Madeleine Becker

Many brightly colored pinned moth specimens in an Entomology collection.

Undergrad and graduate students! Could your work benefit from visiting one of the NHMLAC’s collections? Apply for our Collections Study Award, due Apr. 1. I’d love to have students make use of our Entomology collection!

Details here:
tinyurl.com/bdduefsy

Comic. [Two people looking at a board with apparent formula (3.1.3.1)/(3.1.2.1)] PERSON: Do mammologists think these are hard? I mean, this one just evaluates to 3/2. [caption] Mathematicians encounter dental formulas

Dental Formulas

xkcd.com/3213/

An historic black and white illustration of a paper nautilus floating on the ocean. There are boats, a city and hills in the background.

🎉 Huge news for BHL: The Field Museum is taking over the hosting of BHL’s website, servers & infrastructure, ensuring long-term stability and access for its 63+ million pages of open biodiversity literature. Learn more:
blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/02/tran...
#BHLTransition #ILoveBHL 🌍 📚 🧪

Defunding science on the lowdown. Even while the budget “looks” stable.

The genome isn't a blueprint. But what is it?

I originally imagined this as a reported feature on metaphors of the genome, but it ended up being an essay.

And at the end I share the metaphor I personally ended up landing on. If you want to tell me why it is wrong, you'll need to read the story ;)🧪

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

A wolf has come to Los Angeles County for the first time in more than a century Around 6 a.m. Saturday, the 3-year-old female arrived in the mountains north of Santa Clarita, as tracked by a GPS collar.

There’s a wolf in LA for the first time in 100 years. A collared gray wolf entered the mountains of north Los Angeles County yesterday. Known as “BEY03F” she traveled hundreds of miles from her pack in Plumas County crossing highways, mountains, creeks and valleys.

www.latimes.com/environment/...

Dozens of researchers will move to France from US following high-profile bid to lure talent Large proportion worked at Columbia University, which had its grants cut and frozen by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

More than 10,000 Ph.D. scientists were fired by the Trump administration last year. Grant cuts affected more.

"A few dozen got jobs in other countries" is not a serious solution.

There are not enough jobs in the whole world. The result will be less science, not the same science just elsewhere.

Hot take: folks are too focused on the AI emphasis of the PRFB & missing the most concerning part of the solicitation.

The heavy emphasis on bio-AI integration for “technological advances” is a concerning degradation of NSFs mission to fund basic biological research.

it's the AI PRFB now 🙃

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...

NSF building on Eisenhower Av. HUD now owns.

Destroying the NSF mural in the foyer. Of the Eisenhower building.

The National Science Foundation sign on our Eisenhower Av building is now gone.

The NSF mural in the foyer is removed and torn off in sheets.

We were supposed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the agency in May 2025. That never happened.

metro rewind >>>>>> spotify wrapped metrorewind.com/rewind/

You will be visited by three spirits

Geneticist here. Anyone telling you that they can just change intelligence (which isn't what IQ measures well anyways) by fiddling with a few genes is just straight-up grifting, it doesn't work like that. And yes it's basically definitionally eugenics.

Yes please

White-necked jacobin, a hummingbird, perched on a branch

Here's my latest contribution to the "Lost Science" series at the New York Times: Jay Falk, a scientist who studies why some female hummingbirds look just like males. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qF7Qje

Neat opportunity at George Mason University for #consbio #consgen undergrads. Paid NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

smconservation.gmu.edu/nsf-reu/

Sent: To: Subject: Attachments: Robert Trivers 6/25/2018 2:19:44 AM jeffrey E. [jeevacation@gmail.com] Re: EPSTEIN.docx Importance: High perhaps i misunderstood "let's concentrate on you" Jamaica is bad enough but i have mastered that-at least the danger-4th highest murder rate in the world as for the us i have alienated large stretches of it-i will spare you the details i was amused that you are now friends with JD Watson he single-handedly prevented me from getting a Junior Fellowship at Harvard In 1972 I got my PhD in Biology and it was conventional to nominate the very best post-docs for a Junior Fellowship, Harvard's most prestigious award-it provided three years of research support without any duties. I was the best student out of Evolutionary and Organismic Biology in more than 20 years. The entire department was behind me. but Watson was on the 3-man committee, in charge of all the science candidates and he deemed my two papers, reciprocal altruism and parental investment and sexual selection as "not being science" and dismissed me in one sentence. Well bless his soul, he now does not even understand his own subject-yes, i speak of genetics-because having remained resolutely ignorant of evolutionary logic and biology he can neither understand the shape and form of the genotype nor how it differs systematically within life i have been preparing something for you for a long time on human intelligence, Africa, parasites etc because i prefer to get things right but i am ready to send you what i have main focus is-Africans stupid or smart?

“The Worst person you Just Made a Great Point” photo from The Onion meme

Look I’m willing to say it: maybe James Watson got two things right

big misunderstanding here. obviously this isn't about the pedophile stuff—he's just coming up with topics for evo psych grants he's about to fund 😆

meme of sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill and a photoshopped on green pentatomid captioned “one must imagine sisyphus finding a very cool bug under the rock”

the year i’m having

That’s because the purpose of biology for the right is naturalizing social hierarchy and defining a subaltern “other” to stand in contrast to the “normal”.

Sharing my portrait of Isabella Aiona Abbott for #AdaLovelaceDay to celebrate #womenInSTEM and #IndigenousPeoplesDay.

🐡🧪👩🏻‍🔬 #histsci #ald25

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

I am deeply grateful for the work of NSF staff this year to keep research & grants moving in a difficult environment. I view this petition as a means to demonstrate impact & interest in ensuring access to a vital grad research program.

450+ signees and counting:
laurenkuehne.github.io/grfpChanges/

a meme using the format of a rudimentary sketch of a factory worker on an assembly line. the assembly line consists of an industrial machine outputting widgets onto a conveyor belt. 3 of these widgets are pictures of normal DC metro buses. however, among them is also a picture of a DC metro bus entirely wrapped in an ad for L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics". the factory worker says "i guess we doin scientology buses now"

I can't keep up with DC these days

Flyer for the award. Has images of three students interacting with collections materials; text reads: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Student Collections Study Award October 1st, 2025 Application Deadline Application and Details: https://nhm.org/student-collections-study-award

Are you an undergraduate or graduate student whose research would benefit from visiting a collection at the @nhm.org? Apply now for our Collections Study Award! Deadline is Oct. 1; learn more at nhm.org/student-coll...

A work study student helps prepare specimens for digitization. There are many folks at the Museum that make Ranges possible, and there are even more volunteers helping out online at Zooniverse.

🦇 Outlined in a new paper published online in the Journal of Mammalogy, our Ranges Digitization Network will bring even more detail to digitized mammal collections in western North America, including biodiversity hot spots like L.A.: go.nhm.org/digitized-ma...

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

While full solicitation isn’t up, looks like we have 2025 proposal deadlines for the GRFP: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...