@omearabrian.bsky.social
I study diversification, species delimitation, trait evolution & similar questions, often using new methods. Also random coding projects. College prof living in Oak Ridge, TN, USA. Opinions my own. He/Him
This is making the rounds uncredited once again, so... 🤷♀️
01.03.2026 18:48 — 👍 215 🔁 77 💬 2 📌 3
A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of Biological Sciences.
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01.03.2026 14:48 — 👍 61 🔁 25 💬 3 📌 6
A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.
NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)
Directorates to follow
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Michelle Stocker and Stephanie Drumheller (selfie) at a lab bench.
Back at it today on the VTCT scanner.
And also working on an unrelated manuscript while the machine hums away in the background.
Seminar flier for Wissam’s defense
My PhD student Wissam Jawad defends his dissertation tomorrow! 1pm CST - please join us if you’re on campus or message me for a zoom link if you’d like to join us remotely.
01.03.2026 14:05 — 👍 8 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0Today I learned that I can film darter gill parasites live!! Here's a fantail darter parasite throwing the teeniest tiniest tantrum I have ever witnessed (40x magnification).This might be the first time this species has ever been filmed. Look how cute it is!!
01.03.2026 03:15 — 👍 26 🔁 5 💬 5 📌 0
new package alert! {tidychain} is a #rstats packaged inspired by the below authors experience in showing how an excel file was changed / manipulated by looking at the underlying xml files to prove fraud in research
datacolada.org/109package
usrbinr.codeberg.page/tidychain/
Crap
www.online-tribute.com/DavidBotstein
David Botstein passed away. I worked with him at Stanford for a few years in designing and teaching a course on "The Heart". My heart is heavy right now. He was a wonderful mentor.
So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).
28.02.2026 19:01 — 👍 141 🔁 89 💬 4 📌 4
An historic black and white illustration of a paper nautilus floating on the ocean. There are boats, a city and hills in the background.
🎉 Huge news for BHL: The Field Museum is taking over the hosting of BHL’s website, servers & infrastructure, ensuring long-term stability and access for its 63+ million pages of open biodiversity literature. Learn more:
blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/02/tran...
#BHLTransition #ILoveBHL 🌍 📚 🧪
An NSF spokesperson just responded to our request for percentages:
"NSF declines to provide the data. As stated below, we do not have any additional information to share beyond what is already included in the FAQs: www.nsf.gov/funding/info...
The last-minute change in eligibility criteria excluded second-year grad students, so the total number of NSF GRFP applications is likely to be MUCH smaller.
We're playing word games if they don't tell us % of applications returned without review.
I appreciate @klangin.bsky.social's work on this!
folks, please don't submit LLM-generated PRs to open source projects. It makes no sense.
If the maintainers want to use an LLM to fix an issue, they can use Claude or whatnot directly. They don't need you as intermediary, that's just silly.
If they don't want to use LLMs, they have reasons.
Huge congrats to @reginafairbanks.bsky.social who was just awarded a Chicago Fellows postdoctoral position to go work with @jmkreiner.bsky.social on the population genetics of adaptation in Amaranthus!
27.02.2026 23:17 — 👍 28 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1
#JMIH26 Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists 2026
Annual meeting of: Amer. Soc. of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists 🐟, Amer. Elasmobranch Soc. 🦈, Herpetologists' League 🐍 & Soc. for Study of Amphibians & Reptiles 🐸
The abstract submission and meeting website is now open jmih.net
Couple takeaways:
-more info about GRFP stats on Friday
-NSF plans to hire because they lost too many staff to DRP
-big emphasis on presidential priorities (AI and quantum 'frontiers' in the director's office)
-a lot about reducing bureaucracy, not a ton of justification
FWIW, Virtual Evolution *always* starts on time.
27.02.2026 12:53 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
New for @undark.org
On: "The Birthday Paradox," the transatlantic slave trade, ancestral bonds, and the hidden power of statistics.
"Family is family, whatever our genetic relationship. Impressively, the birthday paradox study captures this possibility."
undark.org/2026/02/27/o...
Hmm… so this means that colleges that want to “prepare students for the AI workplace” should be sure to keep robust Romance and other language departments?
Worth a shot.
#AcademicSky
Hmm… so this means that colleges that want to “prepare students for the AI workplace” should be sure to keep robust Romance and other language departments?
Worth a shot.
#AcademicSky
Musical genius and humanitarian Dolly Parton announces that the East Tennessee Children's Hospital has officially been renamed the Dolly Parton Children's Hospital 🦋 people.com/dolly-parton...
27.02.2026 00:21 — 👍 752 🔁 155 💬 19 📌 20
NSF leaders have just acknowledged what many scientists have long suspected: Presidential directives to boost AI and quantum have upended its traditional way of doing business. www.science.org/content/arti...
26.02.2026 22:35 — 👍 85 🔁 64 💬 6 📌 10Was having a convo with @bachynski.bsky.social & we decided that it's of upmost importance to start gathering the oral histories of those who lived through the time before polio vaccines, measles vaccines, etc. They can provide important perspectives and they will not be with us for too much longer
26.02.2026 22:45 — 👍 235 🔁 63 💬 13 📌 15
The slug didn’t move but my finger started burning and I started seeing new colors. What does that mean about its original range?
[kidding]
The first two articles of Volume 5 of the Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists are now published at ssbbulletin.org.
26.02.2026 20:18 — 👍 4 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0reposting bsky.app/profile/loui...
26.02.2026 12:01 — 👍 59 🔁 15 💬 0 📌 0
Could be a good or bad birthday depending on whether they invited you to come with them to the movie (“Where’s everyone?” “Oh, we had plans”)
Here’s hoping it was a great one!
Stone says NSF will post an update about GRFP to the website on Friday.
Now moving to merit review.
Median amount of time spent under review is 7.4–14.6% longer for female-authored articles than for male-authored articles and the differences remain significant after controlling for several factors - analysis of >36.5 million articles in >36,000 journals
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Quarto Wizard v2.2.0 is out for VS Code and Positron.
New: schema-aware authoring (completions, hover, validation for Quarto extensions), extension snippets, compatibility badges, and brand support.
m.canouil.dev/quarto-wizard
#Quarto #VSCode #PositronIDE #authoring
