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Rachel C Thayer

@rcthayer.bsky.social
2K followers 825 following 214 posts

Evolution of structural color in butterflies🦋🌈 Reproductive functional evolution 🧬 Postdoc | UC Davis 🌐 sites.google.com/view/rachelcthayer/welcome

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Reposted by Rachel C Thayer
c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Let's talk about the HALLOWEEN GENES (really). 1979: It was a dark & stormy night⛈️& a scientist (Eric Wieschaus) is laboring over a microscope🔬, observing the dead remains of ... a fruitfly🪰. But not just ANY fruitfly. This was a TWISTED & MUTATED fruitfly with a GHOSTLY, transparent appearance.
static.klipy.com
Mad Scientist Working in a Laboratory
Alt: Mad Scientist Working in a Laboratory. A man in a lab coat works on a large cabinet sized device covered in proper dials and levers and blinky lights. We used to be researchers. PROPER researchers.
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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Devistating. And against Congress's directive. SBE was included in the 26 budget and the NSF section states that "no directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level."
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[toxic] kaija osmote @pube.online · 01/10/2026
I was born here, well before the dot-com boom, and this is a good account of how the Bay Area has been shaped by tech since the 2000s
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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Some good news for a change: Overcoming a massive and aggressive tech lobby and a squeamish, Silicon Valley-friendly governor, the labor movement has managed to pass a raft of first-of-their-kind AI laws aimed at protecting workers in California.
bloodinthemachine.com
California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the US
Finally, some good news
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Federal US domain bot @fed-us-domain-bot.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
❌ NOTICE Federal US website newly deleted. girlshealth.gov Action taken by the nan (Department of Health and Human Services) at or around 2026-09-30 12:09:17.
girlshealth.gov
girlshealth.gov
Federal US website delisted. URL is not valid.
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Rachel C Thayer @rcthayer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
🧵
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Reposted by Rachel C Thayer
Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
While we’re talking about campus sexual violence, I want to revisit the recent history of a topic where we have seen some of the biggest backslides: Expelling rapists from school.
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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Consent training isn’t going to stop a gang rape.
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Zen Faulkes @doctorzen.net · 27/09/2026
🆕 📄 🤖➕🧪 “Support for using public funding for research drops when scientists use AI.” “34–40% of our sample would trust research findings and scientists less when AI is used.” doi.org/10.1016/j.re...
doi.org
Redirecting
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Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD MA @arrianna-planey.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
If you're preparing a NIH grant submission, you may have to re-download and re-certify your biosketch if you updated on/prior to Sept 18. And make sure NOT to change the file name.
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Arjuna Rajakumar PhD @arjunarajakumar.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
So proud of my lab mate @sagrill.bsky.social (whose on the job market 👀) for this magnum opus from @remlehmann.bsky.social lab @whiteheadinstitute.bsky.social ScRNA-seq of 🪰 germ cells reveals new biology, answers age old questions, and proposes new paradigms! 1/8 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Drosophila stage 10b embryo w/HCR staining marking two germ cell clusters. One will successfully colonize the gonad and the other, like tears in the rain, will be lost forever
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J¡m Vaughn @jiminyspigot.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
RIP King
stlpr.org
Harvey, a mutant cockroach who baffled St. Louis scientists, has died
Scientists were fascinated by Harvey’s unique split coloring but still don’t know exactly why he looked that way. In his long life (for a cockroach) he was a favorite among visitors to the Sophia M. S...
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Reposted by Rachel C Thayer
John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 17/09/2026
Well they finally did it. DOGE got rid of my friend Anne, the only remaining person at the web design system for the entire US government. The replacement appears to be AI-generated code with no dedicated human oversight.
nextgov.com
GSA’s web design system head replaced with Treasury AI engineer
The U.S. Web Design System is intended to help the federal government build accessible and mobile-friendly websites.
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invertebrate @crevicedwelling.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
I think house centipedes should be considered good luck to see, even if people don’t like them I think they should be universally recognized as a bringer of fortune and prosperity.
a house centipede on some concrete
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Matthew Boedy @matthewboedy.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The 2026 @aaup.org Faculty in the South Survey shows deep fears about the impact of government intrusion into curriculum and the future of higher ed. An Alabama professor wrote scholars at the top of their fields are fleeing the South and academia. Let's dig into the results. 1/x
static.klipy.com
Gerry Dee Says 'We Did A Survey' on Family Feud
ALT: Gerry Dee Says 'We Did A Survey' on Family Feud
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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I want you all to note the unions that stepped up to the plate to protect international students when universities wouldn't:
insidehighered.com
Judge Blocks Controversial International Student Restrictions
A Massachusetts judge issued the injunction hours before the regulation was set to take effect. Institutions worried it would harm international students.
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Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Students in discussion of uncurated materials is not teaching. Students hanging out together is not teaching. Good teaching is the thing that AI cannot do, while it can mimic a role in the first two. 9/
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Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
After reading some of the recent pubs and discourse around US higher ed.… I should just stop right here. But here are the three major fallacies of much of what’s out there, three contexts that are missing, and the one big thing that is driving me around the bend (actually already there, but). 1/
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invertebrate @crevicedwelling.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
she crawled up my hand to keep her treat away from the male…
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Alex Spahn 🌋🌪️☄️ @spahn711.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Were it not for calcite, it might have been centuries before scientists discovered the polarization of light. Huygens found that, by rotating a second piece over the first, he could make one of the images disappear! Calcite was the key to discovering that light has orientation!
