Great. Impeach or STFU.

Excited to be giving a public planetarium talk at Embry Riddle University tonight! Love showing off the @sdssurveys.bsky.social data :) Sold out show!!

Amongst your doomscrolling, here’s a fun thing - a paper I’m on was featured on Jeopardy last night!

Masters scholarships for Palestinian students at Sussex. Please disseminate? www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/re...

Unbelievable. It’s not to go home on the weekend. Senate Dems did a deal on RFK and Gabbard so they can go to a luxury hotel in Munich and drink beer this weekend.

CNN shared a story about Taylor Swift at the Superbowl and Steven showed up and dropped the single greatest comment of all time

Y’all they cancelled the NSF MPS Ascend Program after encouraging underrepresented folks to only apply to it and not both the Ascend and the MSPRF. This is astronomically fucked up for many grad students and postdocs of color in math. #MathSky

The NSF MPS Ascend Postdoctoral Fellowship has been archived: new.nsf.gov/funding/oppo... All folks who applied to this opportunity have had their application package deleted.

To be clear, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are instituting death panels for rural America. That’s what closing federally qualified health centers means, since they are often the only health providers available. bsky.app/profile/chan...

“In this week’s episode of ‘AOC Talks America Off The Ledge,’” the opposition leader would “like to remind us that Elon Musk is actually kind of fucking stupid.” “One of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met.” “This dude is not smart.” www.wonkette.com/p/opposition...

This NYT sleight-of-hand is part of why Trump’s insane racism flourishes. The implication is that it’s possible to “attack diversity” WITHOUT a “racist undercurrent.” And it “surfaces” - as though Trump hasn’t been a rabid and explicit racist for years, and this is some new tone.

Hey, I know there are lots of things to be angry, activated, and/or scared about right now. But I am noticing that coverage of the executive orders that are specifically harmful to trans children and adults are barely being discussed by anyone except trans journalists. Stop this shit.

Fixed it.

I am one of these NSF postdocs. NSF has frozen everyone’s access to their salaries and research stipends (that were already awarded) with no information about when they might be expected to be unfrozen. It still appears like we are expected to continue doing our work though.

National Science Foundation suspends salary payments, leaving researchers unable to pay their bills www.statnews.com/2025/01/30/t... Story by @ericboodman.bsky.social

can’t believe we forgot to add constitutional crisis classes to physics grad school curriculum

Turns out the 2010 America COMPETES Act contains language I recognize because I've cribbed it from NSF's Grant Proposal Guide for every proposal I've sent to NSF www.congress.gov/111/plaws/pu... It's encoded in 42 USC 1826p-14 uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?r... R: the 2010 Act, L: the GPG

And it’s not just a requirement that NSF dreamed up and can discard, broader impacts review criteria are written law, enacted by Congress:

It is hard to know where to begin with this. I am not directly affected (yet? thanks, bureaucracy?) — instead, it is largely more junior student and postdoctoral researchers. The NSF is just out here canceling paychecks despite the grants in question already being awarded.

No one is telling us what to do, and we’ve received a lot of conflicting information. Many people were advised to pull funds on Jan 28th. This will be devastating for many folks. Check in on your fellows and see if your university can offer them emergency funds.

Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.

I was an NSF postdoc fellow. Their stipends (aka paycheck) come directly from the NSF into their bank accounts. I really hope the universities employing all of these amazing early career folks are very quickly figuring out how to help them cover their bills.

BREAKING — I'm told OPM just sent out this memo with guidance for implementing Trump's "Defending Women" anti-trans executive order. "Take down all outward facing media that inculcate or promote gender ideology. Review email systems and turn off features that prompt users for their pronouns."

Diversity was a conservative compromise that liberals decided to accept and now we are here

Revoking approved grants for including work that was part of the evaluation criteria previously is like changing football rules now so the team with less points win because points are bad, and then saying as a consequence, Notre Dame is the current national champion. 🔭🧪⚛️

This isn't mine at all, but the Magic School Bus TV cartoon, which inspired untold millennials including myself, originated as an NSF grant 🧪 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

The new general counsel for OPM—the office issuing all those deranged memos—is Andrew Kloster, a self-described “raging misogynist” with a public history of racist comments and a temporary restraining order for domestic violence who most recently worked for Matt Gaetz. www.pogo.org/investigatio...

An NSF prize postdoc let me fund and help develop an audio course aligned with national standards for 3rd-5th grade science classrooms to use for free. Now current fellows can’t even get their next paychecks… www.sciencepodcastforkids.com/universe

lol @ shutting down the government to replace it with a computer program that randomly makes shit up

Deleted, reposting to clarify: the NSF statement does not define "DEIA", I haven't used that term in the proposal for my current NSF project. I could guess what it means, but that's not my job. I would need to know what specific activities I'm not allowed to do before I change any plans.

I am an NSF ASCEND fellow and my February paycheck that I scheduled this morning was cancelled, and we don't have access to our accounts with the freeze. Will I get paid or will my fellowship just disappear? lovely.... Not what I expected to be my first post to #chemksy

If you’re in the US and you’d like to know what projects and vital services federal grants currently fund in your state, you can search here: www.usaspending.gov And you can find the contact information for your elected representatives here: www.usa.gov/elected-offi... They need to hear from you.

I will send a knit gift to the first University president to send an email that says "yes, this is fascism, and yes, we will fight it by your side."

I am begging the national media to start taking this seriously. Stop buying the claims that the framing of "temporary" or "pause." They are altering the review processes of federally funded scientific research from merit-based peer review processes to political screening by ideologues.

Federal grants are your tax dollars, put into projects that improve and enrich your community and your life. It is not okay for all those projects and the livelihoods of all the people who work to make them happen to be held hostage over some ideological gripe. www.usa.gov/elected-offi...

Universities rely enough on grants that they might eliminate positions — perhaps tenured faculty — if the financial situation becomes dire enough. But in the meantime, grad students, postdocs, and “soft money” researchers typically are paid ENTIRELY on federal grant funding. No grant = no salary.

I think some people hear “grants” and think that without them, scientists and government workers just have less stuff to play with at work. But grants fund salaries for students, academics, researchers, and people who work in all areas of public service. “Pausing” grants means people don’t eat.

NEW — OMB temporarily pauses all agency grants and loans programs. Per copy of memo: "The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve."

...the document says programs affected are “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

i can see how you would come to this conclusion if your job didn't require you to ever be correct

Imagine if that was the military’s entire job, that defending people meant making sure that every day life was taken care of, rather than going out and doing all the terrible things the US military asks its young and disproportionately low income recruits to do

Hi Friends! Please consider reading and signing this open letter that @emilyjogriffith.bsky.social and I are sending to AAS in two days time! And share with your friends and their friends and all the friends!

Hi all! @deechiebaby.bsky.social and I will be formally submitting this letter to AAS leadership on Tuesday, so please sign on if you haven't already! 🔭 Link to letter: tinyurl.com/AAS245-Letter

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