It is insanity that this hugely consequential news — whether Trump’s EO vomit tirade about H1Bs applies to current visa holders — is sourced *anonymously*! No one will go on record to clarify the new rules!? www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Our new paper @asn-amnat.bsky.social develops a Grand Unified Theory including both exploitative and interference competition doi.org/10.1086/737628. The R* rule of ecology (that 2 species cannot coexist on a single resource), is widely broken, including via a new trade-off we describe. 1/9

The House discretionary budget bill is now out for FY26, including a proposed *slight boost* in NIH funding & many other components that will take time to unpack. Bill text: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su... A few key points including IDC analysis in a provisional 🧵

Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.

Very sad to see. www.thetransmitter.org/community/ha...

This guy has talent, he should write for the Onion frankaj.substack.com/p/bridge-pla...

Suppose, however, the appropriation is reduced by 10% in the first year of implementation and remains at this lower level (recall that the Administration is proposing a 40% reduction). This results in a larger dip in the number of funded grants. 5/n

The NIH switching to fully funding projects upfront will lead to a painful transition period. There'll also be an impact on indirects I haven't seen mentioned before. @drugmonkey.bsky.social @jeremymberg.bsky.social @donmoyn.bsky.social clauswilke.substack.com/p/nih-funded...

Terrible Friday news dump.The wealth of expertise. The decades of scientific progress. The emerging and urgent challenges we were focused on tackling. It is all so short-sided and cruel. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

🎉 I'm thrilled to share that I’ll be joining the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor starting January 2026! I’ll be recruiting PhD students, lab technicians, and postdocs—so if you're interested in host-microbe interactions, I’d love to hear from you!

Trump’s Tax Scam now heads back to the House, where Republicans can only afford to lose 3 votes. The bill barely squeaked by with a single-vote margin the first time, and it’s only gotten more divisive since. Anyone who tells you this is a done deal doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

If you don't know about mosquito dunks, you should! They're floating plant material containing a type of bacterium that only attacks mosquito larvae. Just put one in the water and stop mosquitos from hatching. They're inexpensive and highly effective. Signed, a friendly bluesky entomologist.

One of the organizers of The Bethesda Declaration 👇👇

The Trump administration has killed a $600 million grant to Moderna to develop an mRNA vaccine for H5N1 influenza. @helenbranswell.bsky.social reports. www.statnews.com/2025/05/28/m...

My father worked in a tire factory in Appalachia. Friends and family in the military. Used to vote Republican. Got into college on a diversity program for the underprivileged. Ended up a Harvard professor. And now my funding is terminated because we're trying to stick it to the elites.

HMMER is the bedrock of genomic annotation globally, and now its funding is terminated for no reason. @cryptogenomicon.bsky.social is now on bsky:

I helped draft this open letter about last Friday’s gold standard science executive order. Take a look and consider signing if you agree.

A long thread about mpox and the context specific nature of outbreaks prompted by the large outbreak of MPXV Clade IIb happening at the moment in Sierra Leone:

Now published in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Therefore students are "entitled to that money at whatever institution will take them (as long as it's not Harvard, or the next institution to run afoul of the administration)" Doesn't change the situation much but hopefully provides some clarity.

America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain  economist.com/science-and-...

. @pnas.org just published the final version of our manuscript on how generation time and effective population size interact to shape vertebrate germline mutation rates, led by Luke Zhu and Annabel Beichman: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday 📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

I wrote about the fact that this denies boosters to household members of eg transplant patients, unless those household members themselves have a qualifying disease.

Breaking: NSF will pause the 15% indirect cost cap until June 13 in order to proceed to a summary judgment, thereby avoiding a preliminary hearing. www.courtlistener.com/docket/70143...

A Path Forward to Save American Bio-Medical Research talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-pat...

I wrote about the widespread adoption of AI in education, and why there needs to be more resistance to it open.substack.com/pub/irinadum...

But “mars isn’t even mid” just cracked me up

I'll say on this, as I have in the past, that I think most plagiarism scandals are overblown, often things that cld simply be carelessness. But the President of Harvard lost her job at least in part over what was apparently a much less serious case. So wld be wrong to brush this off.

Holy shiitake! Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the Director of the US Copyrights Office apparently because she refused to let Elon Musk raid the place to steal author’s intellectual property rights democrats-cha.house.gov/media/press-...

The mayor has been protesting the opening of the facility throughout this week, saying its operators did not get proper permits

Exclusive: National Science Foundation staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced.

The T grant story is even more grim. bsky.app/profile/jere...

What's happening with these grants is much more complicated and mostly unknown. None of the NIH have been officially cancelled. The NIH was just ordered to stop paying. They got the Unis to enforce silence on their own campuses because they thought they were "negotiating" and cld get the funds back.

$500 million is… less than 1.25% of the NIH’s 2024 budget. When I say there is no capacity to absorb the shock, I mean it.

We quantify the aggregation of >100,000 random protein sequences to train CANYA, a convolution-attention hybrid neural network to predict aggregation from sequence. With @bennibolo.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"A report by economists at American University in Washington DC estimates that a 50% reduction in federal science funding would reduce the US gross domestic product by approximately 7.6%." Science is an amazing engine of economic activity and progress for the US ... or at least it was.

We are pleased to announce that the next speaker in the ProSE seminar series will be Dr. Klara Hlouchova with a talk on "Protein Structure Before LUCA" May 13, 4PM CET Registration link: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar4 Please share!

Find a protest near you this May Day to support the workers that keep America running ❤️‍🔥

RFK Jr. ordered the NIH’s Integrated Research Facility in Frederick to stop all research on serious infectious diseases yesterday at 5:00 PM. They study pathogens like Ebola there. You may be familiar with it from The Hot Zone. www.wired.com/story/hhs-ni...

Amidst all the terrible and terrifying news, so lovely to hear of @jkpritch.bsky.social's election to the National Academy of Sciences. Congratulations!

The most profound insights are often also the most simple: growth-rate, by setting the dilution rate of intra-cellular molecules, controls the sensitivity of gene regulatory circuits. In retrospect it seems crazy that this effect seems to have been overlooked so far. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Goodbye to the novavax vaccine? Our Medical Establishment refuses to fund RCTs and rejects medical freedom. They want to use government power to impose their antivaxx agenda on you. My latest. sciencebasedmedicine.org/medfreedom/

“Across the board, they are making repayment significantly more expensive and more difficult,” said Jessica Thompson, senior vice president at the Institute for College Access & Success. “This could reduce the number of people who enroll.” wapo.st/4jTuvnw (Although I had feared even worse.)

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Exciting story from Ingolia lab

Wow, finally we get some answer as to what happened! They really did just run all names through law enforcement databases and terminate SEVIS status for anyone with a match, no matter the circumstances or magnitude of the "offense" (including things like speeding tickets and even dropped charges).

Earlier this month the XFL variant was defined, setting a new benchmark in SARS-CoV-2 evolution: a "quadruple-recombinant", meaning it’s evolutionary arc includes 3 recombinant ancestors. It’s a stark example of how we are giving this virus every possible opportunity to evolve. #COVID19 #XFL 🧵

Now that I’ve had a chance to actually read the complaint against Judge Hannah Dugan of Milwaukee, and having listened to the disgraceful attacks on her and the judiciary coming out of the White House, I have some things to say about the whole affair. My write-up is in the replies.

Important!! 🚨 “Using the rescission process, which requires only a simple majority in the Senate, the Republican majorities can vote to return the unspent funds. That will lop billions off the NIH budget.” 1/2