wait till they figure out how much faster the airplane, a machine invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903, can traverse the same distance

That's right....and so dreadfully wrong www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

There’s no routine screening for pancreatic cancer, most cases aren’t operable, and the five year survival rate after diagnosis is around 13%. It’s a traumatic news. But new personalized mRNA immunotherapy is showing encouraging results in Phase 1 clinical trials. Keep funding science!

"Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial: Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later."

Oh well, we’re safe from robots taking our jobs for now.

This morning, I posted two important stories based on insider information from the FBI and SCOTUS, published in @theatlantic.com and @nytimes.com respectively. This doesn’t happen by accident. The source(s) have to know they’ll be protected, even if the reporters are threatened with jail.

Each Friday night, I write a briefing on what happened in US science & higher ed. 🧪  Apr 17 (Year 2, Week 16) - new CDC director nominated w/ credentials! - closure of Hampshire College. Other schools at risk - changes to federal loans for grad students & much more buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

“The American oligarchy is an AI oligarchy” www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

OOP New York Times got receipts on John Roberts being like, 'I know this isn't how anything works, but a Democratic president is about to implement a policy!!' www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

We already KNOW how to make super babies, you eugenicist creeps! And it's all the things you fucking fucks are fucking up! THREAD!

The stories of this week have been horrific. 62M view rape academy,misogyny, and Lt Gov murderer as just some of the every day experiences So many I know & love are in pain. No words to describe even a fraction of what they must be feeling. May we continue to do the work to one day earn trust.

So many academic departments make up the fabric of a university. They teach the courses for their majors but also for students in other majors who either have to or want to take. They're each part of what it means to offer well-rounded educational opportunities. This is all a loss

Fantastic conversation today led by Prof. Britt Paris. Thought provoking perspective article that has a lot of great points from our workshop: academeblog.org/2025/07/22/f...

Check out this master class in really irresponsible, paternalistic, misogynistic reporting on a murder of a woman who deserves better from journalists covering these crimes. Seriously, reporters need to break the old patriarchy-defined molds of this kind of reporting.

U of I made $40,000 in licensing fees from Chief imagery. Our racist mascot was forced out by the NCAA twenty years ago and our leadership still refuses to choose a new mascot. #Kingfisher

🚨 Great event this afternoon hosted by Illinois Campus Faculty Association. A great chance for tenure-stream faculty at Illinois to think collectively about how we engage in scholarship and teaching at this moment.

it is wild to me to have a colleague say that using genAI to do a "first analysis" of a bunch of papers to get summaries and then engage with those summaries is a legitimate way to do any sort of scholarship like fucking hell how are you calling yourself a scholar

This is a handy little website if you want to keep track of how things are going with science funding. sciencespending.org#overview

For years I have used the voice-to-text module in windows (office-H) to write emails and short stetches of text. Super helpful. All of a sudden it is shit. It is doing some larger 'learning' model that ends up with terrible text segments that are nearly impossible to locally edit. WTF

Exactly one year ago today:

@hhmi-science.bsky.social's #FreemanHrabowski Scholars Program offers early career faculty up to $10M over 10 yrs, plus salary & benefits Stable, sustained support can transform your career: Senior Postdoc? This year's competition has a program for you too. Applications open 11/3! bit.ly/4vhC0LA

🧬🧪 New from JAX: Scientists have corrected an extremely rare and life-threatening genetic disease of the liver in mouse models and human patient cells, using the gene-editing approach that served as the basis for the historic, life-saving treatment of Baby KJ Muldoon in 2025.

Big News. Today the Cancer Center at Illinois becomes the 8th NCI Designated Basic Cancer Center. www.cancer.gov/research/inf...

“Narrative paragraphs summarizing committee discussion will not be used. Instead, summaries will have a sentence describing the degree of consensus in the committee vote, plus bullets listing the main score driving points.“ Why not just give the score distribution and be done with it?

Over the past week, the president posted an image of himself as Jesus, the vice president challenged the pope on Catholic doctrine, and the secretary of defense quoted the speech of a fictional hit man and presented it as scripture.

Big News. Today the Cancer Center at Illinois becomes the 8th NCI Designated Basic Cancer Center. www.cancer.gov/research/inf...

