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Dr. Katie I.
Dr. Katie I.
@hellyeahcorks.bsky.social
Hydrothermal geologist/geochemist, postdoctoral researcher. Sciences hard, loves the work. Also makes costumes. Views expressed are mine.
663 followers81 following5.2K posts
Alas, did not get this, but it was a long shot. (If y'all are going to sea and need someone who kicks ass at doing oceanographic fieldwork, I'm your huckleberry)
I just applied for cruise participation on a quick deadline that wasn't widely advertised (IMO bc there are only 6 slots and they got 100+ applications for the 10 slots on the associated deployment cruise 🤯).
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Billions of our hard earned tax dollars that were meant for science funding went unspent. The money will be spent on whatever Trump's priorities are, not basic research. Brought to you from party of waste, fraud of abuse. 🧪 cen.acs.org/policy/resea...
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In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web.
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JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...
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I point this out every year, and am often told that "surely this cannot be true!" But surveys consistently report similar numbers, and it illustrates why increasing public & private institutional visibility of individual *scientists* (not just "science in the abstract") is actually quite important.
Every year, Research!America does a poll that asks, "Can you name a living scientist?" In January 2026, 76% of respondents said "no." Of those who said "yes," 5% named a scientist who was, in fact, dead. www.researchamerica.org/blog/can-you...
*drags hands down face* *screams into a pillow*
"Machine learning detects seamounts across the 2025 GEBCO grid at unprecedented scale, revealing previously undetected features widespread across ocean basins." *looks at the map, see's they've got literally every spreading ridge other than the East Pacific Rise shown as a seamount* Nah.
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Replying to @ketanjoshi.co
This is unfortunately a trend that I've noticed in LLM marketing in the last year where they *very directly* are marketing to people by going, "Hey, you're fucking lazy, right? Use our product."
The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...
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Replying to @paulguinnessy.bsky.social
“I believe that NSF has lost any semblance of independence.” Physicist Neal Lane, former director of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is among those who say that staff changes at the top of the agency are a sign of its de facto takeover by the administration of President Donald Trump.
The National Science Foundation, in its current form, cannot be trusted.
"Another former senior NSF official speculates that Stone’s departure is linked to the prospects of an investigation of the agency by congressional Democrats if they gain control of either the House of Representatives or the Senate." The National Science Foundation is lawless.
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"During normal times at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the pending retirement of its acting head after 18 months without a permanent director would suggest the $9 billion research agency is adrift and leaderless." The National Science foundation is leaderless.
THEY'RE HERE!!! Still no clue on the innards bc the ID stickers were ripped away at exactly the wrong spot. 💀💀 These are a winter project that I can't start until [redacted] is finished. 😎 The newer will get Batocera loaded for retro gaming, and the older will be a Linux box for audio streaming.
Got my hands on 2 Intel NUCs (via a local surplus auction) for WELL below market value today. Maybe I *can* actually build a little home server? We'll see once I pick them up. I know they'll need drives, but 🤞🤞 there's RAM in there. Reasonably confident I got a 6th gen i3 & 8th gen i5....for $30. 😎
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Replying to @brandontbishop.bsky.social
"The decrease in awarded grants can be seen across nearly all the agency’s directorates, Ross notes, despite Congress prohibiting the NSF from cutting any directorate’s budget by more than 5% compared with fiscal 2024 in the latest spending bill." The National Science Foundation is a lawless agency
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"But according to the latest data compiled by Grant Witness, the NSF awarded 6,238 grants in fiscal 2026 and around 8,650 in fiscal 2025, compared with an average of 11,387 grants awarded annually between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2024."
Good report on a frustrating situation by @kvasquez.bsky.social cen.acs.org/policy/resea...
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"The number of marine animals plummeted by about 60% in the years following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion...and those populations haven’t come close to recovering, the study found."
In the years after the 2010 BP oil spill, the number of fish in the deeper parts of the Gulf of Mexico dramatically declined.
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Alone, the date of the funding opportunity slipping is probably not that big of a deal. But at a time when every solicitation is being reviewed by OSTP and held up for months (or, in some cases, more than a year), this is another sign of breakdown in NSF's basic ability to function.
Scoop: The NSF's Major Research Instrumentation program offers up to $4 million to help scientists buy expensive equipment. Applying is time consuming and competitive. So it's no small issue that date when submissions were meant to open has come and gone. www.scientificamerican.com/article/scie...
Oh hey, my neighborhood beach. Nobody should be doing more than dipping their toes in the water there. Beach is steep AF, the waves and rip currents are always wild, and it's entirely unsafe for swimming (marked via signage). Beautiful, yes, but often has hazardous conditions.
-- Great White Pogo Shark -- Navy tests vertical launch system for man-eating sharks -- Modified Mae West quote Video is pretty impressive. As if seals and seal lions and otters didn't have enough to worry about with domoic acid and reduced upwelling. www.surfer.com/news/great-w...
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Replying to @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Alongside the decades-long gutting of institutional funding, I believe part of what has happened is the system-wide pressures to de-skill and modularize core curriculum so that the foundational courses are taught by the cheapest, largest, and least-protected population of instructors.
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Dawn over Kīlauea 🌋 volcano as its 55th episode is under way — www.youtube.com/live/HggWKlZ...
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Half of Morro Bay is under a THREE DAY LONG PSPS. It was dead calm yesterday. Breezy today, but not super windy. I've never seen a 3 day PSPS (and this was with little warning). It's balls hot here today (98F). And ofc you can't claim lost groceries on PSPS shutoffs. 🙄💀
Quarter of a million customers without power today in California -- including 130,000 due to Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) because of the high winds.
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