I submitted my comment for this RFI about limiting the number of RPGs/PI, due 8/3/2026, next Monday grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

NOA day! 🎉 Mentally exhausted after 14mo of waiting but relieved to have received the NOA for our R35 competitive renewal! Grateful to the hard working staff at NIGMS…thrilled to continue the lab’s work on chromatin and stem cell function in the intestinal epithelium!

Best practices for differential accessibility analysis in single-cell epigenomics www.nature.com/articles/s4...

One thing I’ll say for Thiel is that he’s really nailing that classic faculty move of using a headshot from 30yrs ago. I genuinely didn’t know who this was a picture of until I read the caption a few times over

Scott Horton@robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 3w ago

The Axel Springer Award goes to the German tech billionaire Peter Andreas Thiel, whose most prominent qualification for the award came when he hired the son of the Axel Springer CEO to work for him. Which is how such things usually work. www.welt.de/wirtschaft/a...

Speaking of using your own words, don't forget that the NIH's RFI on limiting the number of RPG awards per PI/MPI is open for comment. I will remind you that the RPG designation includes everything from R03 ($50k direct, 2 y limit) to P01, huge U mechs and DPetc. rfi.grants.nih.gov?s=6a1f200c6e...

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

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:

When I explain to peeps how much we do in research labs for how few $$, they simply don’t believe me. I once explained it to a famous person from Pixar, he looked me square in the eye and said “You mean all the cancer, vision, and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be %#ing kidding me!”

Jason Rasgon@vectorgen.bsky.social · last mo.

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?

I wanted to give QED a chance, but couldn’t bring myself to sign up/share info to see their “review” of my preprints I know it’s a business, but it would be great to get past this era of endless tech-grift and engagement farming. We need to protect science from enshittification, not accelerate it

Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · last mo.

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

Related

It’s often overlooked how much high-risk research in the US was driven by the BRAIN Initiative. Why? In part because of the design of the programs, but mostly because it injected a lot of money and increased grant success rates. There’s a lesson there. The hypercompetition of low success rates…

“I think it’s a real mistake to forget where the pipeline for all this begins.” John Diffley reflects on the importance of basic research, his mission to decode DNA replication and recreate it in the lab, and the scientific optimism of the 1960s that helped shape it. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2026-03...

“Academic science is not only about productivity, it is also about deep understanding, exploring creative solutions and training critical thinkers to be the next generation of researchers.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The uncritical adoption of AI in science is alarming — we urgently need guard rails

Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating scientific output, but risks narrowing inquiry, weakening judgement and undermining how scientists are trained.

nature.com

Fully endorse

Mike Feigin 🥯@mikefeigin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

1) I have never once trusted western blot data from any antibody company. 2) Thermo should be sued into oblivion.

This is really upsetting!

Laurel Oldach@laureloldach.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Thermo Fisher has responded to research integrity activists who spotted apparent manipulation in its antibody catalog: "In ... preparing antibody images for publication on our website, some images may have been adjusted to clarify for presentation purposes." More: cen.acs.org/research-int...

It's time to rewrite reviews-aKG doesn't just regulate demethylation. Work from my lab and @mzspectrum.bsky.social demonstrates a new role for aKG in promoting histone acetylation and DNA repair through regulating carnitine synthesis. Congrats Apoorva Uboveja! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

αKG-mediated carnitine synthesis drives DNA repair via histone acetylation - Nature

The metabolite αKG promotes carnitine synthesis and increases site-specific histone acetylation, thereby promoting homologous recombination-mediated DNA repair, which has potential implications f...

nature.com

Hadn’t thought abt this in awhile - cool to see!

