Hannah Dion-Kirschner

2. AP Biology, where I was amazed by the Miller-Urey experiment—we can (try to) simulate the ancient Earth in a lab?!
3. Freshman year of college, when I accidentally enrolled in an environmental chemistry seminar. At the end of the quarter I declared my second major 🌏

I love hearing scientists’ origin stories because they highlight how the interests that draw us to science are as diverse as we are 🌱

For me it was:
1. A 5th grade teacher who taught a lesson on climate change, my first time learning about Earth’s climate system

NASA Planning for Unauthorized Shutdown of Carbon Monitoring Satellites - Eos Despite warnings that their actions are illegal, Duffy and other senior NASA officials have continued to secretly direct NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellites missions s...

NASA is making plans to shut down two Earth observing satellites that provide key data to climate scientists and farmers, despite lawmakers telling them it’s illegal to do it. Story by @astrokimcartier.bsky.social

eos.org/research-and...

New paper in @nature.com! With @kiseokmicro.bsky.social , Siqi Liu, Kyle Crocker, Jojo Wang, Mikhail Tikhonov & Madhav Mani — a massive dataset and simple model reveal a few conserved regimes that capture how soil microbiome metabolism responds to perturbations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Guidelines for preventing and reporting contamination in low-biomass microbiome studies Nature Microbiology - In this Consensus Statement, the authors outline strategies for processing, analysing and interpreting low-biomass microbiome samples, and provide recommendations to minimize...

Hope this is useful - consensus statement "Guidelines for preventing and reporting contamination in low-biomass microbiome studies" rdcu.be/er3Io

Postdoc Opportunity Megathread

It's been hard for early career biologists looking for postdocs, so I created a Google Sheet where we can all compile fellowships/job boards/postdoc opportunities in one place. PLEASE SHARE WIDELY! If you're a PI looking for postdocs, you can add to the 4th tab! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

⚖️ HUGE day today in the NIH terminations cases

There's a trial (of sorts) at 10a ET in Boston today for arguments that NIH unlawfully terminated 100s of grants.

It's a 3 hour hearing and I'll post periodic updates.

Of note: this is the 1st lawsuit filed against the Trump Admin to go to trial.

Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired Exclusive: Climate.gov, which supports public education on climate science, will soon no longer publish new content

Climate.gov, a major US government website supporting public education on climate science, will likely shut down after almost all of its staff were fired. What would be worse is if the website were co-opted to publish climate denial content.

Isolation of a putative sulfur comproportionating microorganism Scientific Reports - Isolation of a putative sulfur comproportionating microorganism

Our paper on the cultivation of a putative sulfur comproportionator from the Frasassi caves is finally out! Jan would have been happy to see this paper published - it's got everything that he loved: thermodynamics, cultivation, weird metabolisms, and life underground. Cheers to Jan!
rdcu.be/enlo3

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees

Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday

📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful

Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (Gift Article) The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

NSF Physics was cut by 85%, basically wiping out most of its capacity for supporting research.

NSF Astronomy was cut by 53%

Undergrad education was cut by 71% and research on learning by 79%

Graduate education was cut by 100% to ZERO.

#GiftLink ⚛️🔭

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Altadena community calls on Gov. Newsom, California legislature to protect them from predatory developers A new report shows that more than half of Altadena land sales since February have gone to corporations.

Altadena community calls on Gov. Newsom, California legislature to protect them from predatory developers.
A new report shows that more than half of Altadena land sales since February have gone to corporations.
lapublicpress.org/2025/05/alta...

Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My ongoing request:

If your NSF or NIH grant was terminated--whether at Harvard or elsewhere--please report it here.

NSF: grant-watch.us/submit-nsf.h...

NIH: grant-watch.us/submit-nih.h...

Our trackers are actively used in lawsuits and are often the only record that terminations ever occurred.

Map of local National Weather Service office "areas of responsibility" modified (using polygons with black outlines and red fill) to indicate where recent/expanding cuts to NOAA/NWS have resulting in understaffing so extreme that some offices can not longer operate on a 24/7 basis.

I just created a quick map depicting which portions of the United States are now (as of today) or will imminently be (by early June) without 24/7 local National Weather Service coverage (per Washington Post reporting). #CAwx #CAfire #CAwater #ORwx #AKwx #WYwx #KSwx

Few support punitive funding cuts to colleges and universities - AP-NORC Most of the public believes that colleges and universities make significant contributions to scientific and technological advancement and think their federal research funding should be maintained.

The American public is broadly supportive of maintaining federal science and medical research funding, and against punishing universities by taking their funding away, according to a new poll:

So glad you were able to visit and that you enjoyed your time here 😄 it was great to learn more about your work too!!

Breaking: climate scientist admits ice age is coming

As someone who listens to aquarium sounds as my writing white noise this is very relatable

#oneforjournalclub

Are you enthusiastic about #waterstableisotopes in forest trees? 🌲🌳💧

We offer a PhD position on ecohydrological feedbacks in forests under recurrent drought.

Join our team in Freiburg:
uni-freiburg.de/stellenangeb...

@chriswernerlab.bsky.social
@uni-freiburg.de @hydrofreiburg.bsky.social

Timelapse video shows a debris basin filling up fast in the Bailey Canyon area of Sierra Madre in the Eaton Fire burn area. The video is taken over the span of one hour.

That basin doing what it was designed for - keeping that mud and debris from going any further.

https://abc7.la/4gDtQ7L

Ah, so happy to see that the NOAA pages are back!—at least for now 😬

Time to download the most recent CH4 plot in case it re-disappears…

bsky.app/profile/rich...

I used to regularly access this NOAA page on atmospheric GHG concentrations, so glad to know it’s still available from UCSD ⚒️🌏🧪

Is Photosynthesis‐Derived NADPH Really a Source of 2H‐Depleted Hydrogen in Plant Compounds? We provide evidence that photosynthetically produced NADPH is not the major source of 2H-depletion in carbohydrates.

Is Photosynthesis-Derived NADPH Really a Source of 2H-Depleted Hydrogen in Plant Compounds? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

How does light structure microbial mats?
To explore this, we studied #Cyanobacteria and Chloroflexota from hot springs. Using simple synthetic communities, we found that these species cooperate, forming stronger #biofilms and moving further together. Paper now in PNAS: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

@kiseokmicro.bsky.social fyi!

Happy to share a new paper, "Effects of Hot Versus Dry Vapor Pressure Deficit on Ecosystem Carbon and Water Fluxes," led by the amazing Miriam Johnston w/ @mallorybarnes.bsky.social and others agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

What to know about Trump's first executive actions on climate and environment President Donald Trump’s first week in office included a flurry of executive orders with implications for Earth’s climate and environment.

There is *a lot* going on right now. My hot take, as I try to keep up wrt our planet:

“These executive orders will make our air dirtier, make people sicker, make energy more expensive, and make our communities less prepared for extreme weather.”

apnews.com/article/trum...

💔😔