Anny Chung (鍾彥儀)

Lemurs Love This Fruit That Is Choking Madagascar’s Forests

Our work with Dr Matt McCary and team was featured in NYTimes! www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/s...

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

An unconventional Rubisco small subunit underpins the CO2-concentrating organelle in land plants In many algae, photosynthesis is boosted by biophysical CO2-concentrating mechanisms, which pack the CO2-fixing enzyme Rubisco into liquid-like organelles called pyrenoids. Engineering C3 crops with a...

Our work on #hornwort #pyrenoids is finally out in @science.org! 🎉 We uncovered how hornworts pack their Rubisco into pyrenoids and successfully recreated them in Arabidopsis. A key step toward engineering more efficient photosynthesis in crops @btiscience.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

ICE has spun a massive surveillance web. We talked to people caught in it The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, is using a broad web of surveillance tools — purchased as its budget has ballooned under this administration — to monitor, apprehend and intimidate the people it seeks to deport and the U.S. citizens critical of its policies.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, is using a broad web of surveillance tools to monitor, apprehend and intimidate the people it seeks to deport and the U.S. citizens critical of its policies. n.pr/4sig14N

can you teach something at Texas A&M? just follow this flowchart.

www.chronicle.com/article/insi... via @jasperjsmith.bsky.social and @mzahneis.bsky.social

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

things every single republican president of your lifetime has done

- started a war in the middle east
- completely destroyed the economy

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

📢 Now accepting proposals for the Graduate Research Excellence Grants! These provide evolutionary biology research funds for early and advanced Master’s and PhD students. Applicants must be members of SSE. Deadline: May 18, 2026
www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

W.E.B. Du Bois challenged racist myths in 1900. We re-created his work.

More than 125 years after Du Bois presented his works in Paris, the AJC has re-created the visualizations and photographs with modern looks at the lives of Black Georgians.

🚨Our cross-journal special feature is open to proposals!🚨

🐛Focus: how climate change affects plant–antagonist interactions, including those involving phytophagous insects, plant pathogens and more

💡Find out more: buff.ly/fFy6ker

@jappliedecology.bsky.social
@journalofecology.bsky.social

🧪🌍️

Faculty Positions

We are hiring an Assistant or Associate Professor in Indigenous Environmental Governance and Management. Very excited for this position.

Please circulate widely among your networks:
www.sfu.ca/rem/about/em...

#academia #HigherEd #AcademicSky

“As Karen got to know the guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was held, she kept hearing the same thing from them: that ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. “Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that.””

The people who have to insure our homes and cars know that climate change is real, because it affects their bottom line. It's not that regulating emissions is bad for business; it's just bad for a small number of industries that happen to be very powerful.

Exciting announcement! My new department is launching a postdoc fellowship in quantitative biology. Fellows will be co-advised by two Bio faculty, one that is quant focused (not me) and one that is not (me???). I would love to co-sponsor a postdoc and build a collaboration so please reach out!

4 photos showing different types of lichens.

4 other photos with more different types of lichens

How many different #lichens on a single #tree? 🌳 I don't know but this is just a selection from the upper branches of a single oak (Quercus robur or petraea) uprooted this week by storm Nils 🌪️🌳 #botany

Anthropogenic disturbance alters the diversity, composition, and abundance of microbes as well as the edaphic properties of the soil.

#TansleyReview: Why, when, and how microbes can benefit ecological restorations: current approaches and future directions

📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
by Crawford et al.

@kerricrawford.bsky.social @collingdice.bsky.social
Figure created in biorender.com/iwso49n.

Salar microbiano 🦠💕

Todo está relacionado. El salar de Atacama es un holobionte, innumerables relaciones simbiontes que forman un ser vivo complejo porque todo está vivo.
¿Cómo vivirán los que vienen? ¿La naturaleza será sólo un recuerdo?

📣Apply to join us an Associate Editor!📣

We are seeking editors with expertise in:
🌱Below-ground processes
🔥Fire ecology
🐦️Animal ecophysiology
🌊Marine and freshwater ecology
🐝Pollination networks

And more!

