New Zealand is developing detailed plans to eradicate every exotic predator, including feral cats, rats, and weasels.

How women are harassed out of science. Let’s be clear about this: It’s not just that scientific institutions and individual scientists are implicitly biased against women. That is true, but on top of all that, direct harassment itself drives women out of science. Not convinced this is true? Then please please please read this story.

Speaking of which, Christian Ott, the CalTech professor who fired his student because he had the hots for her, is spending another year away from campus.

Google scholar is increasing the half-life of scientific papers and dampering the effect of journal prestigiousness. I haven’t read this thoroughly enough to evaluate it, but it sounds very intriguing and seems solid at first skim. (Also, it came out last year but it only came to my attention just now as far as I recall.)

A scientist at Kansas State was just denied federal whistleblower status from NSF. It was concluded that he wasn’t blowing any whistle, but instead offering baseless allegations. Before you come to any rash conclusions, you might want to read the several hundred pages of related documentation. I haven’t, so I haven’t come to any conclusions.

“The reason your feed became an echo chamber — and what to do about it”- this article has a horrible title – it doesn’t recommend any specific actions. But it’s still a worthwhile read.

Ecology has lost a great one, E.C. Pielou. To learn more about her, here is the 1986 announcement of her receiving the Eminent Ecologist award from ESA. Here is a warm blog post about her by Jacquelyn Gill. And here’s a superb and personal obituary from the Comox Valley News that really gives a feel for who she was.

Do you run an internship program, or want an internship? This is critical:

Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And while many Americans believe fervently and faithfully in expanding opportunity, America’s internship-industrial complex does just the opposite.

The financial connections between Putin and Trump so go deep, they have to be political.

The stronger the union, the more incompetent teachers get fired. The weaker collective bargaining is, the more likely bad teachers stay on the job.

This list isn’t as rich as it has been, because over the past two weeks I’ve been vacationing (backpacking in Colorado), and now a field course in Arizona). So I haven’t read news that much, but have compensated for it by having good time.