ericrscott.com
@ericrscott.com
Scientific Programmer & Educator | Data Engineer at grant-witness.us #rstats, #tea, #foraging, #tucson, #UniversityOfArizona
It's now been over a month since the Trump regime openly declared they intend to eliminate trans people from the United States and not a single Democrat or mainstream media figure or celebrity has cared enough to even mention it.
I am once again saying that Boston should be an hour ahead in the winter. Either have DST the whole year or move the entire region to the Atlantic time zone.
WEATHER IS HAPPENING@weatherishappening.com · 4d ago/ BOSTON SUNSET 2NITE: 8:03 PM / BOSTON SUNSET SEPTEMBER 1ST: 7:18 PM / BOSTON SUNSET OCTOBER 1ST: 6:25 PM / BOSTON SUNSET NOVEMBER 1ST: 4:37 PM
The lab leak push is part of a decades-long propaganda effort to erode support for publically funded science, which helps those who aim to replace democracies and their public services and safety nets and healthy egalitarian societies with a neofeudal system where 10 people own everything.
mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 5d agoThe thing I can't really figure out about Lab Leak Theory is like... so what if it were true? Like is the idea that we could sue China for damages? That's not gonna work. It wouldn't really change anything both to how we responded to Covid and how we act going forward.
Last week's terminations at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) total at least 150 grants worth $230M. That is over half of the agency's portfolio. It's the latest assault on healthcare, health equity, and the rule of law. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #AHRQ 🧪
Termination of AHRQ grants is the latest assault on health equity and the rule of law. – Grant Witness
The agency charged with finding ways to make American health care more effective has been gutted. Last week’s terminations are just the latest blow.
grant-witness.us
‼️ AHRQ is in the midst of a mass grant termination event. We (at Grant Witness) need your help to launch a tracker ASAP. If you received an AHRQ termination notice--or if you know of someone else who did--please submit information about the grant here: grant-witness.us/submit-nih.h...
New: The National Science Foundation is preparing to claw back some $500 million in funds from some of its core science programs in physics, math, computer science, and engineering in order to fund a project from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
NSF plans cuts to core science programmes to fund White House initiative
A proposed clawback of already distributed research funds comes as the US agency’s budget is already squeezed and it struggling to clear a backlog of grant applications.
nature.com
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
NEW: The National Science Foundation has been doing everything it can to meet its legal requirements to spend funds while throttling awards going to U.S. Science. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF 🧪
A Tale of Two Funding Charts – Grant Witness
NSF is spending money faster than it makes awards, but it is not investing in the future of U.S. science.
grant-witness.us
**puremoe** is an R package that integrates #PubMed, #PubTator3, #iCite, and #PMC through a single, PMID-centered interface. Recent updates add citation snowballing, citation networks, sentence-level PubTator analysis, and MeSH descriptor keyness. github.com/jaytimm/pure... #rstats #OpenScience
GitHub - jaytimm/puremoe: Simple R interface for PubMed data retrieval: abstracts, full-text (PMC), bibliometrics (iCite), and entity annotations (PubTator3).
Simple R interface for PubMed data retrieval: abstracts, full-text (PMC), bibliometrics (iCite), and entity annotations (PubTator3). - jaytimm/puremoe
github.com
Scientists have mobilized against OMB's power grab, but we need to look beyond our own grants and make coalitions with neighbors whose hospitals, schools, broadband, roads and parks are at risk. Go out and talk to your town council and county commission! www.forbes.com/sites/judyst... 🧪
How The OMB Rule Could Hurt You And Your Town
The OMB proposal threatens scientific research and ALL federal funding for states, cities, and nonprofits. It politicizes ALL funding. Call your reps and write an objection.
forbes.com
More reporting from @maxkozlov.bsky.social on the political screening process that is slowing public investment in science to a crawl www.nature.com/articles/d41...
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
Noam Ross@noamross.net · last mo.Thousands of biomedical studies are stuck in limbo as NIH drags out renewals months after annual budgets expire. Since 2025, the rate of overdue renewals has TRIPLED. This leaves scientists unable to plan, keep staff employed, or maintain long-term research. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NIH 🧪
This is obviously lower on the list of how to destroy the USA’s scientific productivity than say cancelling grants or redirecting finding to whatever the f*k yr he x-labs are, but “death by 1000 cuts”, etc.
Tomorrow marks the start of the major annual conference for tropical biologists and those of us based at Florida’s public universities can’t attend because doing so would violate state law. www.atbc2026.org
ATBC2026 | Xishuangbanna, China | June 28th- July 3rd, 2026
62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC2026)
atbc2026.org
How can we estimate survival, abundance, and population dynamics from field data? Join our online course Capture-Mark-Recapture Analyses in R (6–8 Oct) and learn CJS, POPAN, multistate models, model selection, and RMark workflows for CMR analysis. #Rstats www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work...
