Dr Dr Oona Snoeyenbos-West

So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature. This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or w

Ever wondered how your grant got cancelled? No we know. Some college dropout asked ChatGPT "is it DEI/woke"?

www.techdirt.com/202...

Congratulations! 👏🥳This makes perfect sense since they can live at and “ride” that anoxic/oxic interface which can fluctuate widely in marine sediments. Very cool work!

New paper from my team detailing a greatly expanded genomic database of Asgard archaea revealing of high energy metabolism those related to eukaryotes! Led by @katyappler.bsky.social lots of help from @jameslingford.bsky.social @valdeanda.bsky.social @kassipan.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say A Stanford University team have tested their nasal spray vaccine in animals but still need to do human clinical trials.

"A single nasal spray vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, as well as bacterial lung infections, and may even ease allergies, say US researchers."

www.bbc.com/news/article....

#medicine

Wow.

As a geoscientist, I agree with this message:

How many times, in how many contexts, in how many ways am I going to have to say that this is what "AI" does— what it fundamentally *is*— before it sinks in? That all Bullshit engines do is statistically correlate training data & inputs via their weights to produce outputs you are likely to accept…

Larry the cat, the UK's most famous feline, marks 15 years as the country's chief mouser patrolling the corridors of power around number 10 Downing Street.
➡️ u.afp.com/S6Sv

On this red-figure pelike - a squat jar with two handles under a broad rolled lip - we see Amymone standing on the left, her hand on winged Eros' head. Poseidon - who has rescued her from a satyr - sits on an unseen chair or rock, seemingly inspecting the tines on his golden yellow trident. A cat sits under the god of the sea, looking out at us, the viewers. Greek, South Italian, Apulian, ca. 360-340 BCE. Attributed to the Dechter Painter. Met Museum, New York (1984.323.3)

Closeup of the cat, not drawn particularly well, but the attitude is all there, as if to say, 'Can you believe all this drama?'

Just in time for #caturday, I noticed something very interesting on this ancient Greek pelike (jar) featuring Poseidon and Amymone. A very rare representation of a cat. It doesn't seem to be very impressed by the presence of the gods. Perhaps this is a scene from a play ... 🏺 1/

#MetMuseum 📸 me

A photo of a cat under a bed with a rotisserie chicken with the caption: This is Beans. Beans stole a while rotisserie chicken off the counter. Not a piece. The whole chicken. Beans dragged it under the bed and growled at us for forty minutes. Beans is 9 pounds.

Become ungovernable

Happy #Caturday !

Exclusive: Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation Staff members have been instructed to scrub this topic and ‘biodefense’ from the agency’s website.

“Maybe a better way to look at this is ‘people preparedness’. One way for people to be prepared (for the next pandemic) is to be healthier, eat better and exercise, so you’re less likely to get sick or have a poor outcome,” Powers added.

Right. This will protect you from a novel pathogen.🤦‍♂️

Isn’t this just a restatement of the Gaia hypothesis and the work of James Lovelock & Lynn Margulis’ work!? 🙄

German photographer Christian Vieler captures the hilarious moments when dogs try to catch treats mid-air.

[📹 vieler. photography]

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

Unique Canadian fungus 'bank' with thousands of specimens saved by family foundation | CBC News A unique collection of microscopic fungi used for Canadian medical and biodiversity research has been saved from being shipped overseas.

hmmmmm? #Canada

Yes, Canada has a 'fungus bank' — and it just got saved by a massive donation

Weston Family Foundation donates $1M for UAMH Centre for Global Microfungal Biodiversity

www.cbc.ca/news/science...

And Horner had a rep as a creep well before this. Marrying a 19 year-old-student when he was 65, then treating it as some kind of joke or unserious. Women MSU students who told me they were interested in paleo, until their interactions with him. Not to mention how got his fame by claim jumping.

Fungi mining and giant waste piles: How to get rare earths without mining rock As nations posture over access to rare earth deposits, scientists say these coveted materials are hiding in plain sight – and can be harvested without any conventional mining at all.

Had a fun chat with the BBC about Mycomining recently. Always happy to nerd out about 🍄🍄‍🟫🍄doing the hard work of cleaning up after us humans plus their ability to turn “trash into treasure “!! www.bbc.com/future/artic...

RFK Jr's Nutrition Chatbot Recommends Best Foods to Insert Into Your Rectum "Top Assitarian Staples,” include “Bananas (firm, not overripe; peeled).”

MAHA indeed. Glad this was advertised at the Super Bowl:

www.404media.co/rfk-jrs-nutr...

🙈

Trump policies at odds with emerging understanding of COVID's long-term harm Studies offer insights into the health risks and burdens faced by people who have had COVID infections. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has narrowed COVID vaccine recommendations and cut research.

'Possible risk of autism in children. Dormant cancer cells awakening. Accelerating aging of the brain'.

The last thing I said on my first call with a client regarding SARS-CoV-2, in late Jan 2020, was 'there will be significant sequelae'. It was obvious even then.

www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-l...

Long COVID may be triggering Alzheimer’s-like changes in the brain: new study Over 20 million Americans are believed to have long COVID, suffering symptoms such as severe fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain, palpitations, dizziness and muscle pain.

As I've said many times before on this platform, the moment I decided that I was going to avoid infection with SARS-CoV-2 was the moment I read that acute Covid-19 could cause both cognitive dysfunction and anosmia.

nypost.com/2026/02/10/h...

Sharma said he has “repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions” 👇🏻👀

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Emil Ruff Leads Team to Explore Dark Oxygen Through NASA Collaborative Award | Marine Biological Laboratory For more than a century, textbooks asserted that molecular oxygen (O2) on Earth is produced almost entirely by photosynthesis, through plants and microbes. But discoveries over the past decade have ov...

Meet "OxyMoRon" our 5-year NASA ICAR program to study dark oxygen production in Earth's hidden ecosystems. We have multiple positions and are happy about collabs.

Co-PIs:@valdeanda.bsky.social @microbiaki.bsky.social @valiergaly.bsky.social Ranjani Murali, Scott Wankel

www.mbl.edu/news/emil-ru...

Very cool! 👇🏻

Fabulous work! 👏

Growth of methanogenic culture under different stress conditions

New preprint: “Proteomic stress response by a novel methanogen enriched from the Great Salt Lake”, first author William Christian. TLDR: we enriched a novel, euryarchaeotal, methyl-dismutating methanogen that grows at 16% salinity. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.29.702513v2 🧵 🦠 #microsky

Excellent question! 🤔

Why methane surged in the atmosphere during the early 2020s The atmospheric methane (CH4) growth rate surged after 2019, peaking at 16.2 parts per billion per year (ppb year−1) in 2020 before declining to 8.6 ppb year−1 in 2023. Using multiple atmospheric inve...

Why methane surged in the atmosphere during the early 2020s www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #jcampubs