Val Giddings

ITIF life sci guru, professional skeptic, biotech expert, policy wonk, beekeeper, lover of wilderness. will travel miles for dark night skies. opinions my own.

[Val Giddings @prometheusgreen]

Make a sustainable choice: Buy GMO food https://t.co/vWlW35HmMp via @sfchronicle

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The federal government just banned bison from public land in Montana.

Not cattle.

Bison.

Interior Secretary Burgum revoked grazing permits for 950 bison
on 63,000 acres of federal land in northeastern Montana.

The reason?

Bison raised for conservation don't count as livestock
under a 1934 law.

Bison raised for meat and milk? Fine.

Bison raised to restore a native species to its native land? Get out.

Meanwhile, cattle ranchers across the West keep grazing on your land.

For $1.69 a month.

One cow. One calf. Thirty days. $1.69.

On land that belongs to every American.

The Cheyenne River Sioux. The Coalition of Large Tribes —
50+ Native nations. Defenders of Wildlife.

They all filed formal protests.

They called it exactly what it is.

"DEI for cows."

The bison have until September 30 to be gone.

Who decided cattle belong on public land more than bison do?

#DemsUnited

[nature @Nature]

Scientists are raising the alarm about a White House proposal that could fundamentally recast federally funded science. The proposed rules would put political appointees in control of all federal grants and de-emphasize peer review, among other measures.

https://t.co/xvOLHPiP4T

[GlobalFarmerNetwork @GlobalFarmerNet]

“Without the Green Revolution, our world would be poorer and hungrier,” V. Ravichandran reflects on how agricultural innovation transformed food security.

Read how the Green Revolution reshaped food security and sustainability: https://t.co/xTufTbmeQb

#GFNMobilizing

[Burr Forest Group @BurrForest]

Leaving grain untouched all summer is a gamble. Rising heat naturally forces moisture to the bottom of the bin, creating an optimal environment for mold and insects, via @westernproducer

https://t.co/qjIYOBGtlp

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Trump, Musk and Rubio slashed aid and scoffed that it was woke nonsense. Now they're seeing that it not only saved one life every 10 seconds but also protected us from diseases like Ebola. Their actions constituted a security failure as well as a moral one.
More broadly, their fecklessness contrasts with the courage and humanity of doctors and aid workers in Congo and Uganda, lacking adequate PPE but still risking the virus to care for fellow humans.
Trump, Musk and Rubio might learn something from them. https://t.co/kPKj7fqJFZ

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“There are tens of billions of known kinds of organic molecules. Yet only fifty of them are used for the essential activities of life. The same patterns are employed over and over again, conservatively, ingeniously for different functions. And at the very heart of life on Earth - the proteins that control cell chemistry, and the nucleic acids that that carry the hereditary instructions - we find these molecules to be essentially identical in all the plants and animals. An oak tree and I are made of the same stuff. If you go far enough back, we have a common ancestor.”

— Carl Sagan, Cosmos

[ScienceBlog.com @ScienceBlogTwit]

Modified Hookworms Generate, Deliver Medicine https://t.co/N3xLaRm4gU

[Team Wolf @teamwolf_org]

Section 125 remains in the Interior Appropriations Bill after today’s markup.

This poison pill would force Gray Wolves off federal protections across most of the lower 48—and block the public from challenging it in court.

Tell your Rep to oppose Sec 125: https://t.co/4Wy6SWqWF0

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The United States has more than 90,000 dams on its rivers. Many of them no longer generate power, hold back floods, or serve a purpose at all. They just sit there, aging, holding the water back.

Take one out, and the ecological recovery can happen breathtakingly fast.

In 2024, the largest dam removal in American history finished on the Klamath River, where four dams came down along the Oregon-California line. Within days, Chinook salmon were pushing into water they hadn't reached in generations.

By the fall of 2025, they had climbed all the way into the upper basin, spawning in streams that had been sealed off for more than a hundred years.

Damon Goodman, a regional director for California Trout, put it plainly: the rivers "seem to come alive almost instantly after dam removal."

Maine's Penobscot tells the same story. After two dams came down, the river herring went from a few thousand fish a year into the millions, and with them came back the eagles, ospreys, and otters that live off the run.

A dam is one of the few environmental problems you can fix by subtraction. Take the wall away, and the river seems to remember what it was.

[Climate Power @ClimatePower]

"It seems to really mark the end of a federal commitment to basic scientific research — a commitment that has served this nation very well for the last 70 years.” https://t.co/hXQDfIgYcX

[WildLands Defense @WLDdefense]

Vale BLM Standard Operating Procedure for Jindalee HiTech lithium explo project poised to rip apart an Oregon Sage-grouse stronghold. Drillers get waivers to drill during high fire risk periods. Foreign miners with US fronts don't have to abide by rules regular US folks do. 1/2

[Val Giddings @prometheusgreen]

@RefriedBrean whoa! that's a bigun! 11 years old. looks like it could take a javalina🤣

[nature @Nature]

A single dose of engineered immune cells has helped two men and one woman to receive life-saving kidney transplants. Their bodies would normally reject donated organs.

https://t.co/CyiKUBpuPc

[Meghan Grebner @BRNAgNews_MG]

Possible New World screwworm detected in Texas, @USDA confirms testing underway

This is a developing story on @brownfield https://t.co/VddYh2jcIL #agnews #NWS

[Matthew Cappucci @MatthewCappucci]

The lack of morning weather balloons launched across the western and central U.S. is having a real, tangible impact on degrading forecast quality.

We can't look at weather balloon data that doesn't exist. We can't pump nonexistent data into models. We can't rely as heavily on models that don't "know" what's happening above our heads.

Today's severe weather forecast is less certain because we don't have weather balloon data to confirm the strength of jet stream winds aloft.

This is extremely frustrating, and is the result of logistical, organizational, political and budgetary decisions.

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

When you trace exactly how a major breakthrough happens, you see how tortuous and improbable the path was. Time and money are the raw material of transformative research, and Trump is threatening to freeze up the whole process.
https://t.co/r2zmk52Faj

[Genetics and Society @C_G_S]

A small study of 35 patients found that an experimental gene-editing treatment significantly lowered LDL cholesterol levels – and that the drop persisted over 18 months. A larger study with 200 patients will test whether the preliminary result holds up.
https://t.co/wdN8fxMDgp

[Birds Colour 🕊️ @birdscolour56]

Peregrine Falcon — The Fastest Animal on Earth Reaching speeds of over 200 mph in a hunting dive,

[Mark Dawes @mdawese11]

Viewpoint: Greenpeace and poison: How environmental advocacy groups rely on compliant (and often ignorant) journalists to spread disinformation and spark litigation https://t.co/T7vAqAGzgs via @GeneticLiteracy

[SkepticalRaptor @skepticalraptor]

Melanoma mRNA vaccine halves risk of recurrence, metastasis https://t.co/At4dvD99iE