RIP Margaret Hamilton, the brilliant computer scientist whose contributions to software for the Apollo Guidance Computer were absolutely crucial to the Apollo Moon landings. She also helped shape the discipline of computer engineering while at MIT's Instrumentation Lab: news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

Agency-wide, NSF made far fewer new grants (~6,200, down from an average of ~11,000) and underspent its buget by 1.4 billion. See previous coverage:

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

89% of SBE NSF grants were never awarded!! My field (Cognitive Neuroscience) is included in this gutting, as are so many others. Plenty of horror stories in the same space are also coming from NIH. It’s not just delaying research; it’s labs shutting down and a next gen that won’t be trained.

Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴@wamsleylab.bsky.social · last wk.

The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

I don’t think everyone realizes how bad things are for US science: For the fiscal year that just ended, the Trump regime withheld $1.4 billion from the National Science Foundation’s research budget, which is about 1/5 of its primary research budget.

National Science Foundation Diverted $1.4 Billion in Science Funds Mandated by Congress (Gift Article)

The move, affecting about one-fifth of the National Science Foundation’s primary research budget, is the latest sign of how the White House is asserting more control over grants.

nytimes.com

Amazing!! Huge congratulations @felipedebrigard.bsky.social on the MacArthur Foundation 'Genius Grant' 🥳🎉 www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/a...

MacArthur Foundation Announces 2026 ‘Genius Grant’ Winners (Gift Article)

The 20 fellowship recipients across the arts, humanities and sciences will each receive an $800,000, no-strings-attached stipend for their work.

nytimes.com

"No aphorism is more frequently repeated [...] than that we must ask nature fewer questions, or, ideally, one question at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken." — Ronald A. Fisher, 1926 1/4 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

thinking of sending funding agencies Letters of Disinterest, see if negging works any better "Your foundation is really close to being the kind of place I'd want to work with"

new preprint: "Directing large language models to follow the letter or spirit of the law" arxiv.org/pdf/2609.23083 (by Qian , Li, Chen, Murthy @soniakmurthy.bsky.social , Belinkov, and me) this is particularly cool/important, and I'm allowed to say it because it was headed by @pqian.bsky.social

This will be bad for: - the students - the research progress - the universities - the towns the universities are in - the companies hiring students - the states the universities are in - the national economy - national security - the country - the world

Michael Clemens@mclem.org · 4w ago

The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.

new paper out: *~*~*~*~ "Revisiting the 5- to 7-Y ear Shift: The Age of Metacognitive Control?" (by Brod @garvinbrod.bsky.social , McAuliffe @katiemcauliffe.bsky.social , Ullman) *~*~*~*~ sharable paper link: bit.ly/5to7_2026 free pdf draft: www.tomerullman.org/papers/5to7s...

Revisiting the 5- to 7-year shift: The age of metacognitive control?

Abstract. The term 5- to 7-year shift refers to the marked changes in behavior observed as children transition from preschool age to school age. In 1996, a

bit.ly

Do read the report from MIT on AI in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/

Soooo... any confirmation on whether this happened 12 hours ago? youtube.com/shorts/6PbM9... (please don't engage with any seriousness about llms being "self aware")

August 29th - Judgement Day (Terminator2)

YouTube video by Nostalgic Nebula

youtube.com

And here's the official journal version! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Melissa Kibbe@levelsof.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New from me and Jessica Applin! We find that infants' behavior in a cracker choice task is impacted by an agent’s partial knowledge of object quantity: infants choose based on the agent's (inaccurate) representation rather than their own 🤯 Now in press at JECP, preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

In school, American children are taught to use "HOMES" to remember the Great lakes, but we will have to switch the acronym to SHAME, If Lake Ontario is changed to Lake America.

Stephanie Carvin@stephaniecarvin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Everyday I wonder how things can get stupider and everyday I am informed how, against my will.

I hope everyone caught this Lancet study confirming that Elon Musk & DOGE are responsible for genocidal levels of suffering & death.

Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...

thelancet.com

Come work with me at Google! We have an open 6-month temp role on my team - it’s a great opportunity for someone with a cog neuro or psych background interested in exploring big tech. Looking for comp modeling experience (e.g. RL, DDMs) and Python/JS. Reach out to learn more or pass along any names!

