Meanwhile, over at the other place... Governor DeSantis calls on the Board of Governors to "pull the plug" on the use of H-1B visas at state universities on Florida.

This dumbass pick me who has been desperately trying to attract the attention of the right wing anti NIH grievance brigade keeps on flailing. He seems to think this is some sort of excellent burn. It is not.

Other “updates”

Late in the afternoon on Friday (yesterday), HHS/NIH did 2 things: 1) They RIFd more employees (despite the extreme staffing shortages). 2) They sent announcements to supervisors letting them know people in their chain of command will be moved to the career/policy “at will” status. 🧵1/3

NIH staffing shortage could slash number of new grants issued this year www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If anything at all, I'm guessing it would probably be the phylogenetic classification of Cypriniformes. www.biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/arti...

Obviously pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I don't think 'definitive' is quite right, maybe 'standard', but if you want an estimate of the Milky Way's gravitational field, then I've got you covered: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017MNRA...

Guess I'll bite. The evolutionary relationships of decapod crustaceans. This paper is the main citation on wiki and on nearly every page of the big 2023 decapod taxonomy Book. BUT it is a phylogeny, so it could always be refuted in the future! royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Maybe - a method to determine, and describe, axis systems: "Tutorial: Crystal orientations and EBSD — Or which way is up?" Materials Characterization (2016) T.B. Britton, J. Jiang, Y. Guo, A. Vilalta-Clemente, D. Wallis, L. Hansen, A. Winkelmann, A.J. Wilkinson dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ma...

Ooh! What a fun question. I would say, climate impacts on California. It’s so old, I’m often asked if I’m “related to the Hayhoe who wrote that paper” www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What is the mass and radius of your m dwarf

i would say my 2015 Science paper is the definitive one in the field on the biomechanics of bombardier beetle spray pulsation www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

dspace link dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/ha...

I wrote a State of the Art Report for the DoD on qualifying additive manufactured parts for use. A few years later I was sitting in a presentation by an AM company working with Futures Command and they cited me.

I guess my Kepler CDPP paper is the definitive paper for the noise properties of Kepler data but that’s not really a finding so much as an apologia about how we came up with an obscure way to do so and now everyone has to live with it. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I worked on the 2019-2020 CDC project known as NHBS-Trans, which had data from the largest federally sample of trans women. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes... It's "definitive" in the sense that the 2023-2024 report got axed by the gender erasure EO

Would love to see some answers to this, Bluesky has to be full of people who are the go-to authority on something (and have a paper to establish that)

Zygomorphic [bilaterally symmetrical] flowers are visited by fewer species of potential pollinators 🌿 doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

in an effort to practice what I preach (trying to get people to respond to this great prompt): if you read about "too big to fail" in the context of astronomy, you can blame me.... and my two co-authors. ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011MNRA...

If we include "was the definitive citation," a comprehensive mechanism for the Fischer-Tropsch reaction, Chem Reviews, 1981. It's a little outdated now, but still useful.

One of their best songs as well!!!

I code the way God intended: by copying and pasting off years old forum posts.

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

What finding have you published where your paper is the definitive citation?

You: please act normal, you need these people to like you Me: ok! People: hi Me: The human genome only contains about 20,000 genes, but over a million copies of an ancient virus-like sequence called 'Alu' & half a million copies of another called 'L1' & together they make up 27% of your DNA.

People cheer on the rhetoric coming from NIH leaders, but when you push them on how to implement that rhetoric it is often: 1) poor understandings of current easy-to-access policy 2) impossible w/o dramatic reform 3) possible but the people who could implement it were fired or pushed out

Multi-year funding, grant terminations, and no clarity on what “DEI-activities” are is holding back ESIs far more than… Holding a K award and receiving an R… As @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social notes in her next post this has been possible since the early 2000s. As a 26 y/o, pretty much my entire life…

I was at a small meet and greet with him at the AAMC last year. We were told beforehand that this was not the place to question him, and that their gov relations team would address our concerns with Congress. It is time to stop being nice.

3/ But still, it was hard not to recall the parable of the emperor who has no clothes, as people continued the usual social niceties with a person we all see mismanaging NIH to the brink of collapse.

At some point we have forgotten that there must be a social contract and we as reviewers, readers and colleagues expect a bare minimum, default of truthfulness, correctness and collegiality. Otherwise, we're not doing science anymore 🧪

Just checking on Xi’s docs

The Eagles 🦅 have home games 4 on Thanksgiving and 8 on Christmas Eve. Why does the NFL hate us lol.

The NIH director’s visit has only deepened my concerns about him www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/nih-...

Please share widely. The new (simpler) MIRA R35 for Early Stage Investigators (ESI) NOFO is published. First due date is 10/2/2026. files.simpler.grants.gov/opportunitie...

NIH R01equiv success rates over 30%.

Words and photos from my colleagues who were at the Tennessee legislature this week: nashvillebanner.com/2026/05/07/t...

This is so niche that none of you will care, but the independent newspaper covering Syracuse University is called the Daily Orange. When staff members graduate, they have a piece called "Ducks", that only a fellow DO staffer or parent would appreciate.

Appalabhotla, Siesser, Bear, Haugh et al. developed a system enabling light-mediated recruitment of PLC-γ1 variants to dissect mechanisms underpinning #cancer-associated hyperactivity, and they show that recruitment of active PLC-γ1 robustly directs #fibroblast #migration rupress.org/jcb/article/...

Outrageous

The Confederacy rises again open.substack.com/pub/aaronrup...

These viruses have been known problems in Korea for so long that there’s literally a M*A*S*H episode about them. People work their whole careers on viruses most people have never heard of…so that you never have to hear about them.

Russia levels of corruption. “According to our analysis, ~$920 million worth of crude oil shorts were taken 70 minutes before an Axios report claimed the US and Iran were near a "14-point" deal to end the war.” The Kobeissi Letter, analysts of global capital markets. The shorts gained $125m.

Triple the rate. 3 times more likely to have grants suspended. “Compared to the all NIH-funded investigators in 2024, investigators who received targeted terminations were more likely to self-identify as… Black/African American (n = 86, 11.9% vs 4.0%)”

This is hilarious. A+ no notes www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

7 dollar gas. Well, I guess I'll buy an electric car. Oh those are 60 thousand dollars? Well at least electricity is cheap. Oh the government won't build solar panels because it's "Too transgender"? Well at least wages are going up. Oh the idea of jobs is fake now? Well at least everyone is happ

How ironic. www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/...

Oh dang. www.nps.gov/dena/learn/p...