Thread about Frontiers journals worth reading... 😱

1/ How did the human skeleton evolve to support bipedalism and tool use? 🦴 A new study from my lab in Genome Biology and Evolution dives into the genomic changes that separate us from chimpanzees during skeletal development. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/.... Here's a quick overview of what we found:

🧵 Public science in the US has taken some heavy hits over the last year, but the White House OMB is proposing a series of changes that will result in a TKO for science as we know it unless we fight back. Here's what's happening, and why it matters. 1/n

Cameron Hill and co-authors from @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social identified distinct distributions of #myosin motor conformations during contraction of slow and fast skeletal #muscle ⚙️ 🔬 📜 Read the study: 🔗 physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/...

This sounds like an important job: "STAT is seeking an ambitious and intellectually curious reporter to cover one of the defining issues in medicine, science, and public health today: declining trust in science… This is a new role at STAT.”

Scoop: NSF has been quietly blocking new funds and grants to four top universities: Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Dozens of proposals from PIs at these universities—and their collaborators—have been stuck at the Office of Award Management awaiting finalization for months.

The National Science Foundation is terminating and suspending grants again, and at Grant Witness we need you to help to track them! 🧪 We can only identify research being suppressed by under-the-radar suspensions directly from researchers. Please report! grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF

Tech CEO says he had no idea what he was talking about (In Time Magazine... not The Onion)

Come work with us!

Or in more detail: Robert Merton's (1942) famous norms describe the ethos of modern science. The second of these, universalism, precludes the consideration of national borders, race, or other personal characteristics in determining who may contribute to, and what constitutes, valid science.

"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Interesting job - Director Of Orthotics & Prosthetics Research at UCSF aprecruit.ucsf.edu/JPF06089

Cleve Moler has passed away #neuroskyence #academicsky #sensorimotor www.mathworks.com/company/abou...

Some extinct human ancestors and modern-day apes appear to share wrist traits that raise the question of whether our last common ancestor walked on its knuckles

Come join us! I'm recruiting postdocs and lab techs to study the functional morphology and biomechanics of walking in fishes and salamanders at the University of Virginia, with option to work at Mountain Lake Biological Station. 2 of 4 job ads are posted on my website: sandykawano.weebly.com 🧪🐟🦎

Supported by fantastic collaborators, we have developed computer simulations of cardiac growth that reproduce eccentric and concentric growth associated with sarcomeric protein variants, mitochondrial dysfunction, hypertension, and valve insufficiency. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Updated my textbook with a cleaner lay-out, better accessibility, and eight new interactive visualizations made completely in html (such as this illustration of the positive predictive value). lakens.github.io/statistical_...

Still one of the best parts of the job. Congrats, Dr. Daphna Raz! Now a presidential postdoctoral fellow at CU Boulder.

"If you ask researchers, 'Why don't you do high-risk research?' they say, 'Well, the funding agencies won't fund it.' If you ask the agencies, they say, 'Well, the researchers won't propose it.'" #MetaSci

In 1970, Regan’s education advisor famously said “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go through higher education].” They said the quiet part out loud over fifty years ago. An educated public is a threat to fascism.

📣 Postdoc in Human Neurophysiology & Neurorehab 📣 The Real-Time NeuroRehabilitation Lab at the U of Iowa is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Scholar! Motor control, EEG/TMS, neurorehabilitation, and real-time multimodal methods. 📅 Summer/Fall 2026 📧 [email protected] Please share!

“The State Department is negotiating new health assistance funding agreements w/countries that used to have U.S.A.I.D. support. These come w/conditions, &Zambia’s has proved particularly thorny, because the State Department has tied support for the H.I.V. program to access to the country’s minerals”

Trump removes a thorn in his side by firing all 24 members of the National Science Board, NSF's oversight body. www.science.org/content/arti...

Nice coverage of what’s happening at NSF from @thehill.com! Two points from me: 1. NSF staff are hanging in like a hair in a biscuit and the admin isn’t making it easy. It’s a psyop every day. 2. Jim O’Neill is not the one to run NSF. Full stop. thehill.com/homenews/adm...

