Bhattacharya often mischaracterizes multiyear funding as beneficial to early career scientists. In reality, it creates a hyper-competitive, resource constrained environment. Part 2 of @27unihted.bsky.social's fact check address MYF. 27unihted.substack.com/p/fact-check...

I was so baffled that I looked into the "six genders" and did find a weird quote where Talarico talks about "six genders" in referring to differences of sexual development caused by sex chromosome aneuploidy. 🤦‍♀️ Which is why genetics education is for ✨everyone!✨ Sex and gender are not the same thing

Alex Ip's reporting has been amazing. So naturally the US is forcing him out of the country.

I grew up in the south where nice young ladies don’t curse. Now I live in the northeast where all the middle aged ladies curse, nice or not. Anyone policing women’s language can fuck off.

If either (or both) the lead and senior author aren’t checking every citation, you should be banned from any reputable journal. I do it. My trainees do it. My colleagues do it. Only AI bootlickers think hallucinated citations should be acceptable practice.

Idk if a sewer district can read sci fi, but if so, I’d recommend Radiant Star by @annleckie.com to @neorsd.org. There’s a good bit about water treatment, and I got the sense the author had a lot more to say on the matter and was editorially restrained. 😂 📚 💙

Goose taking a brief break from stalking flying bugs on the deck. 🐶 ☀️

“This is a story about scientific censorship, a deliberate termination of whole categories of science, and a determination of the categories of science that are politically palatable and will be allowed to continue.” Another great piece from Liz Ginexi. open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Got an obnoxious little finding you'd otherwise shelve? We did our first @micropub7n.bsky.social and it was a 10/10 experience! Find out why you should use caution if deploying Repo-GeneSwitch-Gal4 for investigating fly sleep. Led by @seakelly5.bsky.social & @keisukefukumura.bsky.social

Find the real Goose challenge! 🪿 🐶 💤

Well, would ya look at that! NSF is going to send >10% of its current budget to industry (read: tech start ups) instead of universities…it’s as if the admin is trying to dismantle our basic science mechanism and use it as a start up fund for private companies 💁🏻‍♀️ www.nsf.gov/tip/updates/...

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations doi.org/10.59350/5zt... 🧪

I’m always reading one print book and one audiobook simultaneously, the intersection of which is determined by the vicissitudes of the library hold queue. So what are the odds of two books about academia with pigs on the cover at the same time? 😂 🐖 📚

Maybe we should all get shirts that say “Scientists DO want you to know! AMA” 😂

"Scientists don't want you to know-" Buddy there are so many things I, as a scientist, want you to know and the only thing stopping me from writing more papers and posts about it and then starting a podcast to tell you even MORE things is that I am limited by hours in the day

My mom is pretty great. She came to a Gordon conference in Spain with me last year and had a good old time. She was the talk of the conference! I’m lucky to have a mom who I’m friends with as an adult.

My Kindle was a then-extravagant Christmas gift from my husband in 2012. It’s been my companion through over a thousand books, in bed, by the pool, on the beach, on trains, on planes. It still works as well as the day I got it. I’m devastated that Amazon is discontinuing support. 💔

To download your Canvas content: Settings -> Export Course Content wait, reload, download It's an .imscc extension file. That's rebranded .zip; change the file extension to .zip then unzip. Your main files are in web_resources. #AcademicSky #HigherEd community.instructure.com/en/kb/articl...

You have to write a grant, including all the admin parts like budgets etc, not just the science. And if it’s not in the top 10% based on that year’s committee, you have to change your major. 🫠

Go buy you the newest @aptshadow.bsky.social book, Children of Strife. I adored the series, and really thought it was over, and then BAM - 4th book! All my old favorites, and some new not-favorites. Bugs in space. Shrimps in space. Bacteria in space. And yeah, also some humans.

Canvas is evil, and universities are using learning management systems in ways that defy good pedagogy and steal course content to feed to AI. We should all use Canvas (and similar) as sparingly as possible and this will force the issue at both individual instructor and institutional levels.

"Retirement norms in academia should also be re-evaluated, the team says. The researchers found that after a 1994 change in US law that ended up prohibiting universities from mandating retirement by a certain age, papers began relying on older references."

Oh hey - it's me! I'm at the table presenting Article 42! (Not only me - this is this result of months of committee work, and I'm co-presenting with a colleague from the med school side).

First, if this is what you expect of parenthood, that you’ll have this level of control over the life of another human being, do not pass go. Parenthood isn’t for you. Second, it’s snake oil peddled by eugenicists who know it’s crap or are ignorantly fanatical about only some people having value.

