Benjamin Gill

...and I've used it for running, biking, and swimming.

Don't know if you are willing to upgrade to a smart watch, but I had a Garmin Forerunner for more than a year and half and its heart rate monitor works well. Battery life is still consistently long. It came recommended by an ultrarunner friend of mine.

We’re drafting the bracket next week, so get those nominations in!

Voting starts September 1st

NSF Division of Earth Sciences Informational Webinar

Join us on August 18 for the next webinar.
www.nsf.gov/events/nsf-d...

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.

Trump's new executive order "looks like an explicit attempt to destroy peer review for federal science grants,” a physicist in Texas tells @dangaristo.bsky.social. 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I realize broad science-literacy problems cannot generally be solved just by shoving more facts at people but I really wish more people understood that the entire purpose and mechanism of a vaccine is to educate your OWN immune system, making it about the most "natural" medical intervention possible

New executive order puts all grants under political control All new funding on hold until Trump administration can cancel any previously funded grants.

"In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change." arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Please stop calling us “mainstream” scientists, we’re not boring we’re just right

9. I simply cannot ethically hire anyone on federal funds under these new conditions, and I will not do so going forward.

That hamstrings my research, but worse it prevents the development of brilliant, talented researchers like my former students who are professors, startup founders, and more.

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years.

Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

Eruption Information Eruptive activity at the summit of Kīlauea, within Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, has been intermittent since an eruption began on December 23, 2024.

Kīlauea Episode 30 erupts with twin lava fountains early August 6 HST.

Cam 1: www.youtube.com/live/sTXKIz2...

Cam 2: www.youtube.com/live/fiyttmA...

Cam 3: www.youtube.com/live/BqmpkUd...

Eruption updates: www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/ki...

Eruption info: www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/ki...

🧪🌋⚒️⚠️

Plot of global benthic δ18O data for 0 – 5.3 Ma (Lisiecki & Raymo, 2005) with geomagnetic polarity subchrons displayed on the top x-axis and planktic foraminiferal primary biozones plotted on the bottom x-axis using the deeptime package.

A mammal phylogeny (Garland et al., 1992) plotted in the fan layout using the ggtree and deeptime packages. The greyscale concentric circles in the background indicate geological stages, whereas the linear colored timescale indicates geological epochs.

Early tetrapod occurrence data (Jones et al., 2023) plotted as a taxonomic/biostratigraphic range plot using the geom_points_range() function from the deeptime package.

A stratigraphic column of Cretaceous lithostratigraphic units from the San Juan Basin, USA. The deeptime package has been used to add pattern fill which indicate the primary lithologies of the units as reported by the Macrostrat API (Peters et al., 2018) via the rmacrostrat R package (Jones et al., 2024).

📢 deeptime: an R package that facilitates highly customizable and reproducible visualizations of data over geological time intervals

🔗 doi.org/10.1080/2096...

Fully #openaccess in @bigearthdata1.bsky.social with insight about deeptime📦 development and code examples!

#rstats #geology #paleontology

ACADEMIC READING ALREADY COMES WITH A SUMMARY IT IS CALLED THE ABSTRACT

I would go have a "chat" with the local thieves guild.

That should be "I've been a geology professor at Virginia Tech for 13 years..." 🤦

I've been a geology professor at Virginia Tech, 7 miles from this well, and just l learned about it today. A little embarrassed but this is really cool!

www.usgs.gov/centers/virg...

Awesome. Thanks for this!

Graph of depth to groundwater in a well, showing sudden water level oscillations of up to about 1 foot, starting around 7:45PM eastern on July 29, 2025.

Look at that hydrograph! This is from a USGS monitoring well in Christiansburg, Montgomery County, VA. Observation well 27F2 SOW 019 is 450' deep, completed in carbonate rocks of the Elbrook Formation and well known for its response to quakes.

⚒️🧪

Data: waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-l...

This is cool. This well is less than five miles from where I live!

Our department (Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech) is pretty big. We are currently at 143 undergrad and 71 graduate students for the fall semester. The data is publicly online but you have to know how to navigate the data portal to find it. udc.vt.edu/irdata/data/...

Correction that's Half Life 2 not 3. Three doesn't exist (and thats a long story for another day).

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from a video game:

"Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess Shale and an eon's worth of mud?"

- Dr. Breen, Half-Life 3

This is the same amount as the entire National Science Foundation's R&D spending for the entire field of *engineering* for the whole country. All of it.

Devastating for US Antarctic researchers. US abdicating multiple global leadership roles in marine science. USAP people, we need a professional lobbyist-large sections of both senate and house bills dedicated to drilling and nothing about the NBP. Community led push needed and a comms strategy.

I’m convening a session at a planetary science conference this fall and people keep withdrawing their presentations. So far every one has been withdrawn because of lack of travel support. It’s all folks coming from the US. This administration is killing scientific disciplines in big ways and small

Screenshot from Reddit. User is zensnapple, posting 6 months ago. Thread says "How to turn off Google AI Overview in Chrome SOLVED Open Chrome and put chrome://settings/searchEngines in the search box. A tab will open which brings you to Search Engine > Manage Search Engines and Site Search. Click on the Add button by the Site Search update. A box will open. Fill in the form with the following: Name: AI Free Web Shortcut: @web URL: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14 You’ll now see AI Free Web in the list of search engines. Click on the three stacked dots on the right side of AI Free Web on the list. Select Make Default. From now on, google functions pretty much like it did back when it was good. Good luck out there."

A while ago, we started a #FixItFriday tradition. We keep a running list - large & small, digital & analog, anything broken or annoying - and work on it together.

Today's 30-second fix: to remove AI "preview" from search results, here's the setting for Chrome users: www.reddit.com/r/techsuppor...

Employees’ protests against Trump science policies spread to NSF Letter to key House Democrat follows declarations by scientists at NIH, EPA, and NASA

Staff at the National Science Foundation have sent their concerns about President Donald Trump’s administration to Congress. scim.ag/4f4Mc2u

Amid Fear of Retaliation, N.S.F. Workers Sign Letter of Dissent

"In the letter, the signatories warned that National Science Foundation grants now underwent a 'covert and ideologically driven secondary review process'...”

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/s...

It was at 9:30 at night. They kept the greenhouse open late and there was a long line to get in.

Large, yellow and red bloom of corpse flower with two people smelling the it on the right.