Preprint: What good is modeling? Introducing biology students to theory - arxiv.org/abs/2604.13344 - how to teach and think about what modeling contributes to science. How does it fit into the scientific method? This is often misunderstood.

"The spread of colleges into towns and cities across the country, which put a degree within reach of a growing share of the public, is one of the triumphs of postwar America," Jeffrey Selingo writes. "We’re now at risk of the process playing out in reverse."

Abstract Mad Libs

A new paper on guinea fowl gait biomechanics for National Biomechanics Day! 
 How do bipedal animals adjust movement to avoid falls in slippery terrain? We found that guinea fowl slow down, take shorter steps and adjust posture to reduce fall risk in slippery terrain, just like humans. 
 1/3

I was expecting more The Far Side content today 🌖

“The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist.”

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

I am currently recruiting a PhD student to work on our "Motor complexity and aging" project funded by the @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

"We are watching two disciplines trade their worst habits. Neuroscience is mistaking benchmarked prediction for understanding, and machine learning is mistaking mechanistic language for mechanism. ..."

State election officials testifying under oath say that voting by mail is secure. But an AI video in the MAGA2028 Facebook group says it’s rife with fraud. For busy Supreme Court justices, it can be hard to know who to trust.

During the second session of IMSI's Prepare to Play Workshop, students used their own data to build Python simulations and explore the physics of basketball shots—bringing biomechanics, computation, and hands-on STEM to life. Led by Dr. Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social. #MovementScience

Private money cannot replace public funding of science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I keep having to tell students that the true "product" on a homework, essay, or test is not the completed assignment, it's the brain that has gone through the thinking required to complete the assignment.

⏰ Reminder: Applications for the IMSI Summer Institute 2026 close March 21. If you’re interested in immersive, research-driven training in movement science this summer, we encourage you to apply. Learn more and apply: lnkd.in/gRPtTaS7

Come work with me! 🙌🏼 My lab is hiring a full-time research associate to support projects related to neurodivergent motor & visual development. (Makes a great gap year job! 😉) #psychology #autism #biomechanics #umich #disability (Postdoc ad coming soon! 👀) careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Excellent article about Douglas R. Wilkie, FRS., trainee of AV Hill, and muscle/mechanics connoisseur par excellence. royalsociety.org/blog/2026/02...

This is a cool study. The idea is that perceptual understanding and prediction of gravitational effects implies the existence of an innate(?) internal simulation world model, with some representation of gravity (the study probes the nature of this representation). But... 1/2 doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Call for applications to the 2026 Integrative Movement Sciences Summer Institute!

 This is a funded research internship, open to all career stages. We especially encourage undergraduates to apply. 
 Application deadline is March 21.
 More details here: cims.uci.edu/imsi-si-2026/ Please share!

This sound is why I’m required to keep the volume low while watching basketball 🏀 if my spouse is in the room 😂

As a US senator, I'd find it tragic if Americans replaced vaccines with psychedelics and scammy supplements. But it would be even more tragic if I lost in a Republican primary. Therefore, I will be voting to confirm the kooky wellness influencer that Trump nominated for surgeon general.

There's no better feeling that having some major thing I know that I need to fix or update in my upcoming lecture, and then discovering that past me already did it the last time I taught the course! #AcademicSky

Meet Autumn Routt, a PhD student at Georgia Tech studying how pregnancy impacts balance. She uses computational modeling and human-subject research to examine fall risk and prevention during pregnancy. Part of our Women at IMSI spotlight series. Follow along for more. #WomenAtIMSI #WomenInScience

This #PictureOfTheWeek emphasizes just how high figure skaters jump. Discover the physics behind the sport’s hardest skills with researcher Deborah King, from reducing the moment of inertia midair to the g-forces endured when landing a quadruple axel. Learn more with our podcast: buff.ly/EthY5Zl

Are you interested in the role of visual information in controlling gait stability? In this new paper from our group we exploited optic flow perturbations to study the relationship between gait stability and gait speed. First-authored by Chunchun Wu, read it open access here: doi.org/10.1016/j.hu...