Hannah Dion-Kirschner

Chunks of ice float in Lake Michigan at North Avenue Beach as temperatures plummet in the Chicago area with windchills at around -30 degrees, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. | Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Sea smoke emits Lake Michigan as chunks of ice float along the waters surface at North Avenue Beach, as temperatures plummet in the Chicago area with windchills at around -30 degrees, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. | Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

A man looks over into Lake Michigan from the North Avenue Beach Pier as temperatures plummet in the Chicago area with windchills at around -30 degrees, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. | Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

A woman gingerly walks along a sheet of ice coating the North Avenue Beach Pier as temperatures plummet in the Chicago area with windchills at around -30 degrees, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. | Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Well I felt all that -27 degrees getting these images this morning. Stay warm Chicago!

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

The deep sea is so wild. If you told me this was a recreation of the Burgess Shale fauna I would believe it

-Dr. Frankenstein, probably

“Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labours would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my [thesis] should be complete.”

“If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then” that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.” Mary Shelley knows what’s up 🤧

Was anybody going to tell me that Frankenstein is about work life balance for researchers or was I just supposed to read the book myself

Lessons on Scaling Gift Economies—and How It Can Help the Planet - Inside Climate News Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of “The Serviceberry,” offers ideas rooted in nature for creating sharing economies as a way to bind communities, offer purpose and reduce strain on the Earth.

“The sun’s energy is a gift we have not earned, and yet it comes. That gift of photosynthesis is then shared with others. It’s shared with the larvae of those caterpillars that are eating the leaves…in the abundance of fruits that the [birds] are all coming to feast on.”

Gas line explosion in Castaic prompts 5 Freeway closure, shelter-in-place order Los Angeles County firefighters were responding to a gas line explosion in Castaic on Saturday, which prompted the California Highway Patrol to close a portion of the 5 Freeway and the Fire Department...

Holy moly. Landslide ruptured buried gas line which caused an explosion (apparently?) and now a major N/S artery from Central Cal to SoCal is still shut down.
www.latimes.com/california/s...

Trump administration plans to break up largest federal climate research center Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the National Science Foundation "will be breaking up" the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

“NCAR has played a greater role in advancing weather prediction & atmospheric modeling than perhaps any other single entity in the world,” says @weatherwest.bsky.social

Dismantling NCAR would be “like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.” KH

Snapshot of US EPA's "causes of climate change" webpage as of 12/8/2025. Human causes are no longer mentioned anywhere on the page.

It appears that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has, within the past week, scrubbed a large amount of climate change content from its official website, as well as *removed human-caused warming* from the discussion on its "causes of climate change" page.

I’m looking for a pop science book that follows scientific efforts to measure and/or model the global carbon cycle—would happily accept any recommendations! 🌏 #geoscience

This is an Eastern Cape giant cycad. This specimen at Kew Gardens is the world's oldest potted plant* & it is older than the United States.
I found this oddly comforting? Certain systems seem deeply entrenched & unchangeable but in reality there are houseplants that have been around longer.🧪🌿

China’s CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for past 18 months, analysis finds World’s biggest polluter on track to hit peak emissions target early but miss goal for cutting carbon intensity

This is great news: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n.... Not least because it removes one of the common denialist retorts “what’s the point if China aren’t doing it” - they clearly are and so should we

KligrasV5_ENG This is "KligrasV5_ENG" by Nyah Yentl van Koningsveld on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

🚨 Job alert 🚨

Come work with us as a postdoc modelling the impacts of climate change on plant-soil interactions and C sequestration!

Apply here before the 3rd of December: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Check out this video of the project you will be working in: vimeo.com/1133112953?s...

