The short answer to this question headline is "the intelligence community isn't revealing its sources and methods," which, I guess I might've anticipated. But I took a look at the epibatidine's synthesis, research uses, and assays that might have helped find it: cen.acs.org/analytical-c...

My colleagues @rowanwalrath.bsky.social and @sarahbraner.bsky.social dug into what we know about how alum and related adjuvants stimulate immunity and why MAHA regulators are going after them. cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic...

Whiplash from the FDA: www.statnews.com/2026/02/18/f...

Taking advantage of a rare both-kids-napping window to catch up on “read later” tabs. @jtimmer.bsky.social’s analysis of that MAHA/NIH event last month, and what it says about how Bhattacharya’s goals fit into the administration‘s, is worth your time. arstechnica.com/science/2026...

ICYMI yesterday: how this week's news that the FDA won't review Moderna's mRNA vaccine fits into a broader pattern of regulatory restrictions around influenza prevention. cen.acs.org/safety/drug-...

Half my team seem to be on the US vaccine beat at the moment, but they are also working on other stories. Like this from @laureloldach.bsky.social, on new targets for treating Alzheimer's disease #chemsky 🧪 cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic...

FDA's decision not to accept Moderna's flu vaccine filing has sent shock waves through pharma. "When there’s uncertainty about the path to approval & the reliability of the process, that really has pretty serious consequences,” one player told @jasonmast.bsky.social. www.statnews.com/2026/02/12/f...

The FDA’s refusal to review Moderna’s flu vaccine candidate is sending shock waves through biotech- and meanwhile, with new safety warnings of dubious value and no word on strain selection for next season, the agency is destabilizing already approved flu shots too. cen.acs.org/safety/drug-...

This. And also "just start a paid newsletter" requires that you, yourself, are a BRAND that other people want to pay for! It's a possible niche for op-ed writers or culture. Most reporters are not that. Most reporters are names at the top of a news story you skip right past.

Read this article this morning. Chilling.

Definitely not, because every time I interview a basic scientist, they make the same case.

Also, and not for nothing, I dug the Sunday morning paper bringing my family all this journalism out from under 6” of snow in my driveway

Wake up. Make breakfast. Do email. Watch a murder. Go to a party for a 5 year old. Laugh with my daughter. See a different angle of that murder. Hear govt officials slander the victim. Play Barbies with my kid. Feed her dinner. Tear up at that victim reading last honors to a vet. Put kid to bed. USA

🚨🚨🚨 "At least 63 times since 2007, data from some of the 28 human genomic repositories that the N.I.H. controls was improperly released to researchers, used for unapproved purposes or made vulnerable to theft..." (Gift Link) www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

Good morning. Do you want a feel-good story about ingenuity and a determined graduate student cracking a decades-old total synthesis problem? If yes, @bethanyhalford.bsky.social spins a yarn you may enjoy. cen.acs.org/biological-c...

"In my editing room, we have a neon sign that says, “It’s complicated.” Human events are complicated. It’s important to find out new and destabilizing information. Facts outweigh story and artistic considerations. We’ve always rolled that way." depthperceptionbyll.substack.com/p/filmmaker-...

Meanwhile, in the lab: intratumor vaccination (or, if you will, "chemical reprogramming") guided by a PD-L1 degrader, all wrapped into one molecule cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic...

Gentle reminder that you can turn off autoplay on videos so you don’t have to be traumatized by graphic images without your consent: Settings — content and media — autoplay videos and gifs

We are proud to announce the formation of the Chemical & Engineering News Guild. We represent staffers across the editorial and operations teams at C&EN. 1/6

The vaccine news we have been anticipating is now here: www.hhs.gov/press-room/c...

"Biopharma people are shockingly the most reserved - they're a little too deferential to the FDA." - an anonymous peptide supplier quoted in this piece. That's, uh, that's one way of explaining it. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/b...

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Theorists: this shouldn’t happen! Biology: bet.

Fascinating conversation on the lifecycle of fields of inquiry:

This paper had me breaking out my biochemistry textbook to review GPCR signaling. Turns out, from time to time a receptor can release and recapture a GTP-bound G protein (instead of the classic cycle where GPCR binds a GDP-Gprot, swaps in GTP and then frees GTP-Gprot to go conduct signaling).

