Oh. It’s an experiment.

Tom the Dancing Bug

Man, I wish we were in the control group.

If you think the cartoon is too extreme, try reading Science magazine.

Similar conversations are taking place across the country as the federal government has paused or terminated billions of dollars of grants, proposed slashing research funding by more than 40% for key research agencies in the next fiscal year, and tried—so far without success—to cut overhead payments to universities. In response, graduate schools have reduced the size of their incoming cohorts and faculty have been anxiously watching their budgets and worrying about their own careers. “My lab is definitely going to shrink,” says Arthi Jayaraman, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware.

So is U.S. academic science as a whole—perhaps dramatically. Numbers released in May by the National Science Foundation (NSF) indicate that if Congress approves the cuts to the agency proposed by the White House, the number of early-career researchers it supports could fall by 78%—from 95,700 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs during this fiscal year to 21,400 in 2026. Young researchers supported by other agencies would also be hit, and even senior faculty worry about their future. “It’s a nightmare,” Simon says. “I really fear for the future of science.” (NSF declined to comment for this story.)

Me, too.

You wouldn’t want to take a bath in 70°C water. That would be painful. That’s the temperature of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. We had a dramatic demonstration of how awful it would when a bison stumbled into the spring and was cooked to death.

That’s horrific, but unsurprising. We last visited Yellowstone several decades ago, after a major fire had swept through the place. It wasn’t exactly wholesome for the kids — black charred snags everywhere, heaps of bones where some animal had died in place, and the hot springs were surrounded with skeletons in the muck. It would have made the visit even better if the kids could have watched a massive animal die a horrible painful death. Yellowstone isn’t Disneyland.

I’d rather spare them this sort of thing, though.

Yellowstone’s thermal pools might not be capable of dissolving organic matter, but bodies tend to disappear quickly once they fall in. When Il Hun Ro, 70, fell into the Abyss Pool in the West Thumb Geyser Basin around July 7, the only evidence at the scene was several “dark clumps” and Ro’s shoe-clad foot, which was recovered from the water.

Nature isn’t kind.

You can ask my wife what it’s like being married to a biologist, and she’ll tell you.

SMBC

There is zero roadkill in our house. I like my captured organisms alive and breeding.

UMM is hosting the SCOPES conference (Small Campus Observatories as Promoters of Education in Science) today through Saturday, so 43 astronomers are going to be roaming the campus and talking about telescopes and education.

There is a public lecture tonight, too. Check out the program!

It’s that time of year when we start spending more time outdoors, and when the mosquitos are on the prowl for your blood. Colin Purrington bought these simple devices that are non-toxic but promise to kill mosquitos around your yard — not that I’m at all interested, I like having spider food living around my home — but I can understand not wanting biting, flying insects disturbing your parties. It also seems ecologically safe, since all it is is a tube containing a yeast solution (to produce CO2, a mosquito attractant) and boric acid, to kill insects that drink from it.

Only problem is that they don’t work. They produce very little CO2, mosquitos don’t take the bait, and if they crawl inside the tube, they don’t drink, they just fly out again. And it’ll cost you $50 for a box of 4 tubes! They really shouldn’t have let these devices fall into the hands of a scientist who can think quantitatively and who can devise easy tests of their efficacy.

Oh, another little problem with Spartan Pro: if you write a negative review of their product, they will sue you. It’s a stupid SLAPP suit that was eventually defeated, at a cost of $90,000 to Purrington. No, he didn’t get his legal costs back.

SLAPP suits are evil, and anyone or any compony that deploys them is evil, too.

I’m amazed at all the people leaving comments on Purrington’s site to claim that they actually do work. I don’t know whether they’re gullible, or Spartan Mosquito is paying puppets to leave phony testimonials, or my most charitable interpretation, they’re seeing the effects of general insect decline and attributing it to the magic cylinder they hung from a tree. I’m seeing fewer insects year by year in my area, so this might be a good time to be selling ineffective insect traps and letting your reputation thrive on ecological decline.