Capture-Mark-Recapture Analyses in R
6-8 October 2026
physalia-courses.org
Announcing Toolbars for Shiny! Managing limited screen real estate for filters, controls, or AI components is a challenge. Toolbars addresses this by with a compact, low-profile UI container for headers, footers, and text inputs. See #RStats & #Python examples: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-05...
Introducing Toolbars: Supercharge your Cards and Inputs
New compact components in bslib and py-shiny for fitting buttons, selects, and other inputs into tight spaces.
opensource.posit.co
If you're wondering *why* your grant is stuck in purgatory, Elizabeth Ginexi has detailed how ideological executive orders have added layers and layers of political review. The loss of 20% of NIH staff surely isn't helping, either: elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/the-execut... #NIH 🧪
The Executive Orders Blocking Your NIH Grant
This image was generated by Google AI (Gemini)
elizabethginexi.substack.com
We don't find patterns of targeting as we have for grant terminations. Researchers and topics of all stripes are harmed by sand in NIH's gears. A few institutes stand out, though. At the Fogarty Center, nearly half of renewals are overdue by more than 60 days. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NIH 🧪
Thousands of biomedical studies are stuck in limbo as NIH drags out renewals months after annual budgets expire. Since 2025, the rate of overdue renewals has TRIPLED. This leaves scientists unable to plan, keep staff employed, or maintain long-term research. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NIH 🧪
Overdue Grant Renewals at NIH and AHRQ – Grant Witness
The government’s delays renewing in-progress research are leaving researchers in limbo.
grant-witness.us
Congrats to Hope Pisoni and @unclosetedmedia.bsky.social for winning @nlgjaofficial.bsky.social' Excellence in Journalism Award! Hope's story, "The Staggering Scale of Trump’s ‘War on HIV’", shone a light on the administration's ideological purges in public health. substack.com/@hopepisoni/...
Hope Pisoni (@hopepisoni)
MY STORY WINS AWARD I am very excited to announce that one of my stories, “The Staggering Scale of Trump’s ‘War on HIV’” has received the Excellence in HIV/AIDS Reporting Award at the NLGJA: Associat...
substack.com
My friend's NSF CAREER received the highest possible score (Excellent, Excellent, Excellent: High Priority) and it was rejected today. This would have been my friend's first extramural award, 5 years after starting their lab, exactly when grant $ is make or break for an Assistant Professor's career.
Jeffrey Mervis@policyhound.bsky.social · last mo.Been wondering why NSF isn't spending most of its FY26 appropriation? A $1.5B tech initiative may be the reason. And big cuts to hundreds of research programs could be just the beginning of the bad news. www.science.org/content/arti...
The remake of just one of the movies she starred in made over a billion dollars last year alone, and she still died in poverty from an extremely preventable infection. We need universal healthcare or we don’t have basic human rights.
Maya Media@mayamedia.bsky.social · 2mo ago💔💔 Daveigh Chase, star of ‘The Ring’ and the voice of Lilo in Disney’s ‘Lilo & Stitch,’ dies at 35. She was homeless and living in Los Angeles near the hospital where she died, the Los Angeles General Medical Center, according to her father www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
After 7 days, #NSF grants started flowing again yesterday. NSF generally stops during fiscal year turnover, government shutdowns, or funding lapses. Other than that, it had not taken a week off since 1970. Under this administration, it has done so three times. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... 🧪
NSF’s Halts in Grantmaking are Unprecedented – Grant Witness
The National Science Foundation’s pause breaks decades of consistency and continuity.
grant-witness.us
Just going to drop this here since we haven't talked about NSF strangling geoscience for about a month. It's still strangling geoscience (and everything else) with 9% the number of grants issued compared to the 2021-2024 average. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
Just found this intriguing new function by Wadea Abu Dahoud for making a log-scale axis squiggly, mostly to act as a visual cue/speed bump that the axis isn't linear. github.com/wade31985-ar... #rstats #dataviz
Update: it's also cheaper on average to FLY there every day.
Timothée Poisot@ctrlalttim.com · 2mo agoI'm looking at accommodation options for the #EFI2026 Toronto meeting, and it would be cheaper to commute by train every day. Which I won't do because it's 6 hours, but still. Academic conferences are not going to remain sustainable for long.
Based on the guidelines we issued yesterday, please obtain prior approval for the collaborations you began years ago.
Small update: Since yesterday afternoon, when our article was published, 4 new awards have gone out to Harvard PIs—the first since December.
Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · 2mo agoScoop: NSF has been quietly blocking new funds and grants to four top universities: Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Dozens of proposals from PIs at these universities—and their collaborators—have been stuck at the Office of Award Management awaiting finalization for months.
⏳ 5 days left to submit to #USRSE26. Papers, Talks, Notebooks, BoFs, Workshops — if you support research through software, we want to hear from you in San Jose. Travel support available Deadline: June 5 | Submit: us-rse.org/usrse26/part... #rse #submissions #CallForPapers
Participate
US-RSE Conference 2026
us-rse.org