www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u... an ominous trend: graduate admissions are down 15 percent from last year, on top of an 11 percent decrease from the previous year we are destroying our seed corn

What a great article not only on faculty workloads, but how little our salaries actually factor in to most university budgets. A few highlights. First, our salaries are falling:

When I explain to peeps how much we do in research labs for how few $$, they simply don’t believe me. I once explained it to a famous person from Pixar, he looked me square in the eye and said “You mean all the cancer, vision, and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be %#ing kidding me!”

I wanted to give QED a chance, but couldn’t bring myself to sign up/share info to see their “review” of my preprints I know it’s a business, but it would be great to get past this era of endless tech-grift and engagement farming. We need to protect science from enshittification, not accelerate it

Related

It’s often overlooked how much high-risk research in the US was driven by the BRAIN Initiative. Why? In part because of the design of the programs, but mostly because it injected a lot of money and increased grant success rates. There’s a lesson there. The hypercompetition of low success rates…

“I think it’s a real mistake to forget where the pipeline for all this begins.” John Diffley reflects on the importance of basic research, his mission to decode DNA replication and recreate it in the lab, and the scientific optimism of the 1960s that helped shape it. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2026-03...

“Academic science is not only about productivity, it is also about deep understanding, exploring creative solutions and training critical thinkers to be the next generation of researchers.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Fully endorse

This is really upsetting!

It's time to rewrite reviews-aKG doesn't just regulate demethylation. Work from my lab and @mzspectrum.bsky.social demonstrates a new role for aKG in promoting histone acetylation and DNA repair through regulating carnitine synthesis. Congrats Apoorva Uboveja! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hadn’t thought abt this in awhile - cool to see!

Does PRC2 interact with RNA or is it an artefact? See our preprint showing how stringent denaturing purifications with spike-in controls support direct interaction between PRC2 and RNA in cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NIH has allocated just 33% of its normal budget this year, putting critical medical breakthroughs at risk. Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels and University of Kansas Chancellor Dr. Douglas Girod are calling on the government to release it before the damage becomes permanent. https://bit.ly/4f3GuzR

Someone in the news departments of @nature.com or @science.org needs to take a look at this--its a huge scandal from the scientific supplier that has become a monopoly

🚨🧪🧵URGENT INPUT NEEDED: NIH asks input for next strategic plan-including emphasis on non-animal models (NAMs) to replace animals. Per NIH insider, anti-animal responses now outnumber scientists 200-700x. Please please provide input. Deadline: May 26, 11:59 PM ET. grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Congrats @jraab.bsky.social and team!

Those of you submitting for the May 27th NIGMS MIRA deadline, are we supposed to or not supposed to include a myBibliography link in the Biosketch? The regular directions say No but the MIRA NOFO (PAR-26-121) says Yes. Which is it? Don't want this bounced for this reason.

OA is just conceptually silly IMO. Most working scientists can hardly understand/evaluate papers outside of our fields beyond a college level. We don’t write for public dissemination. I could probably hire a science writer to generate a public/lay summary of each of our papers for 25% of the APC…

Yup. About 7mo ago I paid $2800 in OA for a society journal. Received a bill a month ago for another $2900 in page charges. This is on me for being busy and not fully understanding the APCs but also for being naive and assuming $2800 was a reasonable APC. Wrote to the EiC and of course no reply. ☹️

😞

I propose a 5 year Federal funding ban on any PI who uses generative AI to write a grant proposal

Spend less time processing cell images with the Allen Cell Structure Segmenter. This #OpenScience python-based toolkit helps #cellscience researchers navigate complex images by automatically capturing the boundaries of structures. Access at: https://lnkd.in/gpWA7xWH

I do not understand how *every* mechanism I review grants for requires me to submit detailed feedback, yet everything I apply to is just like yeeting science into the void.

