If there are any PhD hopefuls on here, I wanted to share a few thoughts on your timeline for the upcoming admissions cycle, with apps due starting mid-November. What should you be doing right now? ✔️ Generating a list of schools ✔️ Reaching out to possible recommenders 🧵!

More thoughts: The relevant appropriations committee has already demonstrated it is quite capable of adding extra zeros to DoD accounts. Stealing funding from other agencies is completely unnecessary except to punish the agencies in question. This is vindictive illegality.

Joshua Weitz@joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 2d ago

The agreement "signed by Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Robert Kadlec at the Defense Department" ... "could allow the Defense Department to go around Congress and gain access to billions of dollars meant for infectious disease research" and involve ~$2 billion of NIAID's budget (!!!). 🎁

🚨 The NIH is moving to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in infectious-disease research projects to the DOD under a secret 10-year pact. Here’s what’s happening inside “Operation Prevailing Edge” 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Revealed: inside the US military's plan to tap huge sums from the NIH

An agreement paves the way for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects to be transferred from the NIH’s institute for infectious diseases to the Department of Defense.

nature.com

The ratio on this is hilarious Spare yourself this stream of narcissism and condescension that willfully misrepresents what unionization actually does (e.g: "The value of a good postdoctoral fellowship is not to be measured in salary but in the opportunity to learn at the feet of, yes, a master.")

Inside Higher Ed @insidehighered.com · last wk.

Opinion | Postdocs Aren’t Burger Flippers: Why Unionization Is a Bad Idea Unionization disrupts the bespoke mentor-mentee relationships that are central to the advancement of science. By Evan D. Morris: https://bit.ly/3Sus7fa #EDUSky #AcademicSky #HigherEd

The U.S. is a massive funder of science. Canada does not come anywhere close. Stories about a handful of scientists get attention, but rather than "brain drain," the likely outcome if the U.S. continues its path is that there will simply be fewer scientists and less science getting done in the world

Sarah J. Jackson@sjjphd.bsky.social · last wk.

More brain drain: “Twenty-one universities in Canada announced on Thursday the hiring of dozens of researchers to join their top academic ranks, poaching the majority of the recruits from the United States. Of the incoming 64 researchers, 48 will leave American campuses…”

The lab is a mysterious place--where some people have "magic hands," and some experiments just won't work. Here's my story about the unspoken knowledge of science, and the struggle to share it. Gift link: nyti.ms/3UccF7Z

Insights from inside NIH on the proposal to hide scores and instead bin applications into broad score categories. Please read and comment on the RFI. 27unihted.substack.com/p/nih-wants-... Link to RFI: rfi.grants.nih.gov?s=6a2b1c22c3...

NIH wants to shroud peer review scores. Here’s what you can do about it.

Authored by anonymous current and former NIH workers with experience in peer review

27unihted.substack.com

Information-seeking in mice, featuring work from @jenbussell.bsky.social !

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 2w ago

“All men by nature desire to know” is the first line of Aristotle’s seminal work “Metaphysics.” New findings show that this statement extends across the animal kingdom to mice, too. #neuroskyence By @sarahthau.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/behavior/wou...

When America is gone, remember NYT headlines like this and never again ask what role corporate media played in normalizing the most dangerous man on Earth

This is the reported $100,000 fee on Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows foreign students to remain for a couple years in post-graduate employment. The fee would devastate the program, making the US even less desirable as a destination for the world's best and brightest.

Olga Nesterova@onestpress.onestnetwork.com · 2w ago

White House is planning to announce “a large new tax on international students who stay to work in the US after graduation”.

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades

The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.

nature.com

This is a must-read for anyone interested in NIH. formernih.substack.com/p/nih-direct... NIH_Leadership™ held a session full of half-truths about the "unified funding strategy" while they and HHS continues to play politics with NIH grants. Chilling, but a call to action! @standupforscience.net

NIH Directors Decide, Except When HHS Says No

A June 2026 Nature report revealed that mandatory reviews by top officials, checking for a list of 235 disfavored terms, have left hundreds of meritorious NIH applications in administrative limbo (Koz...

formernih.substack.com

1. The new Trump / Kratsios plan for US science appears explicitly designed to destroy US universities. Diverting money to tech donors is probably just a bonus. Gift link.

Trump’s Plan for Science: More Money for A.I., Less for Universities (Gift Article)

Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s science adviser, proposed overhauling how the government funds research. Democrats said Mr. Trump’s actions had weakened science.

nytimes.com

Once you understand that this is a model of science written by non-scientists who hate universities but love venture capital and redirecting money to political allies, everything makes a lot more sense. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/u...