At UPenn Chronobiology and Sleep Institute annual research retreat where we had a *fascinating* keynote from Vladyslav Viyazovskiy about torpor and what it can teach us about diverse states of consciousness beyond a sleep/wake binary. 😴 🧪

Welcome to the last half of the US federal fiscal year. Here is where we're at with National Science Foundation--the agency that funds basically everything other than biomedical research at American universities--grant numbers. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

Starting in the purple corral must be my good luck! Fastest Broad Street finish yet! 10 miles in 1:18:34. 💜 #runbroadstreet

Time for the best 10 miles all year! #runbroadstreet

Have you stopped to smell the flowers lately? Goose recommends BEEG SNEEEEFFFF!

Every time I see someone talk about Claude I think about how they switched from female to male names as soon as they wanted the robots to seem like experts vs personal assistants.

I love prepping for my most-updated lecture of the semester: gene therapy! When I started teaching this lecture in 2023 there were 5 FDA-approved RNAi and 8 ASO therapeutics. Now there are 8 RNAi and 12 ASO therapeutics! In 2023 there were 0 FDA approved CRISPR therapies and now there is 1! 🧪🧬

“The sooner we eat, the sooner we leave, the sooner we find Miss Genevieve.” Is a phrase I regularly use in an effort to motivate myself to perform non-preferred tasks in the necessary sequence. It works pretty well, tbh. #madeline

The city blocked off part of our neighborhood to tear down a building w asbestos. The teen said "Why did people use asbestos if it causes cancer?!" I told him people thought it was a wonder product and used it EVERYWHERE & told him how the same thing happened w radioactivity... and now AI.

If this is leadership, I would hate to see capitulation. If the Republican's drummed up opposition to gravity, the National Academy would stop speaking about it. 4/4

Semi-regular reminder that if your Word docs are doing dumb things around page breaks that are messing up your ability to cram words into a grant - you probably need to turn off widow and orphan control! #academicsky typographyforlawyers.com/widow-and-or...

Happy Friday! Let’s see those #uniondogs. Goose is a proud supporter of @ruaaup-aft.bsky.social @aaup.org, and as an occasional lecture guest he’s also entitled to representation. ✊🐶

How can a single cell learn without a brain? We explore this in my paper with @wallaceucsf.bsky.social! We discovered that single cells may learn using molecules similar to those that animal brains use to learn, like CaMKII. Cells can also propagate memory states to their progeny!

Major update from #SCIMaP, including * Impact analysis of White House's FY 2027 proposed cuts to NIH and NSF. * Fact sheets showing impacts in Congressional districts. * New analysis on how baseline science funding benefits the economy and jobs in local communities. More via scienceimpacts.org

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

I was preparing for a talk I gave last evening to a lay audience and came up with this graphic to explain multi-year funding and why it leads to fewer competitive awards and funding investigators and projects. 6/8

LOL. LMAO even. Or maybe laugh til I cry since only new faculty and new buildings are the future of research at Rutgers. Oh, and our uncompensated community outreach that isn't considered in tenure and promotion, of course. 🧪 www.investmentreports.co/interview/wi...

Goose and I deserved a lil treat after our yard work. 🐶 🍦 ☀️ 💐

The garden helper

If you think legislation that targets “low enrollment degrees” only impacts the humanities please look at this list. Degrees in chemistry, math, physics, political science, data analytics, psychology and economics are being eliminated. ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/04/16/o...

Recently my lab members have been joining Bluesky in a suspiciously coordinated manner, given what I know of their penchant for getting up to shenanigans. Just know that I see y’all… 👀

NIH funded / aspirant peeps: “The percent of applications discussed in most meetings will be reduced to 30-35%, instead of the usual ~50%.” grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

One more complaint or demand from my class that they "need" access to lecture slides on Canvas to study and I will go full retro-mode and diagram everything by hand on the whiteboard. Take your own notes. Draw your own pictures. That is literally how you learn.

Putting my journal editor hat on: this has become a huge problem since covid. I don’t know what senior faculty are thinking about how they benefited from willing referees in their own career and now just won’t/can’t/sorry-I’m-too-busy. Others ghost editors who write to inquire about late review.

Senior professors - if you want to help your junior colleagues in these times, I am begging you, review our papers. I have done 25 manuscript reviews in the last 6 years. But my own manuscript is stalled out waiting for reviewers. Relatedly, I won't be doing any more reviews until tenure. 🧪

As some of y’all know, I’m in a humanities/ STEM mixed marriage 😝. So excited that my husband’s got a book coming out this summer! If you love Philly history, women’s history, or the centennial exhibition, you’ll love Anna’s diary. www.brooklinebooks.com/978195504168...