Richard Jenner@reggenomics.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Does PRC2 interact with RNA or is it an artefact? See our preprint showing how stringent denaturing purifications with spike-in controls support direct interaction between PRC2 and RNA in cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Does PRC2 interact with RNA or is it an artefact? See our preprint showing how stringent denaturing purifications with spike-in controls support direct interaction between PRC2 and RNA in cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NIH has allocated just 33% of its normal budget this year, putting critical medical breakthroughs at risk. Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels and University of Kansas Chancellor Dr. Douglas Girod are calling on the government to release it before the damage becomes permanent. https://bit.ly/4f3GuzR

President Daniels in WSJ op-ed: Get the federal science money flowing

JHU president, University of Kansas chancellor urge federal agencies to release congressionally appropriated funds to fuel America's research engine

hub.jhu.edu

Someone in the news departments of @nature.com or @science.org needs to take a look at this--its a huge scandal from the scientific supplier that has become a monopoly

Sholto David@sholtodavid.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Earlier this week I posted an example of a fake western blot provided by ThermoFisher to demonstrate the validity of a p53 antibody. I considered it an amusing curiosity. In fact Thermo Fisher Scientific has systematically manipulated antibody validation data!

🚨🧪🧵URGENT INPUT NEEDED: NIH asks input for next strategic plan-including emphasis on non-animal models (NAMs) to replace animals. Per NIH insider, anti-animal responses now outnumber scientists 200-700x. Please please provide input. Deadline: May 26, 11:59 PM ET. grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Congrats @jraab.bsky.social and team!

Genetics Society of America@genetics-gsa.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A mouse hepatocyte-specific model of BRCA1-associated protein 1 (Bap1) and #spatial #transcriptomics analysis reveals how the loss of Bap1 leads to an inflammatory environment and disrupts the recruitment of immune cells in the liver. @jraab.bsky.social Read more in #G3journal: 🔗 buff.ly/wZogkUg

Those of you submitting for the May 27th NIGMS MIRA deadline, are we supposed to or not supposed to include a myBibliography link in the Biosketch? The regular directions say No but the MIRA NOFO (PAR-26-121) says Yes. Which is it? Don't want this bounced for this reason.

OA is just conceptually silly IMO. Most working scientists can hardly understand/evaluate papers outside of our fields beyond a college level. We don’t write for public dissemination. I could probably hire a science writer to generate a public/lay summary of each of our papers for 25% of the APC…

Eugene Day, DSc@eugenedaydsc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It was a scam from the outset, and it was obvious at the time. I don’t understand how academics fell so hard for it. The entire Open Everything movement is gawdawful. A few high minded ideals and a vast sea of grift and credulousness.

Yup. About 7mo ago I paid $2800 in OA for a society journal. Received a bill a month ago for another $2900 in page charges. This is on me for being busy and not fully understanding the APCs but also for being naive and assuming $2800 was a reasonable APC. Wrote to the EiC and of course no reply. ☹️

Drug Monkey@drugmonkey.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Nearing $5,000 for OA fees for entirely pedestrian journals. I still do not understand how NIH and Universities got played so hard on this. My U has a negotiated fee offset and it just seems like the publisher just added that to the charge to grants for no net reduction to the PI’s books.

😞

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 3mo ago

3/3

I propose a 5 year Federal funding ban on any PI who uses generative AI to write a grant proposal

Jeremy Van Cleve@vancleve.theoretical.bio · 3mo ago

Hard limits on the number of proposals submitted per year. There is no other way. First NIH, NSF, and other federal agencies must institute hard limits for every person who is a PI/Co-PI. Other federal agencies can do so as well. It is very likely publishers will need some system as well.

Spend less time processing cell images with the Allen Cell Structure Segmenter. This #OpenScience python-based toolkit helps #cellscience researchers navigate complex images by automatically capturing the boundaries of structures. Access at: https://lnkd.in/gpWA7xWH

I do not understand how *every* mechanism I review grants for requires me to submit detailed feedback, yet everything I apply to is just like yeeting science into the void.

Detection of metastatic burden in mouse models should be done in 3D and at single-cell resolution. The solution is CODA, a workflow that maps organs, tumors and mets exhaustively, in 3D, and at single-cell resolution. Read about this here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...