Do you know how demoralizing it is for students to work themselves bare for two years competing for a clerkship that their peers get handed to them after just a year solely for having the right political ideology and belonging to the right club? It completely destroys faith in the system.

MONTANA SUPREME COURT: “Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination,” and is subject to strict scrutiny under the Montana Constitution.

Rep. Chu brings up the fact that FEMA is approving disaster requests from Republican states but not Democratic states. She asks Vought about it, and he basically says it's not a problem. "No one has looked harder at FEMA funding than us."

fuck em up, professor ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

As we're doing assessments our STEM colleagues across campus, this point keeps coming up. They're feeling this deeply. Faculty unions are an tool to help arrest this slide and reestablish the shared governance model we've seen be eaten away

Academic freedom is declining worldwide, but the US is seeing an especially rapid deterioration across institutional autonomy, or the right for universities to determine who can teach, what can be taught, and who can be admitted onto their campuses. cen.acs.org/research-int... #chemsky #academicsky🧪

My quote of the day Just knowing you don't have the answers is a recipe for humility, openness, acceptance, forgiveness, and an eagerness to learn - and those are all good things. Dick Van Dyke

AI is profoundly unpopular. A recent NBC News poll found that among 18-34 year-olds, AI's net favorability rating is -44. *Negative 44*. Those are basically serial killer numbers. It's not much better among women 18-49. (Men over 50 and upper class are the only ones who like AI, and just barely.)

But yet they ask, why aren’t students protesting

Large study of the effects of mRNA COVID vaccination impacts in France. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... 1/3

Join the AAAS Multidisciplinary Working Group on Disability Inclusion and Anti-Ableism in STEMM for a virtual town hall! Members will share their work identifying how AAAS can support a disability-inclusive STEMM ecosystem & wants to hear from the broader community. Register: https://bit.ly/4eo6ci1

conservative free speech is when they speak and you listen or suffer the consequences

The President's signed the SBIR/STTR Reauthorization Bill yesterday! Good news for investigators looking for support for start-up companies. spacenews.com/president-tr...

I've written before about how USAID was the first government agency killed by conspiracy theory. This confirms it. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...

The "my competitor will see my preprint and replicate/rush their story to a journal" = their competitor has to have already done at least the rate-limiting parts of the work. To me, this is about someone wanting to receive exclusive credit for work that other groups were doing simultaneously.

The push for institutional neutrality, like the so-called “free-speech crisis,” was always a right wing ploy to get universities to stop pointing out obvious things like “fascists are ascendant” and “racism is bad.” It is sad that so many university “leaders” took the bait.

Instead of asking chatgpt, why not ask a librarian? You'll get real answers and they won't tell you to kill yourself.

Imagine a study that found kids with ADHD have more visits to doctors than kids without ADHD — and used that finding to suggest ADHD treatment doesn't work. That's the standard of evidence the anti-trans braintrust is willing to accept.

This stuff also led directly to the destruction of US research, cancer cures, etc. NIH became a political pawn in the plan to deflect blame for COVID away from Trump. That required attacking public health, truth, and science, and it led right to where we are now

"when I was a student, we didn't have flexible policies and professors weren't forgiving" same, and I know what it meant to me when I had professors who did accommodate me when my disabilities rendered me a mess. I owe it to them to pass that favor along.

Here a grandmother is forced to do a gig job with no job security because she can’t afford to retire? What are we celebrating here?

Remember when Trump threatened to wipe out a whole civilization? And then backed out of that and talked about forming a deal with Iran? And then dropped that and went to a UFC fight as negotiations fell apart? And then unveiled a triumphal arch and a photo of himself as Jesus? That was this week.

Spent the day in DC meeting w/ congressional offices BEGGING them to keep funding for cancer research in this country flat next year Every $1 of NIH funding leads to $3 in societal benefit. Cures. Workforce. Dreams. EVERY YEAR IS LIKE 'BEST WE CAN DO IS NOT EXPLICITLY TARGET YOU FOR DESTRUCTION'

VICTORY for faculty at Tufts' med school, who sued after Tufts informed them they would have to generate 50% of their own salary from external grants or face pay cuts. Tufts is a joke; Provost Genco called her own employees "dead weight"; all power to the workers.