understanding life's principles, with implications for health and biodiversity, & its collaborative, open and innovative way of doing science. Thrilled to join its amazing community in 2026!

A lab with a view The Stowers Institute for Medical Research has a new laboratory—with an ocean view.

🌊 A lab with a view. Did you know the Institute has a year-round #research presence at the legendary @mblscience.bsky.social in #WoodsHole? 1,500 miles apart—united by a shared mission to understand how life works.

🔬 Read more: bit.ly/4nytF2o

My lab standing up for science in Chicago!

Super excited to hear @rogerslabucd.bsky.social and Pam Padilla talk in the #worm25 afternoon session!!! #axolotl joins #celegans

Staying ahead of the curve: a decade of preprints in biology When Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory announced the launch of bioRxiv in November 2013, only the braver or more radical amongst us would have predicted that it heralded a lasting change within the scienc...

Hard to remember that just 12 years ago there was no @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social and almost no one in the biology community preprinted their work. What a long way we’ve come. @reinierprosee.bsky.social and I wrote a thing about how @biologists.bsky.social embraced the preprint world

New NIGMS undergraduate training program is forecasted. simpler.grants.gov/opportunity/...

Sofia Casasa is in JEZ-B’s Spotlight! Check out her inspiring path to evo-devo and her thoughts on the field:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/CFRARK...

Paper In focus: Tim Wollesen and Colleagues explore the developmental and evolutionary relationship between Mollusc shells and spicules

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/YUTIXZ...

A blooming panther cap rising from the dead leaves with white crackling remnants of its universal veil covering its expanding gold cap. All photos by me

Here is a nice mushroom

Just fucking wild.

HUD press conference right now officially confirming this:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdct...

Fu**ing corruption.

Repurposing of a gill gene regulatory program for outer-ear evolution - Nature A study on the evolutionary origin of the mammalian outer ear finds that it shares genetic programs with the gills of fishes and amphibians, indicating that elements of an ancestral gill have been reu...

Super exciting and beautiful new work from the talented @mathithiru.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...