Dr. Brendan Anderson

New York State has officially adopted new regulations for the teaching of climate change across the grade span! Congrats to my CRETF colleagues who have worked so hard to make this happen, and congrats to all New Yorkers! www.nwf.org/Home/Latest-...
#climateeducation #teachclimate

Former WVU president mentioned in Epstein files Former WVU President E. Gordon Gee is among the individuals named in recently unsealed court records tied to Jeffrey Epstein.

This is Gordon Gee. He’s mentioned in the Epstein files in connection to his being a member of Leslie Wexner’s board. Which is a completely inappropriate relationship given that Gee was Ohio State’s President & Wexner was OSU’s biggest donor. But Ohio State doesn’t follow rules or norms of behavior.

The rarest of the rare! This holy-grail dream fish is a larval-stage #monkfish, aka #goosefish.

Shot in the wild, using scuba, while diving at night over water several thousand feet deep, several miles offshore from Kumejima, Okinawa.

#larvalfish #blackwater #gug #deepseafish

Rawr *in dinosaur baby voice*

It's Trilobite Tuesday! Proetid trilobites survived in the world's seas for almost 200 million years, beginning in the early stages of the Ordovician & lasting until the end of the Permian Period. The specimen pictured—the proetid Warburgella—comes from Malvern, England's Silurian Period exposures.

The people who push back on silence-as-protection moves are usually the people with the least job security, which remains wild to me. Maybe we should use tenure to do something good?

The Danger of Silence When Academic Freedom Is Under Threat Inaction from rank-and-file workers enabled government censorship during the Red Scares.

You ever write something and there are so many parts you hope people engage with that you can't figure out which ones to quote?

I'll do a wee thread on the 3rd, and final, essay from my Red Scares series

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

The Drop in International Students Last Year Was Worse Than We Thought Visa issuances nosedived 36 percent, possibly reflecting weakening global interest in studying in the United States.

NEW: The bad news about international-student enrollments at American colleges just got worse. An exclusive @chronicle.com analysis of just-released State Department data shows new visa issuances in the summer of 2025 dropped by more than a third. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments - Nature Meta-analyses on a global scale show that the measured coastal mean sea level is higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments.

Most research may have underestimated coastal sea-level height across the world by an average of 0.3 m, according to a study in Nature. In some areas in the Global South, these levels may be up to 1 m higher than previously assumed: spklr.io/63320EDBy0

#Geoscience ⚒️

Pacific Ocean Floor by MARIE THARP, Bruce Heezan, and Heinrich Berann, *as published in* the National Geographic. There, fixed it.😉

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is planning to widen the shipping channel leading into Port Everglades, blasting through a coral reef and dredging up sediment that could smother acres of coral, federal scientists say. https://wapo.st/4r7kRAU

⚒️ #WavyWednesday

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

“The fact that Ellis was flagged for her name change alone suggests the state of Kansas is intensely monitoring transgender citizens.”

It's Trilobite Tuesday—and we have new research to share! On the left is a 3D scan of Lonchodomas chaziensis babies that are about the size of a grain of sand. The accompanying photo on the right shows an adult specimen of the closely related species Lonchodomas rostratus.

Texas AG Ken Paxton has declared that it is illegal for mental health providers and therapists to treat trans youth. It means that trans youth will be denied access to any mental healthcare that isn't conversion therapy. Paxton also threatens parents of trans youth with child abuse investigations.

When Putin needed pretext for creating "The Red Web", Russia's authoritarian system of online censorship that effectively bans LGBTQ speech, he did it through the EXACT same moral panic about social media and kids that liberals and many leftists are spreading today.

the incentives here are so obscenely terrible that the entire thing should be illegal by default

“I am sabotaging negotiations because I stand to make piles of money on Polymarket” is absolutely in play, what a horrifying clusterfuck

Hey look! If you've been using AI to shortcut everything in your life and suck the soul out of your creativity, good news for you: you're now complicit in making it popular enough that the US Government has co-opted it for mass murder. Good job, everybody.

In case you’re just waking up, the U.S. has teamed up with Israel overnight to start an illegal war of regime change, apparently on a presidential whim with no involvement of Congress, and they are already committing horrific atrocities.

This push for AI at the NSF grant-making level is less discussed than other AI drives but is highly consequential because it creates incentives that change entire fields. People will pivot away from other research that isn’t being funded to this and many won’t come back.

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

📢 Now accepting proposals for the Graduate Research Excellence Grants! These provide evolutionary biology research funds for early and advanced Master’s and PhD students. Applicants must be members of SSE. Deadline: May 18, 2026
www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony

Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses "The legislature did not include a grace period."

From @erininthemorning.com; Transgender people in Kansas have been sent letters ordering them to immediately surrender their drivers licenses which will become invalid tomorrow, Feb 26th, with no grace period for updating.

www.erininthemorning.com/p/kansas-sen...

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

I notice that no one has offered to de-extinct Titanosarcolites. Cowards.

streaming link opens up very soon! get your credit cards ready, get your drinks and snacks, mute the word "Trump" on here if you haven't already, and get ready to have your mind expanded by a dozen nerds nerding out

I'm one of them, just from a couple years before in late 2022. Got out of Oklahoma due to rapidly hostile legislation and drove across the country to NJ where I had no family or network except a couple of friends letting me stay with them.

So the number is likely much larger than even this.

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich