THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE POWER ACCOMPLISHES! Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who wrote comments, contacted Congress, and yelled! This is OUR WIN! @standupforscience.net www.politico.com/news/2026/08...

Senate finalizes funding patch that would block Trump’s grant overhaul

Language is included to delay the president’s move to put political appointees in charge of grant approval.

politico.com

Admirable clarity @science.org

David Roberts@volts.wtf · 2w ago

Whew, the editors of @science.org are getting real.

“Sooner or later, elite schools are going to realize that an analog education carries more prestige than an AI-assisted one & will retool their curricula..to reflect that prejudice. This has .. already happened with screens in elementary and secondary education” hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-f...

New CBO paper: every $1 of federal R&D returns ~$3–$4 of GDP in present value over 30 years www.nber.org/papers/w35472

Bingo card on fire. "Panda told him it would be career 'suicide' if lab members didn’t go along with his official story." "The lab 'really feels like a family,' she says." "$220 million grant from the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, of which he is the director, "

Science Magazine@science.org · 3w ago

Exclusive: Satchidananda Panda, a prominent biologist known for his work on circadian rhythms, light sensing, and intermittent fasting, will resign next month after 22 years at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. scim.ag/4f9F5Yi

RFK Jr. made Cyclospora tracking optional, gutting a CDC program used to detect outbreaks. Now cyclosporiasis has hit 31 states. That's what happens when you dismantle the systems designed to keep us safe. www.npr.org/2026/07/12/n...

What to know about cyclosporiasis, the intestinal illness hitting the U.S.

A surge of cases of the intestinal illness that causes diarrhea and fatigue has been detected in 34 states. Here's how what to do if you suspect you have it and how to avoid infection.

npr.org

Not just research and science. ALL federal grantmaking (think: education, transportation, parks, water infrastructure, healthcare, public health practice), which undergirds state & local economies and is factored into credit agencies' assessments of governments' creditworthiness.

Maureen Barr@barrlab.bsky.social · 3w ago

341,699 comments as of yesterday. Today is the deadline. Your voice impacts the future of US research & science. Please submit a comment if you haven't already.

CA leads the nation in scientific advancements & cutting-edge research. White House Office of Management and Budget new proposed rule puts all this in jeopardy & makes way for politically motivated decisions that serve the President over science.   They must rescind this rule immediately.

There is more, but I'll stop because I need to sleep. My personal take: biology is complicated, men and women have more in common than not, and anyone looking for a simple story about sex and the brain is probably going to be frustrated by the reality. I'll end with two quotes from the study: 17/n

At the risk of being a killjoy... the comments + quotes on this seem to interpret it to mean the study found no sex differences in the brain and that isn't really what it says. The paper is way more interesting than that. So I read it and made a thread as I went: 🧵 1/n

Laura Helmuth@laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 4w ago

Male brains and female brains are all just human brains.

Our top scientists are getting recruited overseas. 29 US scientists are from #NIH & Harvard, Yale, Columbia & Stanford universities. The fact that NIH scientists were recruited means that the world values what we built over 80 years, more than this administration. 🧪 nltimes.nl/2026/07/07/n...

Netherlands recruited 29 top scientist leaving U.S. under Trump

The fund the Netherlands established to recruit leading scientists mainly attracted American researchers leaving the United States under the Trump administration. Of the 34 top scientists recruited la...

nltimes.nl

You mean the minute anybody put any effort into coming up with something else they could make this better by almost nearly entirely this, it's my surprised face

The Office Jenna Fischer

Alt: The Office Jenna Fischer is not surprised

static.klipy.com

19thnews@19thnews.org · 4w ago

Trials found that Carevix — a portmanteau of “care” and “cervix" — reduced pain during IUD insertion by up to 73 percent and bleeding by 78 percent, compared to the tenaculum.

Not loving that my university is the one that owns tear gas grenades and AR-15s that they claim they will never use. Best case they mean it, but the stuff is still there and could be stolen/misused. Why even have it?

profchander@profchander.bsky.social · 4w ago

i quit.

After watching US university administrations' violent overreactions to anti-genocide protestors (their own students, and faculty and staff) for the past few years, anyone who believes universities are stockpiling weapons "will never use them" could only be the most naive person on the planet

profchander@profchander.bsky.social · 4w ago

i quit.

Only a few days left to comment if you have not! Please take the time. Just a few paragraphs are needed.

Jenna Norton@jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 4w ago

Keep those comments on the OMB proposed rule coming! www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Friends don't let friends continue to give exams and papers that are not adapted to the current AI landscape www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty... (this is AFTER 27 bailed so the reality is even worse) PS Props to students 1, 22, and 31

Just met with a former student who’s had a dreadful first year of grad school. I realize not everyone is cut out for the PhD life but the extra obstacles and unkindness she was shown over the last year are heartbreaking and deeply disappointing. 1/

“There's a piece of NIH's mission Atlas never mentions, because it doesn't fit his story: NIH doesn't just fund experiments, it funds people. Training grants, fellowships, career development programs, and research project grants that carry graduate students and postdocs through their formative yrs”

@hellabores92.bsky.social · 4w ago

Excellent response from Dr. Bertagnolli to the article from Scott Atlas www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-a...

"University leaders and research advocates cite many reasons for the declines in new doctoral students. ... But the most cited reason in interviews was the unreliable nature of federal funding under the Trump administration." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u...

www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u... an ominous trend: graduate admissions are down 15 percent from last year, on top of an 11 percent decrease from the previous year we are destroying our seed corn

Research Universities Are Admitting Fewer Ph.D.s, a Bad Sign for Science

nytimes.com

The NIH is an ENORMOUS bargain for the American people. Do folk think that private industry will do the background slog work for drug discovery for 250K direct costs?

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · last mo.

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

The absolute dumbest thing about Scott Atlas’s opinion is that nearly all industry scientists are trained on NIH funds, trainee salaries are a huge part of the NIH budget. Industry doesn’t want NIH cut, their costs would be immense if they had to run biomedical schools on top of drug development.

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · last mo.

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

We shouldn't be proud of this. It shows we're chumps willing to squeeze more and more work out of our days and nights as the university gives us less and less.

What a great article not only on faculty workloads, but how little our salaries actually factor in to most university budgets. A few highlights. First, our salaries are falling:

Faculty salaries are a declining contribution to university expenditures. Trying to drain even more from overworked faculty (who are often teaching 3, 4, or even 5 courses per semester) is not a way to corral costs, it’s a way to decrease effectiveness

Cool that James Madison envisioned everyone having a rocket launcher but the authors of the 14th amendment explicitly stating their intentions doesn't count for some reason.

Kate Riga@kateriga.bsky.social · last mo.

Kavanaugh says that Constitution is an "enduring document" and that new exceptions to birthright citizenship can be added for "modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers"

Many bonkers words on this list, but at least when I applied for an R16 you had to have a section about your student recruitment plan. ‘Recruitment plan’ is on the disfavored words list now. I’m sure all clinical trials also use that phrase as well.

elizabethginexi.bsky.social@elizabethginexi.bsky.social · last mo.

This is the NIH grant screening disfavored words list published by Nature: media.nature.com/original/mag...

NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵

Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants

Mandatory reviews by top health officials and checks for 235 disfavoured terms have left hundreds of vetted grant applications in administrative limbo.

nature.com

Bio/science friends, how is it that I only heard of the "In Preparation" blog/substack today? Every article hits hard, so very hard, like headline @theonion.com articles from Jan 18, 2001 and Nov 7, 2012. Just banger after banger. For example: inpreparation.substack.com/p/german-sci...

German Scientist Struggles To Keep Straight Face As American Colleague Suggests They’ll 'Just Go To Europe’

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY — Dr.

inpreparation.substack.com

The “innovations” ppl care about 2day (new cancer therapies, GLP1s, AI, etc) came from the creativity of people trained decades ago. New policies are ~implicitly~ telling trainees that supporting them is no longer a priority. Nor is broadening the perspectives present in science. Sad to see!

anil oza@aniloza.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A 20 year study on 2 NIH diversity programs in Science Advances shows they doubled undergrads' odds of getting a Ph.D. That is, before the funding for those programs and for the study itself was terminated last year: www.statnews.com/2026/06/17/n...