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Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I’m looking to hire an NIH funded postdoc to join our lab here at Davis (please RT). Ongoing areas of interest include: 1) polygenic signals of selection from time series, ARGs, GWAS, etc 2) The interpretation of GWAS, polygenic scores, & sources of confounding
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Marleny García Lozano @marlenygarcial.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
The second chapter of my PhD thesis is out in @NatureComms 🎉!! we found that a "Yellow" protein, the same gene family known for pigmentation in many insects, has been repurposed to protect a beetle's bacterial symbiont. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Yellow protein co-opted to sustain obligate symbiosis in leaf beetles - Nature Communications
Insects have evolved diverse strategies to protect their genome-reduced symbionts during vertical transmission. Here, authors show that tortoise beetles have co-opted a Yellow protein to form spheres ...
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MwahahahahahadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Do you work with microscopy images and segment to quantify or track? Do you study cell biology? development? Gather round! Let me tell you about FOCUS-3D, a segmentation algorithm that is fast, accurate and can be used on any model. We used it here to study zebrafish development. 🧪 (thread)
biorxiv.org
FOCUS‑3D: Robust, generalizable volumetric cell segmentation for three‑dimensional fluorescence microscopy
Understanding how cells establish spatial organization within tissues is a fundamental question in life sciences. While modern three-dimensional fluorescence microscopy captures large-volume tissue ar...
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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
The largest arthropod ever was a sea scorpion. Jaekelopterus stretched about 2.5 meters, longer than a person is tall, hunting the seas 400 million years ago with claws half a meter long. Nothing with an exoskeleton has come close since. 🦂 🧪 #FossilFriday #HowToBuildAGiant Artwork by Dani Navarro
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Rachel C Thayer @rcthayer.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Think this is a useful framework to improve the sexual conflict discourse, even though there will be cases where it's debatable what constitutes an individual entity with agency.
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Matt Kustra @matt-kustra.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
New preprint led by amazing undergrad @ogolwala.bsky.social! Within ~10,000 years, sperm traits have diverged between trophic specialists in this young radiation of pupfish. Hybrids are fertile, but show transgressive sperm kinematics and reorganized integration. With @fishspeciation.bsky.social.
Density plots of sperm straightness comparing two species of pupfish (molluscivore and scale-eater) and their hybrids. Hybrids have straighter sperm than the parental species.
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Reposted by Rachel C Thayer
Henry Arenas-Castro @henryarenas.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Conspecific Gamete Precedence in Speciation: History, Evidence, and a Research Roadmap I’m very happy to share this review about a fundamental reproductive barrier that has been largely overlooked in speciation research. I’d appreciate all your feedback! Preprint: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
Taxonomic breadth of reported case studies of conspecific gamete precedence, 41 in plants and 52 in animals.
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Reposted by Rachel C Thayer
Timothy Fuqua @timothyfuqua.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
@vakirlis.bsky.social and I are proposing a new term in the de-novo genes / molecular evolution cinematic universe. The term is: "Emergence Bias" and our perspective piece describing it was published in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social today! So, what is an emergence bias? (1/7)
academic.oup.com
Emergence Biases in Molecular Evolution
Abstract. Biases in molecular evolution can significantly influence evolutionary trajectories. They have been described in a variety of contexts, such as d
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Katharine Hayhoe @katharinehayhoe.com · 23/08/2026
I've heard thousands of climate denial arguments over the last few decades. But do you know they all fall into one of 5 categories? 1. It's not real 2. It's not us 3. It's not bad 4. We can't fix it 5. You can't trust the info/experts Source: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A classification tree showing the breakdown of climate denial arguments.
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ᴢᴇɴ sɪᴍᴍᴏɴs @killlthehype.blacksky.app · 23/08/2026
16 months ago: Never forget how it started.
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D. Allan Drummond @dadrummond.art · 22/08/2026
Straight from Hoth, a massive killer, the North American wheel bug. Spotted by a friend on our bug walk on the UChicago campus. What a beast! #bugsky
A large, white-frosted true bug with powerful long legs and red waving antennae striding over pine needles. Its comically small head is almost half made of a huge black rostrum (sucking mouthpart). It has a spinosaur-like spiky sail/crest on its back.
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Harmit Singh Malik @harmitmalik.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Folks thinking that uploading confidential material to their favorite AI is safe because of of their special fences should be reminded that this past month, AI agents at all major AI companies broke out of their sandbox (much more secure fences that yours) and attacked another company!
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Reposted by Rachel C Thayer
FlyBase @flybase.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects
Letter to the Editor
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Kim Lane Scheppele @kimlanelaw.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Zero new NSF grants in sociology, anthropology, political science and economics. The agenda of this US govt is to stop documenting the society in which we live while they are destroying it. We will find other ways to track and explain our times and fight to restore our research funding.
