Drew Steen

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

you know the world is ending when Summers is supporting a woman in STEM

Standing up for the smallest of minorities is important because when you accept the premise that one group are expendable because small or ‘insignificant’, you have accepted the idea of the expendability of human life in general, and the enemy will use your acquiescence to pick off yet more.

A bunch of folks at Lamont-Doherty are extremely amped right now

No AP News alerts, no Union-Tribune alerts or articles, no emails from UC either. I work at a UC and I would not know that UCLA lost all grant funding last night if I wasn't on Bluesky or in union group chats.

Self-preserving silence and general complacency are becoming more common.

University sidelines scientist who exposed toxic metals in Lake Maurepas The Southeastern Louisiana University scientist who discovered alarming levels of toxic chemicals in Lake Maurepas was abruptly removed from her research position this week without explanation.

“Changes such as these are common” Bro they absolutely are not www.fox8live.com/2025/08/01/u... University sidelines scientist who exposed toxic metals in Lake Maurepas

before i work out: i hate it in there, the sweaty panting world is a bad place
while working out: i remember now that this is a good place, it is the clean and normal-breathing world that is the enemy

Dear Dr. Paxson, As an alumnus (Sc.B. '00), I am disappointed to read of Brown's recent settlement with the Federal government. In my opinion, this agreement represents an unacceptable capitulation to a campaign of harassment by the Trump administration. The terms of the agreement may be defensible, taken out of context. But the context here is important: the Trump administration is trying to bully elite Universities, often using illegal or questionably-legal tactics, as part of its campaign to assume unconstitutional, authoritarian power. As many scholars at Brown could tell you - and many formerly bullied kids will agree - giving in to authoritarians doesn't protect an institution, any more than giving a bully your lunch money today protects you from having your money taken tomorrow. The Trump administration fundamentally does not respect contracts or agreements, and giving away concessions to such an administration does not protect the administration from tomorrow's shakedown. I assume that the Trump administration could destroy Brown University. But it is also possible that Brown University could destroy itself by ceding its autonomy to an authoritarian president. I owe a great deal to Brown, and I would hate to see it destroyed. But I would much rather we go down swinging, defending values that I thought were central to Brown's institutional culture, than to crumple in the face of an authoritarian government. Sincerely, Andrew D. Steen '00

Here's the email I just sent to Dr. Christina Paxon, President of Brown University, about the agreement Brown just signed with the Trump administration.
I'll send a version to the Brown Alumni Magazine. Happy to take comments/edits and co-signers from other alums.
cc: @hurricanexyz.bsky.social

Investigating the Atmospheric Microbial Ecosystem Through Theory, Bioenergetics, and Numerical Modeling: A Breath of Fresh Air for Aeromicrobiology Aerobiology research is hindered by several technical challenges facing experimental studies, sampling, and monitoring strategies Theoretical approaches and numerical modeling tools provide power...

Does the atmosphere harbour a resident, growing microbial ecosystem? ⛅

Here in @jgrbiogeo.bsky.social we outline how theoretical tools 📝 & modelling 💻 can bring us closer to the answer

Congrats lead author @drmartinezrabert.bsky.social @mioceanologie.bsky.social

🧵 thread 👇

tinyurl.com/7pdfm7uw

Given climate changes over the last 40k years it is entirely possible this species is younger than aboriginal culture

bsky.app/profile/drew...

Like, the indigenous kid hanging around the field camp out of boredom said, “hey, y’all ever see a [indigenous name for bigass stick insect]?”

This is going to be one of those things where scientists discovered the thing that indigenous people know about since time immemorial, right?

a lot of rank and file dems do not seem to understand that trans people are in an existential battle for our right to be part of society right now. the government today is trying to use employment law and federal extortion to ban us from bathrooms.

Why Did National Geographic Disappear Its Own Documentary About A Queer Climate Scientist? | Defector If you’re not a particular kind of mountain sports nerd, you might not be familiar with the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour. But for people who live their lives in the overlapping circl...

Good - and upsetting- reporting from Defector
defector.com/why-did-nati... Why Did National Geographic Disappear Its Own Documentary About A Queer Climate Scientist? | Defector

Whenever plans change unexpectedly I make sure to shout “Tajikistan is off! Tajikistan is off!”

president@brown.edu

Hulu Adapting ‘Midnight Son’ Audiobook Into ‘Blood & Myth’ True-Crime Doc The streamer is launching Blood & Myth, a doc that explores a series of shocking violent crimes that shattered a remote native village in Northern Alaska.

Hey hey, this is my cousin, James Dommek. He fricking rocks (as do all his siblings). He wrote a book and co-produced the audiobook version. Hulu picked it up and it'll be out this September! I can't tell from the story if it's an episode or a miniseries or a movie, but I'm looking forward to it!

People used to have to estimate! That’s a useful skill that changes the way you think about the world! It helps you separate “quantitatively important “ from “negligible “!

I’m not totally convinced that the widespread adoption of calculators hasn’t been detrimental to peoples’ cognitive abilities

Host: Let's play Wheel Of Ornithology!

Me: Are there any jays?

Host: No sorry

Me: I'd like to buy an owl

NSF plans abrupt end to lone U.S. Antarctic research icebreaker Imminent termination of the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer shocks polar scientists

My latest: Polar scientists warn that the White House and NSF are planning to terminate the Nathaniel Palmer, the only US research icebreaker capable of handling Antarctic extremes, this October.

So far the plan has seen minimal pushback from Congress.

DoD has just confirmed that NOAA will be able to continue using these satellites for the remainder of their operational life.

(I don't have a link, yet, I am literally sitting in a webinar where it was just confirmed)

the one thing i genuinely did not anticipate from this administration was its vicious, know nothing hostility to any and everything that might even be adjacent to science and scientific research. they genuinely one to destroy the entirety of the nation’s research capacity. and for what, exactly?

As I've said repeatedly, I cannot believe my fellow nerds haven't learned how to deal with a schoolyard bully by now.

I misread this as the *deer* surviving the vomiting, and was disturbed

Protein stability is also a key requirement for thermophily: a protein that is unusually stable at cold temperatures is just the right level of flexibility at hot temps.

We think this correlation suggests that protein stability is a big part of aeonophiles' ability to persist at low energy!

Frontiers | Potential Activities and Long Lifetimes of Organic Carbon-Degrading Extracellular Enzymes in Deep Subsurface Sediments of the Baltic Sea Heterotrophic microorganisms in marine sediments produce extracellular enzymes to hydrolyze organic macromolecules, so their products can be transported insi...

(c.f. www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic..., www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic... on that last point)

We don't understand very much at all about how microbes achieve aeonophily, or the ability to outcompete other organisms at very slow growth rates. However, theory and experiment suggest that aeonophiles require unusually stable proteins, to limit the energetic cost of protein repair.

We noticed that in permafrost, but not anywhere else that we looked, the apparent thermophiles were also apparent slow-growers, based on computational prediction of their growth rates based on codon usage bias.