Erin Hotchkiss

NIH’s entire budget for FY2026 is $48 billion. We just spent a quarter of that amount in the first six days of this war of choice.

$1.8 billion per day. That money could fund 450 R01s each and every day.

Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them Utilities are convincing lawmakers around the U.S. to delay bills that would allow people to buy solar panels, plug them into an outlet and begin generating electricity.

Utilities are convincing lawmakers around the U.S. to delay bills that would allow people to buy solar panels, plug them into an outlet and begin generating electricity. n.pr/4ul3y2p

First 6 Days of Iran War Cost U.S. $11.3 Billion, Pentagon Says

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

This is the entire budget of NASA's Planetary Science Division for *four years*

Modeling cumulative and spatially-varying nitrate removal from multiple floodplain restoration projects in a 4th-order river channel network Floodplain restoration increases floodplain exchange and is implemented to mitigate watershed-scale water quality impairments such as eutrophication. …

Floodplain restoration is widely promoted to improve water quality, but its watershed-scale benefits vary. This study shows that projects in larger channels yield greater nitrate reductions downstream, offering guidance for prioritizing restoration to reduce nutrient pollution. 🌐🧪

Regionalization of Hydrologic Behavior and Pothole Water Storage Dynamics in the Prairie Pothole Region Physics-informed deep learning outperforms LSTM in regionalizing hydrologic behavior and pothole storage across PPR (un)gauged catchments PPR-scale model captures inter(a)-annual variability of h...

Check out our new paper in WRR: in the Prairie Pothole Region, millions of wetlands fill, spill, and connect, making runoff hard to predict. We show how physics + AI can improve prediction of streamflow and wetland storage in ungauged watersheds. #Wetlands #NewPaper #AGUPubs #PhysicsInformedML

Ryan (and me) are hiring a PhD student! Sweden is a great country to do a PhD, see the link or ask us for more details, or share with potential students!

Bridging waters and power: Hydrosocial territories with socio-natural resilience in China's Great Yangtze River protection programme Global water governance has increasingly focused on resilience as a means to manage cross-scale complexity and change. In this paper, rather than prop…

Thrilled our paper is out in Environmental Science & Policy! We merge 'hydrosocial territories' & 'socio-natural resilience' to study the Yangtze River. TL;DR: Water resilience isn't just ecological—it's deeply political & shaped by hydro-hegemony. See attached PDF! 🌊 #AcademicSky

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.

I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.

1/ Here's what I can share:

A small part of the Brazos river, Texas, USA.

Thru 4/3 you can join our partners at the @ijcsharedwaters.bsky.social for a series of webinars, or submit comments online to share your perspectives on how the Canadian and US governments are doing to restore, protect and enhance #GreatLakes water quality: glperspectives.ijc.org/en

Does anyone know if it’s recommended to measure TN/TP on a SEAL with the alkaline potassium persulfate digestion method or acidic potassium persulfate digestion? Thanks!!

This is absolutely brilliant.

Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture and estimators of energy use - Nature Communications The universality of the energetic equivalence rule has long been debated. Here, the authors show that across 183 soil invertebrate food webs, size–density and energy use varied with trophic level, ene...

Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture & estimators of energy use ... the "need to integrate food web energetics & trophic structure to better understand body size structure of ecosystems" #allometry #metabolicscalingtheory www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🌐

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

Never believe that budget cuts to social programs or education, or supporting the arts and science are about fiscal responsibility due to limited funds. They always find the money when they want to.

And this doesn't even include the cost of human lives, which is the real horror here.

New paper with the crew at the Occoquan Lab and a big team of collaborators. We built a modeling framework that helps explain how deicing salts move through urban watersheds and shape stream salinity and drinking water quality.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Iran Conflict Sparks Global Rush For Critical Fertilizers A third of global fertilizer supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz, while gas from the region is crucial to production of nutrients for global agriculture.

If you, or one of your loved ones, are one of those people who likes to eat food, you need to read this story.

Because farmers from Poland to Australia to South Dakota are starting to freak out over the insane spike in fertilizer prices.

Gift link ⤵️

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

It is absolutely insane that the US appears to have targeted desalination plants first – putting them onto the board. Iran seems to have already retaliated against one in Bahrain. This is one of the most obvious ways this could spiral.

We published this yesterday before strikes today on oil storage facilities in Tehran.

So far strikes have also hit oil and LNG infrastructure and energy export facilities in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and the UAE.

Map at the link ⬇️ @npr.org

Many heat-stressed tropical insects are reaching their limits Vast study in Peru and Kenya confirms limited defenses against rising temperatures, redoubling climate concerns

Insects living in the lowland tropics have evolved to deal with brutal heat. But many of them are close to their limit, according to a massive study that assessed the heat tolerance of hundreds of species. https://scim.ag/406Y5yh

Key Questions on the Role of Technology in the Expanding Middle East War Tech Policy Press asked experts working at the intersection of technology policy, security, and international affairs to share what they are watching.

The expanding war in Iran brought to the fore questions about the role of technology in armed conflict, including the controversial use of new artificial intelligence technologies. Tech Policy Press invited perspectives from experts on what they are watching for as the situation unfolds.

The Nature Record Now it’s our turn to shape what comes next. A new project. A mission years in the making.

The DRAFT Nature Record national assessment has dropped and is ready for comment! I'm proud to be one of the authors. This is the first comprehensive, independent, evidence-based assessment of how nature is doing across the U.S.
Come read. Come comment. Come shape the record.
naturerecord.org

It's the funding of taxonomic research & training that's dying out. Without an ability to identify life forms, we can't recognize/quantify invasions & extinctions and their impacts on ecosystems. Imagine trying to repair a complex steel structure if you can't distinguish different types of bearings.

a calendar that says today a day you can vote early on it ALT: a calendar that says today a day you can vote early on it

Today March 6 is the first day of early voting in Virginia for the redistricting referendum

All voters can cast ballots at their local election office and satellite locations in some places

Make your voice heard Virginia!

Link w more information below

www.elections.virginia.gov/casting-a-ba...

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.

USAID’s Emergency Food Security Program spent $4 billion in FY2022 to feed 114 million people in 55 countries. We just blew that much money in four days of this war.

Big Tech Signs White House Data Center Pledge With Good Optics and Little Substance “Data centers … they need some PR help,” said President Donald Trump at the event.

NEW from me: the pledge big tech companies signed at the white house today is supposed to protect ratepayers from high utility bills due to data centers — but the WH actually has little ability to make that happen

"this is theater," @aripeskoe.bsky.social told me

Hydrology Paper of the Day @hollykirk.bsky.social on a Nature-Water Design framework for ensuring urban and landscape design in the context of ecological services, systems, and climate change: a combination of frameworks; design principles; ensuring connectivity and stewardship; and five principles.