If you're a first-year biomedical Ph.D. student, I'd like to hear how your first few months of grad school have been going. I'm a science journalist at @statnews.com and got my Ph.D. in immunology before going into journalism. You can reach me at [email protected]. #journorequest

After helping someone near to me field a just-this-side-of-plausible pitch, I'm looking for perspectives on a zero-trust future of digital correspondence. Has anybody read (or written!) something thought-provoking on wrangling your inbox in a post Turing Test world?

You’ve just opened a Chemistry themed pub. What are you calling it? The Flask and Column #ChemSky #ChemChat

It just seems strange to not trust drug companies and actual research and to instead trust "med spas" with iv's, people making peptides in their garages, and formulating pharmacies with the cleanliness standards of Boar's Head plants.

OK, but as a Marylander, it pleases me to see Oakland on the real Bay

The end of the year is a great time to boost your colleagues. If you know an amazing early-career* chemist or biochemist doing creative work on important problems, please consider nominating them to the Chemical & Engineering News Talented 12 class of 2026? cen.acs.org/sections/tal...

Der Spiegel arranges for an academic scholar of media to produce — quarterly — an evaluation and critique of the magazine on any subject the scholar finds important. The latest, "Knowing Ignorance," is on Der Spiegel's climate coverage. Bernhard Poerksen is the author. www.spiegel.de/internationa...

Biochemistry fam, help a sleep-deprived reporter out. Let's say you wanted to explain the GPCR/G protein cycle to someone who hadn't heard of it. Would you call GTP and GDP ligands? Cofactors? Small-molecule buddies?

This filing is worth your time if you care about what’s happening to NIH. Also: I follow this stuff for a living, and I had forgotten all about the $500 million, not peer reviewed Taubenberger/Memoli vaccine development grant

For @cenmag.bsky.social, I tried to summarize what happened in science policy in 2025. Spoiler: A lot! Thanks to Ian Banks, @jeremymberg.bsky.social, Arthur Daemmrich, @cdelawalla.bsky.social and @ucs.org Jen Jones for their insights. Out soon: what to expect in 2026 cen.acs.org/policy/nih-n...

"It’s also, @georgwinter.bsky.social says, grounds for looking very closely at the proteome-wide effects of any compound in development, no matter its putative mechanism." PREACH #biotech #chemsky

Biology strikes again: a whole lot of kinase active site inhibitors are also targeted kinase degraders. (Sometimes not even the same kinase!) cen.acs.org/biological-c...

Why do babies need the hepatitis B vaccine if they aren’t high-risk? Short answer: Because hepatitis B is a tricky virus. Longer answer: Continue reading ⬇️ 🧵1/9 @kkjetelina.bsky.social @meganranney.bsky.social @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social @enirenberg.bsky.social

It just keeps going:

Friends, please do not buy Botox via WhatsApp to DIY wrinkle treatment at home. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...

A research team has found multiple lineages of archaea that have fully repurposed the TAG stop codon to encode the noncanonical amino acid pyrrolysine. cen.acs.org/biological-c... #chemsky 🧪

So, remember that MAHA summit 2 weeks ago that @statnews.com broke the news of and @maxkozlov.bsky.social somehow got into for Nature, even though it was closed to the press? The organizers posted the entire 6.5-hour conference proceedings to YouTube last week. cen.acs.org/policy/MAHA-...

To me, the issue is the internal editorial structure that keeps the political reporter from walking over to the science desk/slack channel and saying "hey, could you look over my coverage quickly and identify potential problems". So, I'd place this at the feet of the most senior editors.

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I am completely mystified by journalists' uncritical acceptance of the MAHA talking point (reiterated here) that American life expectancy is a KPI for the American research enterprise. For health systems, I can see it. But for NIH? www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Just this week alone.

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What if, instead of editing every premature stop codon that causes disease, researchers edited the translation machinery to skip those codons? cen.acs.org/biological-c...

Personal opinion that I am proud to have managed to get through as the lede of this story: differentiating between diastereomers is better left to chemists than Congress. cen.acs.org/biological-c...