News, links, ephemera 8/17/2015

After a brief interlude, the weekly posts are back. 

In honor of the transition I just made from postdoc to faculty member here is an article about the first week on the job from the Chronicle of Higher Ed...

A new paper on the phylogeny of sharks and the evolution of bioluminescence...

Researchers have deciphered a series of mysterious words in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The words are variants on Hebrew words, a language Swift studied in college...

Sequoia tree are suffering from a drought in the Sierra Nevada...

Lastly a fun article on speculative zoology from the Tetrapod Zoology blog...