We need to show rightwing newspapers that actions have consequences. Add your name: goodlawproject.org/s/abb8a1

Jason Arday: Demand a public inquiry now | Good Law Project

Commission an immediate public inquiry into how to ensure a responsible press given its contribution to Dr Arday’s tragic death.

goodlawproject.org

regular reminder that most of the millions of projected deaths from USAID's destruction HAVE NOT HAPPENED YET—which means they can still be prevented. but this is only possible if we demand that democrats prioritize it once in power. it is a moral imperative that we actually act on these numbers

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Not to be some wild-eyed innocent, but I think it should be slightly bigger news that The Lancet have crunched the numbers and found that Musk's USAID cuts will kill 14 million people. And that's just by 2030. That's 9,600 people a day, every day, until the next world cup rolls around.

COS is announcing important changes to the Open Science Framework (OSF). OSF Projects—used for project collaboration, file mgmt, & storage—is being phased out as an active workspace over the next 6 months. This change does not affect persistence & accessibility of existing public projects. (🧵1/2)

to be honest, this is my fear with NIH getting rid of the BESH category, i.e. that that was just the first step in getting rid of anything that *isn't* a clinical trial, i.e. the death knell for all basic science...on which all those eventual CTs are based.

Liz Neeley@lizneeley.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A scientist who just lost her grant cuts straight to the heart of it: “Requiring that NIH only fund work leading directly to a drug or other biomedical intervention… would rule out much basic research funded by the agency.” It’s pathetic & harmful to limit our understanding of health like this

Trying out the features in Claude for education. Join me as I see how it "helps" me write a research paper. My chosen topic: "AI and education". /1

new preprint: "The Humorous Hill: A U-shaped Relationship Between Humor and Quality" (by Bhattacharya, Hu, and me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”

Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”

Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general…

direct.mit.edu

the best day for the presidents of every R1 to hold a press conference screaming that higher ed is our second largest export and destroying it is economic sabotage and soft power detonation was Jan 21st 2025. the next best day is tomorrow.

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 3mo ago

a bad thing is running a phd program with brilliant international students who must reckon with a volatile xenophobic saboteur government in fresh ways every day, no thank you, 0/10

New from me and Alan Leslie! We got the band back together to lay out our view on object representations in the infant mind: non-discursive indexes that operate within a language of thought, & which get development of a more complex object concept off the ground www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For folks asking why bother commenting because the OMB won't care: comments help build cases for the courts by explicitly laying out harms. That's why it's really important to have your comments be as specific as possible. Also, contact your senators and reps! They actually do care about this.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Monday is the deadline for public comment! The Heritage Foundation has been mobilizing its members to leave comments in favor of the rule change, so every unique comment matters (don’t use a form letter or copy/paste—similar comments are batched and treated as one).

Right! Furthermore, the OMB has to read & respond to all new comments (this slows them down, forces them to engage with the potential impact of these policies). And additionally, a strong showing by the public tells politicians we care about this and so they pay attention and care more too.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 3mo ago

For folks asking why bother commenting because the OMB won't care: comments help build cases for the courts by explicitly laying out harms. That's why it's really important to have your comments be as specific as possible. Also, contact your senators and reps! They actually do care about this.

There's an OMB rule change that would require political oversight of scientific grants, and could pull any that don't "reflect presidential priorities" Another country has tried this before! It was the USSR and it was called Lysenkoism. By @thsaey.bsky.social www.sciencenews.org/article/omb-...

Here’s what happens when you put politicians in charge of science

Proposed federal rules would rely on political appointees to decide how a lot of U.S. science gets done. History shows the consequences of such actions.

sciencenews.org

I see this often among my grantees. Uncertainty about maintaining funding on a grant (even thought it has been found meritorious in peer review, high priority in programmatic review, and was already awarded) makes conducting the science extremely challenging. substack.com/@27unihted/n...

An unstable research environment is undermining scientific advances and public trust

Concern 4 of the Bethesda Declaration: One Year Later

substack.com

What's more nonsensical: smashing a pumpkin using a number, or growing flowers inside a sneeze? Our paper on graded inconceivability is out now in Cognition! Come for the cognitive science 🧠🔍, stay for the whimsy 🌼🧚! 🔗Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog

Tomer Ullman@tomerullman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social