Adriana Darielle Mejía Briscoe

After 5 years of developing, a new preprint from the lab - introducing our workflow for comparative insect connectomics, aimed at democratizing connectomics. @erc.europa.eu @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fear that herbicides are poisoning Orange County creeks blows up on social media A group of residents is demanding answers from Orange County officials about herbicide spraying in waterways.

The last thing we need is herbicide sprayed in our urban waterways. www.latimes.com/environment/...

Surprising finding: If Latinos in the U.S. were their own country they’d have the 5th largest GDP in the world. newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/us-...

Richard C Lewontin lab 1976:
See Russ Lande, top left; Jerry Coyne bottom right. Who are the three others? Help me folks!

I had a friend in grad school who tried and failed to find bicoid outside Diptera. This paper sums up why.

“UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot.”

🦋✂️🧬 🧪 New preprint! Led by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social CRISPR‑Cas9 knockouts of ABCG transporters across butterflies & moths reveal how pigment pathways shape color during development. #CRISPR #Lepidoptera #pigmentation
Feedback welcome 👩‍🔬
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Heliconius erato demophoon sat on a pink, yellow and white lantana flower. The left side of the butterfly is white, while the right side is the usual black and red, but with some white clonal patches.

New preprint form me and the McMillan lab at STRI and Martin lab at GWU, digging into scale cell type specification and differentiation in Heliconius wings, with some insights on the lncRNA gene ivory.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Comments/suggestions welcome!

I usually have to edit URLs like this to get them to show correctly. Try deleting the text starting with "?" and everything that follows and see if it loads correctly. I'm suggesting this from memory so you might have to play with it.

Highlight of my week: Receiving an email from someone requesting permission to use my ancestor's corrido in a documentary to "humanize those impacted by the mass deportations". I made the article open access so that its historical lessons would not be forgotten. rdcu.be/e53lq

Amazing peppered moth story from Saccheri lab - same locus, but different structural variants, underly parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the UK and across continental Europe.

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...

Indigenous Ikoots community prepares to relocate as the Pacific floods their town CUAUHTÉMOC, Mexico — On a wind-battered beach in San Mateo del Mar, Mexico, four figures haul a net into shore. Frigatebirds (Fregata magnificens) mark the fishers’ position in a high, twisting…

On Mexico’s Pacific coast, shoreline loss averaging 8.4 meters a year since 1967 is driving worsening floods.

In Cuauhtémoc, San Mateo del Mar, at least 900 Indigenous Ikoots residents voted to relocate in May 2025, but delays and lack of funds are slowing the move.

Private money cannot replace public funding of science Who should pay for American science? In the current political climate, many are looking to the private sector to compensate for cuts in public funding. At the Harvard School of Public Health—particula...

My latest:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Next column will address needed guardrails for private funding of science, esp. in light of #Epstein/ #Summers etc.

Hotspots of accelerated North American bird decline linked to agricultural activity Though previous research has shown that bird populations are declining across North America, a new study is the first to show that the pace of loss has picked up speed since the mid-1980s in three reg...

"A top predictor of where the accelerated abundance loss occurred became clear, overlapping with locations of agricultural intensity as indicated by the extent of cropland and the use of fertilizer and pesticides."

Vanguard Settles Case Claiming It Tried to Kill the Coal Industry

"The agreement blocks Vanguard from supporting efforts to fight climate change. Vanguard agreed not to advocate that any company it invests in 'take any particular course of conduct to reduce carbon emissions.'” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/c...

Birds Aren’t Just Declining. They’re Declining Faster, a New Study Finds.

Reading: Birds Aren’t Just Declining. They’re Declining Faster, a New Study Finds. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/c...

A butterfly on the ground, which is covered with rough gravel (decomposed granite) and fresh green sprouts. The butterfly is seen in profile with the head to the left. The wings are partly closed, and in this view we can see the underside of the left wings and part of the upperside of the right forewing. The underwings are a confusing pattern of brown and white -- good camouflage -- with four obvious spots near the back end of the hindwing. The fore upperwing is orange and black near its base, black with white spots near its tip -- this side of the wings is for showing, not hiding. The body and head look fuzzy gray. The visible eye is brown with black spots. The antennae look gray, with white tips.

The painted ladies (Vanessa cardui) are on their spring migration north from Mexico, and have reached Albuquerque. Photo taken in the Sandia foothills on February 26, 2025.

#nature #naturephotography #butterfly

Mexican Agricultural Secretariat Receives 3,514 Applications for Corn Producer Subsidies Mexican corn producers have been devastated by low prices resulting from the dumping of heavily subsidized corn from the US.

Mexican Agricultural Secretariat Receives 3,514 Applications for Corn Producer Subsidies

Mexican corn producers have been devastated by low prices resulting from the dumping of heavily subsidized corn from the US.

Bedtime listening 🎧
Feminism in the Wild by
Kamath and Melinda Packer
#amreading #amwriting #amlistening

Who Deserves to Be a Citizen? This obsession with citizenship, which began in the 1990s, surged after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent War on Terror. Politicians charged that there were now citize…

Daisy Hernández on the obsession with birthright citizenship: lithub.com/who-deserves...

NSF Intent to Restructure Critical Weather Infrastructure

The US NSF has put out a "dear colleagues" letter that is essentially a yard sale list for @ncar-ucar.bsky.social

It asks questions such as, who'd like to take over some of NCAR's programs? Is anyone interested in commercial use of the Mesa Lab?

If you have thoughts, send them to NSF_NCAR@nsf.gov

New pre-print with some updates on ivory:miR193 in a highly polymorphic moth.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We mapped ivory (again!?) this time controlling aspects of camouflage in Anticarsia gemmatalis. Mapping, SVs, Expression and Function.

Comments/suggestions welcome!

Summers To Resign From Teaching Appointments, Relinquish University Professorship Over Epstein Ties | News | The Harvard Crimson Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year, relinquishing his University Professorship — Harvard’s highest...

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
"Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year, relinquishing his University Professorship — Harvard’s highest faculty distinction — and remaining on leave until that time"

Important update here. Epstein's ties with Nowak were some of the most extensive in the research community. Good work by the journalists at the Crimson for following up.

Nobel chemistry laureate Frances Arnold: ‘Whole swaths of science are just going to die on the vine’ The Caltech professor on using AI to harness the power of enzymes — and what US funding cuts could mean for research

Frances Arnold, a Nobel laureate (2018) in Chemistry says that the current administration is interested only in a limited range of topics such as AI & biotechnology.

“There’s whole swaths of science that are just going to die on the vine.”

Science is multidisciplinary.
🧪 archive.today/4qgez

Leader of Columbia Brain Institute Quits Over Friendship With Epstein

Richard Axel, Nobel Laureate, Resigns
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/n...

Evolution, genomics and conservation of butterflies and moths - Nature Reviews Biodiversity Butterflies and moths are key indicators of functioning and healthy ecosystems around the world. This Review describes the evolutionary history of the order Lepidoptera and tracks shifts in researcher...

Now online! In this review, we cover four major topics on butterflies and moths: their evolutionary history and diversification dynamics, genomics, global diversity patterns, and conservation 🦋🌏 (1/8) @natrevbiodiv.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Five-lobed white flower with some purple patches at the center

Datura discolor, the Desert Thorn-apple, blooming along Coyote Creek this morning #nativeplants 🌿

“Ball decided to stay, believing Church would dial back his associations with Epstein…They were not aware that in 2014, when billionaire…Leon Black donated $2M…in the form of a genomics…research fund under Church’s direction, it had been facilitated by Epstein.”