Good reporting by the Crimson.

Latest batch of the Epstein files has plenty more physicists. Going through them slowly, in no particular order.

Last July, I was interviewed for this project about 'watchdog' science journalism. Funny to be on the other side, for a change. Anyhow, worth a read if you want a sort of high-level amalgamation of how the sausage of investigative science journalism is made. osf.io/preprints/so...

Good reporting on this troubling saga.

The whole interview is pretty much in this vein: Bhattacharya shares a grievance about past health authorities during COVID; Douthat says he agrees but gently tries to nudge Bhattacharya toward a more moderate position. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/o...

RIP LaTeX formatting as a green flag (1984–2026)

Mixed news for basic and applied science funding from DoD in the appropriations bill. It's not clear when it will pass, though, since the DoD bill is currently tied to the DHS bill, which lacks 60 votes after Dems withdrew support because of violence by ICE in Minneapolis. My reporting:

I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com

How many STEM Ph.D.s were lost from the U.S. federal government last year? My colleagues @mghersher.bsky.social and @policyhound.bsky.social dug into a recent data release to find the answer. A @science.org exclusive. www.science.org/content/arti...

Can confirm.

Revealing stat: prior to widespread gen-AI, arXiv rejected ~4% of submissions. Now it's 10–12%.

For reasons, I looked into research in #Greenland recently. Did you know they have a new(ish) national research plan? That they have a new(ish) very capable oceanographic research vessel? That they are beefing up their computing capabilities to handle AI analyses of e.g. marine species? 🧪🇬🇱

NSF's "Dear Colleagues" letter about NCAR omits any mention of climate science, opting for language around 'critical weather infrastructure' etc. www.nsf.gov/funding/info...

The fetal tissue ban was part of a number of anti-abortion policies proposed under the HHS section of Project 2025, which, until now, have gone largely unfulfilled—the author of that section, Roger Severino, was denied an administration job. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year. That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027. A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications. A short 🧵

Good lord. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

Inbox: The Trump administration is advertising its science & tech accomplishments.

This is an interesting model by Atkinson, but I don't think it really has explanatory power, let alone predictive power.

A year ago, under a flurry of executive orders, it became clear that the second Trump administration was going to make dramatic changes on US science. Here's our 10,000 foot look at the damage. with @maxkozlov.bsky.social, Jeff Tollefson, and Rich Monastersky

PSA, if you, like me, suddenly started getting AI-generated overviews above emails in Gmail and do not want them (but would still like to keep the useful AI-assisted mail sorting of promotions, etc.): Go to settings and disable "Google Workspace smart features".

This zombie claim about quail cocaine research has been shuffling along for so long that the formatting of the (very good) 2011 SciAm blog takedown of Sen. Tom Coburn's 'Wastebook', which Bump linked to in 2021, is nearly broken. www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicuri...

Unequivocal that the Trump administration's actions have hurt/will have longer term consequences for US higher ed, but those are not what is being captured in a survey like this, which the article (to its credit) is clear about.

With the big caveat that shit can suddenly hit the fan at any moment (cf. SAMHSA grant cuts a few hours ago), I think this is a helpful broad-strokes preview of what may come this year, or at least what to keep an eye on.

We are collecting information on terminated SAMHSA grants at Grant Witness: grant-witness.us/submit-samhs... If you worked on one of these programs, please let us know at the link! And please share with your colleagues. We need a comprehensive record of these terminations to fight back!

If you see one, the most important thing to say is “WHAT’S YOUR NAME” because otherwise the person is gone for good, maybe. I witnessed one in an alley as the sole pursuit car, I was the only witness, I froze for a second and didn’t shout it in time, and the guy is just… gone now. I’ll never know.

The rarest of sights - a big glossy journal publishing negative replications! Yes, we had to bundle 4 replications into one article AND we had to wait 2 (!!) years in peer review, but here we are: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

NASA spent years and billions of dollars collecting Martian samples to bring home. But Congress's current proposed budget for the agency would leave them stranded. What's at stake? Take a deep dive with this recent feature:

A fairly frank interview, as these things go. (disclosure: I have recently written for Quanta, which is supported by the Simons Foundation)

From a little over two decades ago, but hasn't aged a day. www.nature.com/articles/422...

Feels like it might be a long year.

Katherine was an intellectually intrepid writer and editor. She had great ambitions for what physics journalism could be and she pushed those around her to meet that mark, as this eulogy attests. It is just devastating to lose her.

Science has named the seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy worldwide as the 2025 Breakthrough of the Year. Learn more about this year's #BOTY and other big advances in science: https://scim.ag/493Tpgx

Took their time with this one...

Hearing for Thakur v. Trump (over terminated grants for University of California researchers) starting now: www.courtlistener.com/docket/70459... Zoom link: cand.uscourts.gov/judges/rfl/l... I'll try to follow along live.

Huh. Well that's about 5% of the way there. Large enough to make a dent, small enough to probably not change much about its relationship to taxpayers.

The National Science Board, which oversees NSF, has published recommendations to update the foundation's merit review (which was just updated). Below are the main points. www.nsf.gov/nsb/updates/...

Here's our reporting on the proposed dismantling of the jewel of US atmospheric science, @ncar-ucar.bsky.social. The plan is to break NCAR apart and disburse some parts to other locations (like the research aircraft fleet) and eliminate others. www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪 #AGU25 #climate

Scientists have expressed their shock and sadness following the death of plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro, a researcher at MIT, who was shot at his home on Monday go.nature.com/3MI0sUD

These are understandable concerns, given all that has happened at NSF, so I think it's worth addressing. Here is the exact language about internal reviews: "in those rare circumstances when an ad hoc or panel review request process fails to produce the minimum of two external reviews."

I think it's fair to argue that many reductionists (then and now) hold a 'strong reductionist' view that goes beyond just 'everything is reducible' to 'everything can be derived up from the smallest things'. The latter is what Anderson took issue with.

A state program in Wisconsin for deafblind children helped a 3-year-old, born with poor vision and no ears, learn to communicate. The Trump administration cut the program’s funding over goals related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Fermilab appoints a new permanent director, Norbert Holtkamp, following Young-Kee Kim's tenure as acting director.

Amid a whole host of other upheaval—their last day in the building is this Friday—NSF is making some changes to its grant review process. I spoke to staff about the potential benefits and drawbacks:

When should a paper be corrected? Last December, @elisabethbik.bsky.social and other sleuths began flagging papers by a prominent bioengineer, Ali Khademhosseini. They found over 80 with image issues. Khademhosseini and his colleagues have issued over 40 corrections, but avoided retractions.

washington navel oranges, painted by royal charles steadman, 1927

NSF reorganization is, frankly, a bit odd, and we haven't run a story on it partly because it's hard to know what to make of it. The impetus for reorg, as I understood it, was to limit the siloing that occurs because NSF has so many (35ish) divisions. Now there will be 50+ sections.

Bit late on this, but yesterday DoD appealed this case about indirect costs to the First Circuit.

Dark matter experiments are dipping well into the neutrino fog at this point.

Fired CDC director Susan Monarez is one of Nature's 10 people who shaped science in 2025. “I always challenge the status quo because that’s what you do in science,” Monarez told me. “You challenge it to try to do better, but you don’t compromise your moral and scientific integrity for expediency.”