Marty Kardos

After a long and frustrating discussion with the Cell Press ”help”-desk, led by Ben and Tom, the paper is finally made open access (in line with what we had requested and expected from the beginning) 😅

Low mutation rate but high male-bias in the germline of a short-lived opossum Abstract. Age and sex have been found to be important determinants of the mutation rate per generation in mammals, but the mechanisms underlying these fact

New paper led by @yadirapga.bsky.social!

Opossums have babies at 6-months of age, but are still highly male-biased in their mutations

academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Purple pollen visible in a dissected flower of Linum grandiflorum, flowering flax, an insect-pollinated species.

*Postdoc in Evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University*
We are recruiting a postdoc for a large interdisciplinary project to investigate evolutionary drivers and genomic consequences of pollen evolution in response to pollination mode shifts in flowering plants. 1/5

su.varbi.com/what:job/job...

I'm hiring a postdoc... By combining samples that are more than a million years old with the short generation time of small rodents, we hope to gain a unique window into evolution unfolding across millions of generations!

Law Firm Pressures Brown University to Erase Research on Anti-Wind Groups

My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up.

NYT just covered it. 1/n

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

Inbreeding reduces fitness in spatially structured populations of a threatened rattlesnake | PNAS Small and fragmented populations are at high risk of local extinction, in part because of elevated inbreeding and subsequent inbreeding depression....

www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

ConGen: Population Genomic Data Analysis Course/Workshop, South Africa 2025

Conservation Genomics course (ConGen) this December in South Africa

This course is always a lot of fun, and will be great for grad students, postdocs, or anyone else wanting to dive into applications of genomics for conservation and management of wild populations. www.umt.edu/congen/africa/

A great way to destroy biodiversity is to be consciously ignorant of it

I’m pretty amazed that any real scientists are still willing to be involved with Colossal.

Wyoming deer are heading to the high country, some will travel up to 150 miles. Amazing - and necessary - movements across vast swaths of YOUR public lands. Follow along for weekly updates!

N.I.H. Workers Denounce Trump’s ‘Harmful’ Health Policies

This is admirable

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/h...

Agents that make frequent massive mistakes I suspect

We really did live through a world-historical scientific and technical effort to contain a pandemic, decide that we don't ever want to do that again, and conclude that means tearing down everything and everyone involved in containing a pandemic

Save the date, follow ICP2026, update your ABBA playlist, and come join us in Stockholm next year!

This is going to be fun!

The end result is hollowed out institutions with no credibility

‘doing it for the sake of the institution’ and “my boss told me to” are pathetic excuses.

We watched in horror as the acting administrator of NOAA fired hundreds of workers for cause when she must’ve known there was no cause. Officials at NOAA broke legally binding bargaining agreements with unions knowing that this was unethical at best.

Unethical and illegal orders that come from a legitimate leader are still unethical and illegal. Many high ranking federal officials seem to not recognize this.

RFK Jr. threatens to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals The health secretary said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet are in bed with pharma.

….whatthefuck.

Geniuses at work

If you are privileged enough to be a tenured Prof at a US university, here is an opportunity to lend your voice to media. Sign up if you are willing to talk to the press about what the war on science means for education and for our society.

I want to eat there

This will benefit the fossil fuel industry and hurt biodiversity and public health.

EO directs federal scientists to account for uncertainty, be transparent about methods and data, use weight of evidence in interpreting results… like this isn’t already done in every agency.

The only thing new is an order to essentially abandon the precautionary principle in rule making.
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I commented. You should too!

#OpenToWork: how laid-off US scientists are coping with shattered careers Unemployed researchers face some tough career choices as they flood the job market after the Trump administration’s cuts to science.

So many of us now have the previously unusual experience of having a mad man lay waste to our careers and contributions to society. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The comment period for this ends in 3 DAYS. Please leave a comment telling them EVERYONE should be able to get covid boosters.
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The Trump administration wants to exclude environmental destruction from the definition of ‘harm’ in the ESA - reversing decades of progress on threatened species protection.

Trump’s ‘liquidation plans’ could wipe out Wyoming research group renowned for migration work - WyoFile Fate of the Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit’s science faculty — Matt Kauffman, Anna Chalfoun and Annika Walters — unclear as president orders deep cuts.

Fate of Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit staffers — Matt Kauffman, Anna Chalfoun and Annika Walters — remains unclear, but Trump administration cuts have led to widespread suspicion that their days on the job are numbered.

I so wish things like this were more widely published and read.