Detection of metastatic burden in mouse models should be done in 3D and at single-cell resolution. The solution is CODA, a workflow that maps organs, tumors and mets exhaustively, in 3D, and at single-cell resolution. Read about this here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It’s brutal in academia right now. A lot is out of our control, but it doesn’t cost anything to remember that there are humans behind papers and grants…reviewers, program officials and funders can be more empathetic in the face of unprecedented chaos in the US scientific enterprise.

Turns out even when your institution has an agreement with Springer Nature that covers gold OA publication fees, they can just decide not to honor that agreement and refuse to make your paper available unless you pay up! No more reviewing for or submitting to GeroScience for me @springernature.com

Our NIAAA funded Post-DoctT32 has received its NoA (non competing renewal). Are you looking for a post-doc and interested in joining our amazing center? If so, reach out! Here is a convenient form that you can use to upload CV and a cover letter! unc.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

NIH is WAY under schedule in obligating its external research funding. Halfway through the fiscal year they're only at 15%! #AcademicSky #ResearchSky www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Untangling mechanisms underlying #CancerDrugResistance www.nature.com/articles/s41... @jess_ljx @arjunraj.bsky.social #Cancer #DrugResistance #TranslationalScience

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.

Cool!!

Now that we're settled at @unc-cbp.bsky.social I'm excited to share the lab's latest preprint tinyurl.com/y8755f2n From 1st author Kendall Kanakanui (@kkanak.bsky.social an @emory-gmb.bsky.social student) it represents a years-long effort to define heterogeneity among biliary epithelial cells (BECs)

Happy International Day of Women & Girls in Science! Today & everyday I am grateful for the opportunity to work alongside & learn from this talented group of women scientists. Funded by grants from the NIH, this team is working to understand how the gut microbiome affects our digestive health.

In our new poll with the Boston Globe of NIH funded scientists in Mass ... - 72% say they have delayed or cancelled projects - 66% reduced research scope - 56% paused experiments or students. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/09/m...

The beauty of the kidney arterial tree for this #FluorescenceFriday. Evans Blue dye labels the vasculature. Image courtesy of postdoc Sarah McLarnon.

My department at Washington State University is recruiting an Assistant or Associate Professor in vector-borne disease 🕷️🦟🦠 Full job description is linked below. Come join us on the Palouse!

Wiley: "We’re supporting responsible research assessment practices" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1520... Also Wiley: "Prove that your article is a good fit for this journal 😉😉😉😉😉 by citing at least two of our articles in your manuscript before we will even consider reviewing it" 🤡

I heard a lot of similar stories last year, and more this year. Lots of 4th rotations. This is devastating for the future of science. We reject many superb applicants to PhD programs every year, because spots are limited. Now we struggle to find labs for admitted students.

Follow up to Doug Hanahan’s visionary article about the stages of cancer development from back in the 1990s www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

If you, as a scientist, cannot be bothered to engage in the intellectual work of science, please quit your job and leave it to someone with skill and integrity.

Whoa…interesting

The constant succession of administrative crises undermining science in the US is exhausting.

From Meghan Mott on LinkedIn 1/2

The language on multiyear funding (MYF) is ineffective. Final bill anchors MYF to 2025 instead of 2024. This means MYF will likely continue at the same rate we saw last year, where NCI's payline from ~10% to 4%. This is incredibly harmful to the US research workforce - especially early career.

FINALLY out in AJPath - the second manuscript from @hannahhrncir.bsky.social’s PhD at Emory! Hannah developed a novel pipeline for quantitative 3D light sheet microscopy of bile ducts that will hopefully be a great resource to the community. ajp.amjpathol.org/article/S000...

HUGE problem!

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I still think if you have a completed story you believe is ready to submit then there is no disadvantage to pre-printing. We always pre-print first and then decide where to submit. As stressed above this in effect mitigates ‘scooping’. Revision requests in every field have got out of control.

When I was the DGS of an umbrella-type PhD program, I worked to put in a rule that PhD students needed a minimum of one 1st-author research paper to graduate. The main intent was to protect students from advisors that were slackers about publishing. No 1st-author pubs really hurts students. 1/3