Today was a hard day for Ph.D. students who found out that they can no longer apply for NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. "Devastating“ was how one student described it to me. #GradSchool #NSFGRFP www.science.org/content/arti...

Happy to share the Biodiversity Cell Atlas white paper, out today in @nature.com. We look at the possibilities, challenges, and potential impacts of molecularly mapping cells across the tree of life. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For the past five years, Kyle K. Courtney, who directs copyright and information policy for Harvard’s libraries, has fought to make e-books more accessible to public libraries across the United States. Sophie Gao and Alexandra M. Kluzak report. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

I am QT dunking but I think this is a case where it is warranted: Science is political and "not wanting to see politics" as a scientist is a political choice. You may decide it's what works for you, but you need to decide how that fits with the fact your (diverse) colleagues still exist 🧪

Happy to share that ShapeEmbed has been accepted at @neuripsconf.bsky.social 🎉 SE is self-supervised framework to encode 2D contours from microscopy & natural images into a latent representation invariant to translation, scaling, rotation, reflection & point indexing 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01009 (1/N)

Immigrants, particularly on H1Bs, are the lifeblood of American innovation. If you wanted to hurt US competitiveness in the next century, I can think of few more effective ways than a move like this Even when found illegal, the mere intent will have irreparably harmed our future

If only we’d elected Kamala.

The H1-B visa thing is, like everything else in the Trump administration, set up to carve up exceptions for friends and punish enemies. It’s the authoritarian thru-line that stitches everything together.

alert to all H1B holders, please share: Trump just banned H-1B employees from reentering US unless employer pays $100,000 "fee". Proclamation applies to both new H-1B entrants and current H-1B employees who are abroad. set to take effect tmrw sun sept 21. please return if you can. i am so sorry. 😢

ADD YOUR THOUGHTS ON LIMITING STUDENT VISA TO FOUR YEARS Comment period ends September 29th www.federalregister.gov/documents/20... 1/2

In June, an ACIP member said that 250 pediatric flu deaths were no big deal. Maybe today we will find out that a handful of hepatitis B related cancers, transplants, and deaths are also not a big deal to them either. Welcome to the new public health. We are aligned to a manifesto, not science.

Measles cases hit record highs with RFK Jr. in charge. Now, his hand-picked vaccine panel just voted to make it harder for little babies to get vaccinated for measles and other diseases. How does that keep our kids safe?

wish everyone could agree not to bump requires-python if not actually using the new language features

Really insightful post from Julie Tibshirani (spotted in LinkedIn, can't find on Bsky) reflecting on #rstats 's unique governance structure and what can be learned for other languages jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the...

I stand by my claim that peak iPhone was the 2016 og iPhone SE. <4oz. Fits in the palm of my hand. I can reach all four corners with my thumb. With Touch ID I can have it already unlocked before it comes out of my pocket. At $399 I could buy several for the price of one iPhone 17.

The new ggplot2 4.0.0 now supports absolute plot dimensions 🤩 #rstats #dataviz #phd

Senate hearing today, Dr. Monarez testified: Kennedy directed her to commit to approving every recommendation "regardless of the scientific evidence" and also directed her to "dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy, w/o cause" "He said if I was unwilling to do both, I should resign"

This is the official spokesperson for the White House, stating that the President hopes to deploy the United States military to occupy every city controlled by the political party that opposes him. Explicitly.

Justice Sotomayor, not mincing words, also says that today's decision will lead to the "creation of [] a second-class citizenship status" for Latinos, who now will have the burden to "carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely."

Clear-eyed @ezraklein.bsky.social on the stakes: "We are in the authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency... This is not just how authoritarianism happens. This is authoritarianism happening." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/o...

“It's not clear whether Trump can officially change the name without congressional action, but he told reporters, "We're just gonna do it." We’re not gonna media our way out of this thing until journalists start leading off with this stuff in the headline instead of the 7th paragraph.

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

Amazing, unusually direct rebuke to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh from Judge Burroughs. She is, of course, entirely correct.

Update on this from the Boston Globe. This is great news!

“A [Marsha] Blackburn spokesperson said she is against the public’s use of computer-assisted facial recognition to identify ICE officials but supports police use of the technology.” www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

"He noted that snippets of Prasad’s comments still appeared on anti-vaccine social media accounts, suggesting Prasad was directing his removal demand only at a critic and not anti-vaccine influencers. In the past, Prasad has complained about censorship by social media companies."

In a functional government, this would be a five alarm fire where Congress calls in Kennedy and asks him what the fuck is going on

We're excited to share that our preprint on anndataR, a new package bringing Python's AnnData to R, is now available on bioRxiv 🎉 🔗 Read the paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 Check the package in action: anndatar.data-intuitive.com

Breaking News: The Trump administration ordered construction to stop on a $4 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that has already mostly been built.

A simple design framework that will massively improve your slides and your public speaking clauswilke.substack.com/p/slides-tha...

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers. My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers. We found 437 of them. Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

Has the NY Times ever asked Trump or the many other far-right figures in his circle and in the Republican Party whether they would classify themselves as fascist?

The future of cancer treatment is ‘personalized’ mRNA vaccines

Some wisdom on AI from Cal Newport: www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

We're excited to share our new preprint, "Joint decomposition of Hi-C maps reveals salient features of genome architecture across tissues and development", led by Thomas Reimonn. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"To do it, utilities...can offer “special deals to favored customers” like a data center and effectively shift the costs of those discounts to regular ratepayers. Many state laws can shield disclosure of those rates" 😠 They should be paying higher rates, not lower

We've become so accustomed to lawbreaking that this probably won't ripple much, but it is important not to forget that firing the IRS Commissioner for refusing to break the law--if that's in fact what happened here--would and should prompt immediate articles of impeachment in any other presidency.

🎁Gift Opinion Trump actually is ‘canceling’ the 2026 midterms, starting in Texas Trump's outrageous push to kill 5 Dem House seats in Texas triggers a nuclear war that will end representative democracy. share.inquirer.com/JviiR3

Well, this is a huge Executive Order power grab... www.whitehouse.gov/presidential... 1/3

“GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic — a Ph.D.-level expert,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.

Funding for this groundbreaking research on Alzheimer's was terminated by the Trump Administration www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/06/m...

To say that "the data show these vaccines fail" in regards to the mRNA plaform is unforgivable. For those of you that don't remember - this is the data from a SINGLE dose. In December 2020. So good I cried in grateful tears.

It goes without saying that it is complete and utter bullshit to imply that funding is controlled by a small group of highly paid, unaccountable insiders. Every grant is reviewed by a panel of other researchers and ranked for scientific merit. And it’s not just one panel. There are more than 175.

Harvard has just informed all employees that DHS has sent a subpoena requesting access to all i-9 records for Harvard employees and that they turned them over to the Trump admin with some exceptions

This is unfortunate: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u... I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

going to keep saying: important for a society that would like to keep functioning to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

among many other major issues with this statement, the government is not a business and should not be run like a business no on expects the US Army to turn a profit we don't spin of Texas when they have a bad quarter anyway the ROI on NIH funding is positive: each $1 of NIH spending yields $2.46

Everybody should read David Pozen on the Columbia "deal": balkin.blogspot.com/2025/07/regu...

Bracing analysis from Columbia Law School’s David Pozen about the significance and implications of Columbia’s settlement with Trump. balkin.blogspot.com/2025/07/regu...

The current administration's systematic dismantling of our research infrastructure—402 documented attacks in just 6 months—represents more than policy disagreement. It's an abandonment of the principle that knowledge should serve the common good and expand opportunity for all communities.