Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.

The White House is taking new steps to undermine every international student at our universities.

It has approved a new rule restricting student visas to 4 years max. That's not long enough for PhD students, or about half of undergrads, to finish their degree.

Likely to enter force within days.

Just to give the TL;DR on this one:

*The* main purpose of the EO is to move funding priorities and decisions away from experts and career professionals over to political appointees. With the ultimate power held by Vought / OMB.

Boosting because Drew is brilliant as well as being a very good hang.

Can’t wait for my swim home today.

Flood risk map for Thursday shows the DC area through Philly and to northern New Jersey in a Level 3 of 4 risk.

Flood risk Thursday bumped to a Level 3 out of 4. NWS warns of localized 8-inch totals possible, with 2-3 inches in an hour in some spots. Details on the rain and heat @ cwg.live.

The Central Collection of Algal Cultures (CCAC) at @unidue.bsky.social is advertising a 3-year PhD position supervised by the current Curator, Dr. Olga Matantseva!
This PhD will take place in close collaboration with the @jgi.doe.gov. 🦠🧬💻
Apply here: www.uni-due.de/karriere/ste...

So while I’m on the books as a continuing finalist, it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll be returning to #archaea genomics research. I’ve missed that community to and I can’t wait to continue to contribute in new and exciting ways.

One thing I can say is that my world is so, so much larger than it was a year ago. New knowledge on agriculture, trade, diplomacy, policy, politics… all now letting me see the world in a deeper and richer way. And the network is invaluable; I’ve met such amazing colleagues in DC and worldwide.

Today is my last day as an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow contracting with USDA. I was laid off a month early as part of cost saving efforts.
I rolled the dice applying for the fellowship this year and.. wow.. they certainly came up a certain way.

Everyone is acting like US scientists will just go get science jobs elsewhere and sure some will but there are not anywhere close to enough science jobs elsewhere.

The end result of this will be much, much, much less science, not science happening in different places.

#ArchaeaSky
#MicroSky

Congratulations, Miguel, this is super cool!

Elated to have our pre-print now published in @natcomms.nature.com #ArchaeaSky #Microbiology #MEvoSky
rdcu.be/euila
Our main results stay the same: S. islandicus follows a cell cycle akin to that of some eukaryotes, like the budding yeast, with cellular processes cycling similarly.
old🧵cited below👇

Our preprint on estimating how many more prokaryotic taxa can be discovered in the unbinned fraction of metagenomic samples.
We predict that there are 10 archaeal and 145 bacterial novel phyla across all habitats.
#MicrobialDarkMatter #TreeOfLife #Microbiome #Archaea #Bacteria #Metagenomics

Being a scientist on the job market right now means getting bombarded with AI training “jobs” and I cannot emphasize enough how much they need to fuck off.

It’s probably 30% of listings on LinkedIn, and I get multiple messages per week (sometimes per day), it’s insane.

Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm not pointing fingers at anybody but I do see #USDA left out of a lot of the reporting on cuts to federal research funding, and USDA funds a LOT of research!!! Food safety! Ag sustainability! Making our food supply chains more resilient!!!

Enrichment cultivation and visualization of Ca. Methanonezhaarchaeum fastidiosum

Preprint🚨 #microsky 🦠 “Cultivation of Methanonezhaarchaeia, the third class of methanogens within the phylum Thermoproteota”, authored by @kohtzarchaeota.bsky.social & Sylvia Nupp, expands the diversity of methanogens! 90% enriched, methylotrophic culture from a hot spring. A 🧵 tinyurl.com/yw8ku2bj

Stories about Al deployment tend to fall into a few categories. You've got productivity stories, where workers — most visibly at tech companies — talk about how Al tools are making parts of their jobs easier or harder, increasing their workload or simply making them redundant and taking their jobs. You've got top-down management stories, where Al use is suggested or mandated by leaders demanding more efficiency, who are either betting that a great deal of automation is possible within their firms, or who are just worried about getting left behind. Then you've got the stories in which people are more clearly using new Al tools against one another in an escalatory way. Job hunters, now able to generate custom applications instantly, flood employers, so employers turn to Al to manage the glut. Spammers and other bad-faith actors flood social media with near-infinite material, pushing the platforms to double down on automated moderation. Rapidly generated presentations lead to rapidly scheduled meetings recorded and automatically transcribed by AI assistants for machine summarization and analysis. Dating-app users generate chats with Al only to be filtered and then responded to by someone else using AI. The starkest and most consequential such story is what's happening in education: Teachers dealing with students who generate entire essays and assignments are turning to Al-powered plagiarism detectors, or getting pitched on ed-tech software that solves cheating with surveillance - with, of course, the help of AI.

These are stories about AI, but they're also stories about broken systems. Students flocking to ChatGPT in the classroom suggests that they see school in terms of arbitrary tasks and attainment rather than education. The widespread use of Al in job hunting drives home the extent to which platforms like LinkedIn, which promises to connect job seekers with employers, have instead installed themselves between them, pushing both sides to either pay up or dishonestly game their systems. A dating app where users see opportunity in automated flirting must already be a pretty grim space. If Facebook can be so quickly and thoroughly overwhelmed by Al-generated imagery and bots, it probably wasn't much of a social network anymore — a low-trust platform better at monetizing users than connecting them. Smaller-scale AI arms races like these don't take hold unless users (or workers, or students) have already been pitted against one another by systems they don't respect. In an uncomfortably large portion of modern life - especially online - that's exactly what's happened.

The real AI arms race is between one another 🥰 nymag.com/intelligence...

As historian David McCullough expressed in a 2003 interview: “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

It was 90 with high humidity at 9 PM in Arlington yesterday, feeling like an actual sauna.

Just few days left to apply to one of these postdoc positions in my infectious disease modelling Unit at @pasteur.fr in Paris!

It’s 10000% cope; obviously it’s better to live in paradise than to suffer 8-10 months out of the year.

That being said, the spring rush IS fucking incredible. Joy is always momentary and comparative and so I get why they say it.

I’m haunted by John McCain’s ghost. Unbidden, I see him, a rictus grin stretched across his withered face, croaking out the bastardized lyrics of a Beach Boys song.

a man dancing in front of a banner that says reetlight festo entertainment system ALT: a man dancing in front of a banner that says reetlight festo entertainment system

When the smoke coming out of the Vatican is black and white checkerboard:

I hope everyone knows that it's very easy for any social content platform, including Bluesky, to be a misery machine and that if you aren't intentional about it, they will absolutely decrease the positive impact you have on the world while making you less happy.

Between the heat and everything else, 🫠 is officially the top of my most-used emoji list.

The ‘former gifted kid’ discourse is so sad to me. Schools cater to the lowest performers, kids on grade level get told they are just “really smart” instead of an education. Now those kids are adults and feel shame that ‘they used to be smart’ instead of realizing that the the school let them down.

This but grad school for me. I did quite well at my state undergraduate institution, but grad school was a real kick in the head. Impostor syndrome lessened when I (& the other working class people I gravitated to) realized that the people struggling less had doctor/lawyer parents & knew the rules.

Seriously, they should use pictures of what this actually would look like - elderly people being carried away in an ambulance, or like a friend of mine who lives in a home with flat roof no air con and broken down car having to sit in the bath all day on hot days due to a health condition