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
For some perspective on how much FY26 is a historic outlier this is, here is a mockup using the number of grants with an original date for each fiscal year. n.b. slightly overestimates the true number of new grants because it counts transfers, etc. as new awards
Chart showing NSF new grants over time from 1980 on
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Andrew Kniss @wyoweeds.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Manuscripts and grant proposals submitted for *peer* review are typically meant to be confidential. I'm fairly confident the text of these confidential documents have now been uploaded to an LLM. I don't know which one, but I'm guessing it wasn't a 'local' LLM sandboxed on someone's computer.
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Patrick Kennedy @patrick-kennedy.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
I have been tasked by @markjfbrown.bsky.social with making sure that all social insect groups go up on the map. If for some inexplicable reason you're not yet on the map, be warned - I might ambush you in the IUSSI poster session 🤣 #IUSSI2026
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Andrew Dacks @adacks.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Nominations for the GSA Larry Sandler Award are now open! genetics-gsa.org/awards/larry... This award recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis (graduating between 07/2025 and 12/2026) in any area of Drosophila research. Include 1) the thesis abstract, 2) the Nominee's CV and 3) a nomination letter.
genetics-gsa.org
Larry Sandler Award - Genetics Society of America
The Larry Sandler Award was established in 1988 by the colleagues, friends, and students of Dr. Larry Sandler after his untimely death in 1987. The award serves to honor Dr. Sandler for his many contr...
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 17/08/2026
7. It's yet another thing that AI has stolen away from the current generation of scientists. Yet again, AI proves to be an anti-egalitarian force in that these abuses force us to abandon the Mertonian norm of universalism for increased reliance on credentials, reputation, and personal connections.
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The Interactive Fly @interactivefly.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Fang, C. C., Rajakumar, A., Kenny, A., Mueller, U. G., Abouheif, E., Stein, D. (2025). Embryogenesis in Myrmicine Ants Combines Features of Short Germ-Band Development With a Progressive Mode of Segmentation. J Exp Zool B Mol Dev Evol onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Embryogenesis in Myrmicine Ants Combines Features of Short Germ‐Band Development With a Progressive Mode of Segmentation
Different insect species exhibit remarkable diversity in the developmental trajectories from fertilized eggs to hatching larvae. For three myrmicine ant species, we observe a novel combination of a d...
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EcoEvoRxiv @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Reproduction is more sensitive to warming than adult lifespan across invertebrates DOI: doi.org/10.32942/X2W...
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Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
I am excited to announce a job for an Asst Prof in Plant Evolution in the dept. of Evolution and Ecology at @ucdavis.bsky.social. We're looking broadly, from macro (speciation, comparative genomics, evo-devo) to micro (pop biology, adaptive evolution, evo-eco). recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07777
recruit.ucdavis.edu
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
"Young people cannot be expected to develop a firm allegiance to the democratic faith they are taught in the classroom if their campus life is carried on in an authoritarian atmosphere." Ok Truman Commission, you're spitting one too many hot truths.
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Matthew Boedy @matthewboedy.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
The 2026 @aaup.org Faculty in the South Survey is live. If you are faculty in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas please take a second to fill it out: forms.gle/iLheVskd4wcA...
forms.gle
2026 AAUP Faculty in the South Survey
The Georgia conference of the American Association of University Professors [AAUP] and its partners in states across the South have been at the forefront of fighting attacks on higher education. To as...
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 11/08/2026
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance. 1/
"Eugène Delacroix's painting 'La Liberté guidant le peuple' ('Liberty Leading the People'), depicting the French revolution as a ragtag group of peasants led by a flag-waving, bare-breasted incarnation of 'Liberty.' The painting has been altered: the scene is now being observed with a giant, smoke-shrouded CCTV dome, and the distant building have been replaced with a mainframe computer.
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Jake Yeston @jakeyeston.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
We are hiring a new physics/photonics editor at @science.org — please spread the word! recruiting.ultipro.com/AME1123ASEM/...
recruiting.ultipro.com
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Shefali @iamshef.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
📢📢 #Drpsophila community! #FlyCROSS surveys are open for #mentors. The current chairs @shyama13.bsky.social and @jocmcdonald.bsky.social alongside the committee members have put in a lot of effort to begin the third cycle of this mentoring program. You may have already received an invite from GSA.
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Martin Garlovsky @martingarlovsky.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Very happy to see our paper just published in @molbioevol.bsky.social highlighted: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... Probably my favourite paper to be a part of and really fun working with some great people! Bedbugs are very gross but also very cool! Paper here: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
academic.oup.com
Highlight: Traumatic insemination and the molecular evolution of a novel reproductive organ in bed bugs
Sex can be complicated—just ask bed bugs. The bane of many conference goers, these blood-feeding parasitic insects mate via traumatic insemination, a repro
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Rebekah Rogers @evolscientist.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Officially recruiting postdocs at GW. If you are interested in genetic novelty, structural variation, or evo genetics please get in touch! We have data sets on mulitple organisms with large population sizes (Drosophila, Megalonaias nervosa) and species in decline (fireflies, mussels, elephants).
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