See here for more info👇️
buff.ly/MzIXj6U

🧪🌍️

U.S. Sen. Warnock moves to block ICE detention warehouses in Georgia

Sen. Raphael Warnock filed an amendment to the DHS funding bill that would prohibit federal funds from being used to buy warehouses for immigrant detention in Georgia.

This feels straight out of an intense dream about our switchgrass diversity panel experiments.

Dear Ms. Wolfe, Petitioner-Appellee Rümeysa Öztürk submits this Rule 28(j) letter to advise the Court that on January 29, 2026, the immigration court held that the Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving removability, and the immigration court thereby terminated removal proceedings against Ms. Öztürk.' This development underscores the dangers of the government's interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under the government's view, it could punitively detain any noncitizen in retaliation for her speech for many months, so long as it simultaneously institutes removal proceedings—no matter how unmeritorious—all without any federal court review of the lawfulness of detention at any time. To be clear, the termination of Ms. Öztürk's removal proceedings does not moot her habeas case. (By contrast, as Ms. Öztürk has argued, this appeal is moot. Br. 18-20.) Without habeas jurisdiction and the bail order that is currently in place, any government appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals would again subject Ms. Öztürk to re-detention. See 8 C.F.R. § 1003.6(a). For that reason, she continues to suffer the threat of continuing "now-or-never" First and Fifth Amendment harms. Br. in Opp. 55-57.

NEW: An immigration court has terminated removal proceedings against Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, finding that DHS did not meet its burden of establishing that she was removable, her lawyers tell the Second Circuit. live-awp-vermont.pantheonsite.io/app/uploads/...

Brandi Carlile's accompaniment for "America the Beautiful" before the game last night was SistaStrings. The duo, Chauntee and Monique Ross, played another American anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," on the Library's Stradivarius instruments in 2024.
Here's a clip of that impromptu performance. ⬇️

Promotional graphic for the Botanical Society of America Graduate Student Research Awards. A collage of smiling graduate students doing field and lab work appears on the left. On the right, text reads: “BSA Graduate Student Research Awards. Applications Now Open! $1,500 Research Awards. Deadline: February 16, 2026.” A QR code and the URL botany.org/home/awards.html appear at the bottom.

🌿 Applications are open for the Bill Dahl Graduate Student Research Awards (GSRAs), including the J. S. Karling and AJ Harris awards.

BSA supports graduate student research in botanical science with these $1,500 awards.

Deadline: February 16, 2026.

Apply now: botany.org/home/awards/...

Glad you think so ;)

Photo from our summer lab lunch! 12 people sitting at brightly painted picnic tables with yellow umbrellas outside Cali n' Titos.

I'm hiring postdoc in my lab to work on temporal dynamics of sorghum root microbiome assembly! This position is funded by the Moore Foundation through UGA, and would be perfect for someone finishing up their PhD this spring. Details here: chunglab.franklinresearch.uga.edu/join-lab

Donate to Support for Washington Post international employees, organized by Michelle Lee Among the hundreds of journalists laid off by The Washington Post on … Michelle Lee needs your support for Support for Washington Post international employees

Former Washington Post journalists have launched a GoFundMe to help repatriate fired staff members who are effectively stranded in foreign countries.

One of the richest men in the world fired them from the paper and didn’t even pay to ensure they got home.

Abolish the billionaire class:

Blackish jelly-like lichen lobes amidst moss. Along the Greenman Trail this morning.

Collema subflaccidum, our Tree Jelly lichen, on a rock with moss after reanimation with a little water today 🌿

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

YOU RUIN THE PUBLICATION, DRIVE OFF ALL THE SUBSCRIBERS, DO HIS DIRTY WORK, AND ONLY *THEN* LEAVE?????

Humans: we like dumplings, bbq, and telling people about neat animals we saw in the woods one time.

millions will stream sunday’s super bowl without seeing this ad.