tallsmith.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

The neighborhood is getting ready for tomorrow

submitted 3 days ago • 100 comments

Are you a recent PhD (or soon to be PhD) from outside Canada looking to do a postdoc in Quebec? Get in touch if you are excited about microbes, evolution, ecology, genomics (or all of the above!) and I'd be happy to help develop a project together! www.mcgill.ca/gps/funding/...

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

I’m hearing rumors that thousands of people are calling the ICE tip line to report little green men and other aliens from outer space. That’s not why ICE set up this number, so you should absolutely NOT call that tip line to report those types of aliens. 👽 I repeat—do NOT call the below number! ☎️

submitted 5 days ago • 688 comments

Genetic material shed by tumors can be detected in the bloodstream three years before cancer diagnosis, according to a study led by investigators at Johns Hopkins University. That study was made possible with federal funding. Now, many studies like this are canceled. hub.jhu.edu/2025/06/04/...

submitted 5 days ago • 60 comments

Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

Meet Cuvier’s dwarf caiman! The smallest living crocodilian, it grows ~4.9 ft (1.5 m) long & weighs ~15.4 lbs (7 kg). It’s native to parts of South America, where it can be spotted basking along the shores of the Amazon or Orinoco rivers. Photo: Javier Caicedo Moncada, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

The weight loss drug Ozempic comes from a protein produced by Gila monsters (a big North American lizard of Southwest deserts). Basic science can lead to surprising applications. Leaps & bounds arise from steady effort. Defunding basic, unglamorous, steady research puts America last, not first.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

How Trump’s ‘gold standard’ politicizes federal science

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

How we made Jaws, the ‘dumb shark movie’ that changed Hollywood

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Here is a fascinating account of the science of crowd control technology and tactics that is not intended to be used as a guide for protestors but hey I’m not the how to read a science news article cops www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

submitted 8 days ago • 3 comments

Babies can’t be vaccinated but the folks around them sure can.

submitted 9 days ago • 19 comments

Ahem.

submitted 9 days ago • 439 comments

Let's have some fun. In this NYT story, we see a picture of an OpenAI billboard on a college campus, suggesting the following prompt: "Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus. In two weeks. Small steps please." What happens when we actually use ChatGPT to do this? THREAD!

submitted 9 days ago • 14 comments

Vaccines save lives.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

This seems like a great day to remind Bluesky that Stephen Miller lived four doors down from me freshman year And our student council person asked him (and everyone) to sign a birthday card for our dorm’s janitor And he threw a tantrum and wrote an op-ed about not socializing with “the help.”

submitted 11 days ago • 317 comments

Living Under Pressure: Suitable Areas for an Endangered Coastal Dolphin Overlap With Intense Human Activities

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Caribbean beaches blighted by record masses of stinking seaweed www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j... 🦑🧪🌎

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Trump calls it “gold-standard science.” But what he’s proposing is fool’s gold - shiny rhetoric hiding the rot of political interference in scientific endeavors, in the pursuit of his ideological agenda. Read the WaPo article featuring our Open Letter here: www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

submitted 14 days ago • 7 comments

Frontiers | A classification system for wounds and scars observed on white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias)

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Tactical deception in cephalopods: a new framework for understanding cognition www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... 🦑🧪

submitted 14 days ago • 4 comments

ICYMI: After years of hearing complaints that it's hard to get good career advice in marine biology, I assembled an expert panel to answer your questions about graduate school, where to find jobs, what skills are needed, and much, much more. 🦑🧪🌎🦈🐟

submitted 14 days ago • 2 comments

Once in Dire Straits, Atlantic Sturgeon Are Staging a Comeback on the East Coast From Maine to Florida, the endangered, prehistoric fish is rebounding, but a recent study shows just how vulnerable the U.S. population remains www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

submitted 14 days ago • 3 comments

Trump Cuts Threaten Safety Training For Workers In America’s Most Dangerous Jobs gcaptain.com/trump-cuts-t...

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

If violence breaks out at a protest, sit down in silence. It exposes agitators, protects peaceful protesters, and creates powerful optics the media can’t ignore. In the face of possible provocation, unity and discipline are our strongest defense—and a loud message in stillness 🪑✊🕊️🎥

submitted 16 days ago • 23 comments

For those who missed it, this happened.

submitted 16 days ago • 2 comments

Experts inside and outside the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been left stunned and puzzled by the decimation of a nearly 80-year-old agency that has been a global leader in public health. Learn how decimating the CDC will cost many lives in the US and abroad. #MedSky

submitted 18 days ago • 15 comments

see you there!

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

22 years ago I pivoted from working on antibiotic resistance to pandemic viruses. Since then, I've argued that if we care about saving US lives in expectation, advance capacity for producing bird flu vaccine offers by far the greatest expected return on investment. ... We were so goddamn close.

submitted 19 days ago • 111 comments

200+ scientists are in the middle of a marathon livestream to show why weather and climate science is so important and needs all our help to continue. It is here: wclivestream.com/watch

submitted 19 days ago • 34 comments

(1/4) For the first time since 1948, the US was absent from the annual World Health assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. The World Health Organization voted on policies to shape global health for years to come. While we sat out, here's what was covered at the 78th assembly. #WHA78 #GlobalHealth

submitted 19 days ago • 11 comments

Angular roughshark!

submitted 21 days ago • 41 comments

Lots of people on my feed are concerned about the destruction of NOAA by the Trump administration and Elon Musk, but much of what I’ve seen people post about is the national weather service. That’s vital, but NOAA does so much more than that! My latest, for @ucsusa.bsky.social 🧪🌎🦑🐠

submitted 47 days ago • 14 comments

Upcoming public talks: I will be part of a panel discussing the legacy of "Jaws" on its 50th anniversaray. The panel is hosted by Johns Hopkins University (JHUP is the publisher of my book "Why Sharks Matter") and you can sign up for free here: events.jhu.edu/form/jaws-50th 🧪🦑🦈

submitted 56 days ago • 8 comments

"I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom." - Abraham Lincoln

submitted 21 days ago • 155 comments

Chub getting frisky in the shallows

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

Sometimes you just need a weird lungfish to break up your timeline:

submitted 24 days ago • 5 comments

It’s weird because for my whole career I was assured that a rising anti-intellectual fringe wasn’t really a problem because those people had no power to make any decisions that impacted my life Huh

submitted 23 days ago • 2 comments

#evolution of toothache "Dentine evolved as a sensory tissue in the exoskeleton of early vertebrates, a function retained in modern vertebrates." OA paper, tks!, from the paleontology lab famous for the discovery of the Tiktaalik a.k.a. Your Inner Fish: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9h1...)

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

Believe it or not, all three of these fish are the same species… the bluehead wrasse. Wrasses are protogynous hermaphrodites, meaning they transition from female to male over the course of their lives. Each phase can look radically different from each other as evidenced here #coralcitycamera

submitted 23 days ago • 218 comments

Hey, got some free cycles this summer? Did you know Harvard offers FREE online courses in the U.S. Constitution, Public policy, Civic Engagement in Constitutional Democracy and more? Share widely and get smarter this summer. pll.harvard.edu/subject/gove...

submitted 23 days ago • 5 comments