2. AP Biology, where I was amazed by the Miller-Urey experiment—we can (try to) simulate the ancient Earth in a lab?!
3. Freshman year of college, when I accidentally enrolled in an environmental chemistry seminar. At the end of the quarter I declared my second major 🌏

I love hearing scientists’ origin stories because they highlight how the interests that draw us to science are as diverse as we are 🌱

For me it was:
1. A 5th grade teacher who taught a lesson on climate change, my first time learning about Earth’s climate system

NASA Planning for Unauthorized Shutdown of Carbon Monitoring Satellites - Eos Despite warnings that their actions are illegal, Duffy and other senior NASA officials have continued to secretly direct NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellites missions s...

NASA is making plans to shut down two Earth observing satellites that provide key data to climate scientists and farmers, despite lawmakers telling them it’s illegal to do it. Story by @astrokimcartier.bsky.social

eos.org/research-and...

New paper in @nature.com! With @kiseokmicro.bsky.social , Siqi Liu, Kyle Crocker, Jojo Wang, Mikhail Tikhonov & Madhav Mani — a massive dataset and simple model reveal a few conserved regimes that capture how soil microbiome metabolism responds to perturbations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Guidelines for preventing and reporting contamination in low-biomass microbiome studies Nature Microbiology - In this Consensus Statement, the authors outline strategies for processing, analysing and interpreting low-biomass microbiome samples, and provide recommendations to minimize...

Hope this is useful - consensus statement "Guidelines for preventing and reporting contamination in low-biomass microbiome studies" rdcu.be/er3Io

Postdoc Opportunity Megathread

It's been hard for early career biologists looking for postdocs, so I created a Google Sheet where we can all compile fellowships/job boards/postdoc opportunities in one place. PLEASE SHARE WIDELY! If you're a PI looking for postdocs, you can add to the 4th tab! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

⚖️ HUGE day today in the NIH terminations cases

There's a trial (of sorts) at 10a ET in Boston today for arguments that NIH unlawfully terminated 100s of grants.

It's a 3 hour hearing and I'll post periodic updates.

Of note: this is the 1st lawsuit filed against the Trump Admin to go to trial.

Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired Exclusive: Climate.gov, which supports public education on climate science, will soon no longer publish new content

Climate.gov, a major US government website supporting public education on climate science, will likely shut down after almost all of its staff were fired. What would be worse is if the website were co-opted to publish climate denial content.

Isolation of a putative sulfur comproportionating microorganism Scientific Reports - Isolation of a putative sulfur comproportionating microorganism

Our paper on the cultivation of a putative sulfur comproportionator from the Frasassi caves is finally out! Jan would have been happy to see this paper published - it's got everything that he loved: thermodynamics, cultivation, weird metabolisms, and life underground. Cheers to Jan!
rdcu.be/enlo3

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees

Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday

📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful

Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (Gift Article) The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

NSF Physics was cut by 85%, basically wiping out most of its capacity for supporting research.

NSF Astronomy was cut by 53%

Undergrad education was cut by 71% and research on learning by 79%

Graduate education was cut by 100% to ZERO.

#GiftLink ⚛️🔭

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Altadena community calls on Gov. Newsom, California legislature to protect them from predatory developers A new report shows that more than half of Altadena land sales since February have gone to corporations.

Altadena community calls on Gov. Newsom, California legislature to protect them from predatory developers.
A new report shows that more than half of Altadena land sales since February have gone to corporations.
lapublicpress.org/2025/05/alta...

Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My ongoing request:

If your NSF or NIH grant was terminated--whether at Harvard or elsewhere--please report it here.

NSF: grant-watch.us/submit-nsf.h...

NIH: grant-watch.us/submit-nih.h...

Our trackers are actively used in lawsuits and are often the only record that terminations ever occurred.

Map of local National Weather Service office "areas of responsibility" modified (using polygons with black outlines and red fill) to indicate where recent/expanding cuts to NOAA/NWS have resulting in understaffing so extreme that some offices can not longer operate on a 24/7 basis.

I just created a quick map depicting which portions of the United States are now (as of today) or will imminently be (by early June) without 24/7 local National Weather Service coverage (per Washington Post reporting). #CAwx #CAfire #CAwater #ORwx #AKwx #WYwx #KSwx