Bill Tracy

Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Greg Casar on stage in Tucson in front a crowd of 23,000 people.

Tucson, Arizona today.

Original projected attendance was 3,000 people.

23,000 showed up.

AOC: What they like to call as radical, I believe is common sense.

I believe that when a person gets sick, they shouldn’t go bankrupt in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Common sense

I believe that a minimum wage should cover the minimum cost to live. Common sense...

West Papuan Indigenous people call for KitKat boycott over alleged ecocide Thousands of acres of rainforest is being cleared to produce palm oil, used in popular Nestlé and Mondelēz brands

“All are products that contain palm oil, by companies that source the ingredient directly from West Papua, where thousands of acres of rainforest are being cleared for agriculture.

More than 90 West Papuan tribes, political organisations and religious groups have endorsed the call for a boycott.

Opinion | The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education This is a moment to trumpet the strengths of higher education and address its weaknesses.

‘“The people who are attacking higher education are talking nonstop,” said Holden Thorp, a chemist and former university administrator who runs the Science family of journals. “And the people leading higher education are not saying very much.”’

Read this right now

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

A graduate’s arrest and Trump’s ‘pincer attack’ on higher education The administration is cutting funds and threatening what it sees as liberal bastions, such as Columbia University, where it detained Mahmoud Khalil for his pro-Palestinian activism

“There’s an attack on people’s rights with one hand and on their livelihoods with the other. Both of them are equally dangerous. It’s no secret that the right wants to defund the left and that they see universities as bastions of the left. It won’t stop with Columbia. They want to suppress dissent.”

Beautiful

I honestly believe our most powerful position in a toxic time that feeds on cynicism, apathy,& despair is to genuinely care and act for a better world.

Cynicism is our enemy. We should check it, incl. on the left. It’s not intellectually superior. It’s the virus they’re trying to infect us with. NO

I need to this. For years I've avoided daily news, and now I just keep recting to everything that fool does. Gotta calm down and focus on me and mine and not him.

Can they all be the same species? 🌽😂

I read the whole thing, I don’t recommend it.

Inside the Nazi mind: why did millions of Germans embrace Hitler's ideology? — BBC History Magazine My interest has always been in mentalities: why people think the way they do, how they justify their actions, and what makes them believe they are right. This focus has shaped my career much more than...

“Most people stop studying history in their mid-teens. This creates a fundamentally historically illiterate population. The idea that there’s a widespread movement to learn from history or to understand it meaningfully is false. Only small numbers of people engage with it seriously.”

Modern GWAS can identify 1000s of significant hits but it can be hard to turn this into biological insight. What key cellular functions link genetic variation to disease?

I'm very excited to present our new work combining associations and Perturb-seq to build interpretable causal graphs! A 🧵

Haven’t read nightmare years, but I agree on the rise and fall book2

Yes, good to see, I believed that people carried maize to the upper Missouri and then to the North east. This seems to imply that the flint types were moved west after adaptation to the NE. Not sure about that.

The Grapes or Wrath

The 1/3 or so of the electorate who chose not to vote (they could be their own party) are just as responsible for what's coming as the people who voted for him.

Inaction was an action.

From now on my group will be using it. And I will be suggesting it on anything appropriate that I edit.

I like this a lot

and PEOPLE quickly moved it across the Americas

news.wisc.edu/uw-madison-h...
Graduate student Zoe Fess inspects one ofthe ears she just harvested. Photos by Bryce Richter and artcile by Elise Mahon

news.wisc.edu/uw-madison-h...
Professor Bill Tracy and Paul look at different variety

UW–Madison, Ho-Chunk partner to increase seed stock of corn through traditional methods The crop scientists and Ho-Chunk partners went to great lengths to prevent cross-pollination with the commercial corn that’s widely grown in Wisconsin, covering the ears of Ho-Chunk Speckled corn in b...

news.wisc.edu/uw-madison-h...

Push–Pull Intercropping Increases the Antiherbivore Benzoxazinoid Glycoside Content in Maize Leaf Tissue Push–pull technology refers to a promising mixed cropping practice for sustainable agricultural intensification, which uses properties of intercrop and border crop species to defend a focal crop again...

New paper from our group! We found that maize plants from push-push fields had a higher relative abundance of metabolites toxic to insect herbivores. This suggests that maize plants growing with companion plants are "stronger" than maize plants growing alone.
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Slide I put together for a Darwin Day talk I'm giving next year. Unconscious selection = Natural selection. Leaf angle in maize has not been directly selected on by breeders but shows huge change! A meta-analysis of natural & wild pops suggests selection under domestication is, if anything is weaker

Love this quote

Joanne Chory, Who Enlisted Plants to Fight Climate Change, Dies at 69 Biologist sought to breed crops that could store more carbon safely underground in their roots.

"Joanne Chory, Who Enlisted Plants to Fight Climate Change, Dies at 69"

In the Wall Street Journal

www.wsj.com/science/envi...

#PlantScience #Obituary

"Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it."

-- Leo Tolstoy, who died #OTD 1910