Trump’s Plan for Science: More Money for A.I., Less for Universities

Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s science adviser, proposed overhauling how the government funds research. Democrats said Mr. Trump’s actions had weakened science.

nytimes.com

Remember when NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said there were no banned words and NIH Program Officers were making them up? Here’s the proof he lied: apnews.com/article/cali... I know, Jay Bhattacharya lying is not news. But it’s still really validating to have the admission.

White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants

Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COV...

apnews.com

The Trump admin's latest strategy to mass generate removal orders is diabolical: - Take a huge group of people with hearings scheduled in late 2026, 2027, or 2028. - Send them a physical letter rescheduling all of their cases to next week. - Those who inevitably miss court get ordered deported.

Deportation Orders Soar in NYC as Trump 'Mega Master' Hearings Accelerate

A new report finds removal orders for people who missed hearings more than doubled in New York City in June, as a new tactic of hastily scheduled court dates rolled out.

thecityreporter.nyc

Women’s use of AI is perceived as a sign of incompetence, while men’s use of AI is seen as an indication of initiative. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Women Who Use AI Seen As Incompetent; Men Who Use AI Seen As Pragmatic

A 2026 study found that when women and men use AI tools to create identical resumes, evaluators view the women as less competent, while crediting the men with initiative.

forbes.com

Stupidest times. We live in the stupidest of times.

Jason Scott@textfiles.com · 2mo ago

I'll summarize this: Mamdani asked NYers to keep air conditioning at 78 degrees. A wave criticism hit online. A MSNBC broadcast pointed out the US Department of Energy recommends that 78 degree figure. Immediately after, the US Department of Energy deleted 6,000 web pages related to energy saving.

The reason the US has such a powerful science and innovation ecosystem is simple: decades of public investment (via largely independent agencies, including NIH and NSF). Basic science builds future cures over a timeline too long for the private sector. /3 www.infotimes.us/basic-scienc...

Basic Science Is The Foundation Of Future Cures

Injecting partisan politics into American basic science would be terrible for the US: for the economy, and for development of future treatments for diseases like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's.

infotimes.us

Scott Atlas, the champion of herd immunity as an Fox News commenter and the Trump Advisor during COVID, weighs in with a DEEPLY MININFORMED op-ed in the WaPo. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202... 1/7

Opinion | Abolish the NIH

A $48 billion government monopoly should give way to the market.

washingtonpost.com

The Battle over the Constitution Has Spread to American Science. I'm out in the @theatlantic.com today about the new OMB proposed rule. It's just the longtime agenda of the the Supreme Court. US science and cancer cures now all depend on us picking up a fight with the Roberts Court.

The Unitary Executive Takes Over New Territory

The Trump administration’s theory of how the federal government should work is a threat to American science.

theatlantic.com

pete hegseth is engaged in open racial discrimination against black officers. the clear message is that there is no place for black or women leadership in his military

Secret Vetting and Blocked Promotions: Inside Hegseth’s War on Diversity

nytimes.com

Mike Collins, a Georgia congressman, strongly supports the Trump administration’s push to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers. But he has also opposed rules experts say actually would reduce the odds of serious crashes.

Yesterday, I met Jay Bhattacharya briefly for the first time. I don’t think he’s a fan. 😬🤷‍♀️😇 He spoke yesterday at an NIH workshop on Health Disparities. I want to reflect on his talk, as well as the brief interaction that followed. Here goes… 🧵1/???

1. The Secretary of Defense is an idiot. 2. Disease has killed more soldiers than any enemy ever did. Scores Fall Ill at Air Force Base After Hegseth Makes Flu Vaccine Optional www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/u...

Scores Fall Ill at Air Force Base After Hegseth Makes Flu Vaccine Optional

nytimes.com

New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...

It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests

"We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently."

404media.co

Quintessential Trump: In 2025, Trump axed the program to combat New World Screwworm, stating that they had "saved" $1.5 million a year. In 2026, the Trump announces a $1 billion emergency program to combat the Screwworm outbreak. $1 billion would have funded the old program for 667 years.

A glowing profile of my post-doc advisor. As @yvetteefisher.bsky.social says in the piece, Rachel is truly "...one of these generational scientists who thinks extremely incisively about both the details and the big-picture frameworks." magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/stu...

By Studying Fruit Flies, Rachel Wilson Is Changing How We Understand the Brain

magazine.hms.harvard.edu

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

Now published - the #BANC! A full central nervous system (CNS) connectome of a limbed animal at single-synapse resolution, enabling us to follow sensory-motor arcs and understand how the CNS controls the body. rdcu.be/fncjS. #neuroscience. Video by @quorumetrix.bsky.social 1/18