Paula Adams, PhD

U. of Alabama Suspends Black and Female Student Magazines, Citing D.E.I. Guidance

This is truly awful. I have served in the university media board for 3 years and saw how brilliant and committed the student editors of these magazines were to quality and integrity. This is such a loss for the university community at large. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/u...

#TheRefs are never not involved if Auburn doesn’t win

Sapiens Podcast Episode · If Books Could Kill · 11/20/2025 · 1h 38m

Episode 46: Sapiens

It's an ambitious goal to write the entire history of humanity in just 400 pages. It's even more ambitious to do it without reading any research.

Alabama Public Television could lose millions, members and programs if they drop PBS Board to discuss potential disaffiliation on Nov. 18 as some commissioners claim PBS has become "enemy" to conservative values.

Thanks to Congress slashing funding for PBS, Alabama Public Television, the nation’s oldest public educational network, may sever ties with PBS, which would effectively kill the network. www.al.com/news/birming...

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty - Nature Human Behaviour Studying socioeconomic backgrounds and intergenerational transmission in the US academia, Morgan et al. find that faculty have a parent with a Ph.D. degree a striking 25 times more often than the gene...

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty

Tenure-track faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years.

#AcademicSky

Tweet from @PPathole Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don’t recognize.

like basically everyone who works in software I embody this tweet and do not under any circumstances want to talk to my computer

Western Alaska was hit hard by the recent storms. Houses floated away in Kipnuk, houses flipped over, people lost everything from the flooding that came with the storms. Please donate if you can. This group has a long history of supporting AK communities.

alaskacf.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/c...

We still can’t predict much of anything in biology Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

Biology is much more complicated than most non-biologists can imagine. And AI is not going to change this anytime soon.
blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

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(no jerks, plz)

What are you gonna do, tackle him?

Biogeographic ancestral area reconstruction, with pie-charts at the nodes of a phylogeny indicating estimated marginal probabilities for each region. This phylogeny excludes a bunch of species whose distributions reflect human activity and whose pre-anthropogenic-movement distributions are unknown. The main result is that there's a lot of red (Oceania) in the deeper nodes of the Elegans Supergroup. There's other colors too, to be sure.

Surprisingly, the phylogeny implies (equivocally, to be sure) that the Elegans Supergroup of species, which includes C. elegans, is derived from American ancestors, and that a lot of the groups diversification may have taken place in Oceania, prior to subsequent invasions of Asia.

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

My experience (also alabama) was that they're giving covid vaccines no questions asked here.

Flyer How to apply to the NSF-GRFP (in 7 weeks!). Check out our comprehensive guide and timeline for applying to the NSF-GRFP (or any fellowship!) on a deadline. Give it a shot — it’s not too late! Resource by Olivia Goldman, PhD and John Lê. Photos of authors. Cientifico Latino, Inc. logo. Link: cientificolatino.com/apply-in-7-weeks

Applying to the NSF-GRFP (or another fellowship) on a tight deadline?

We built a 7-week guide + timeline to get you from draft to submission. It’s not too late — you’ve got this! ✨

🔗 cientificolatino.com/apply-in-7-weeks

#NSFGRFP #GradSchool #Fellowship

Vaccines are battle training for your immune system. If you could give it intel on the enemy, why would you withhold that? Give me ALL the vaccines! I want to be prepared for everything!

YouTube video by LastWeekTonight Trump vs. Higher Education: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Obligatory sharing of John Oliver's take on this administrations fight against research and Universities #academia

youtu.be/xk94il8L820?...

Was able to walk in to Kroger and get both with no appointment and no questions asked just now in Alabama.

Nearly all PhDs take 5 years--with finishing in 4 a rare outcome. This is deliberately designed to eliminate the international powerhouse that is US postgraduate training.

I remember being able to grade by question in blackboard (all answers to question 1 on the same page). But cant do that with canvas 😢.

Canvas is better than BB for pretty much everything else though.

That makes sense. I taught a class 2 years ago with 35-40 and I could grade that no problem. But the ~185 is challenging. And canvas makes it more difficult than it should be 😅

What's your class size? Struggling to grade anything that's not multiple choice on canvas with large class.

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Trump order gives political appointees vast powers over research grants Researchers are alarmed that the move might upend a long-standing tradition of peer-review for grants.

There are a lot of details in yesterday's sweeping executive order, but the bottom line is that it gives political appointees immense power over scientific grants, which have until now been stewarded by career civil servants and experts.

My reporting:
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Community support for inclusive US education The Trump administration is working to dismantle inclusive education efforts by opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion (1); encouraging divisive actions in K-12 schools such as banning books (2) an...

@emilydriessen.bsky.social and I wrote a letter in Science calling for us to lean into our communities and increase support for change agents during this time of adversity and funding cuts.

#DBER #BioEd

Community support for inclusive US education | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages

Why isn’t bell hooks’s writing around men and love not seen as a progressive text on how men can get laid, i.e., form healthy romantic relationships with people in their lives?

The WaPa headline says: 60,000 Gazans were killed. 18,500 of them were children. These are some of their names. Then follows an enormous list of small print names

Thousands of small print names interspersed with some photos of some of the child victims

NEW: 18,500 children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The Washington Post has just published every single known name.

A seminal moment.

YouTube video by RoadRunnerCoyote2015 PBS - The Magic School Bus Ending Credits and Fundings

STEM ed has been foundational to NSF's mission & mandated functions ever since its founding in 1950.

Ex: Remember the Magic School Bus? NSF funded that.

Bill Nye the Science Guy? Zoom? Reading Rainbow?

NSF was a key funder in all those [with others like the imperiled Corp for Public Broadcasting]