Megathread about responding to new OMB grant funding rules (feel free to add/link more!) I was collecting these for me, but figured I'd round 'em up for everyone 🧪 What's the problem? arstechnica.com/science/2026... elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

What does the new OMB proposal mean for science? How can we STOP VOUGHT and SAVE SCIENCE together? All of these questions and more to be discussed at the Emergency Science Meeting on June 2nd, 4PM ET, hosted by Stand Up for Science! Register at the link in our bio, or go here: zurl.co/g3vTZ

All these things are terrible, but in all the discussion I've seen on Bluesky it seems like this one has gone under the radar. This would allow them to give grants to their hack cronies, like RFK's antivax friends, without even any public notice that it was happening.

Calling all Scientists! Research Administrators! Deans! Fans of Science! No one is coming to save us. Here is your assignment. I have written a step by step, easy to understand "how-to" document to help you comment on the proposed OMB rule. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-ne...

So no publication fees, no conferences, no international collab, and we can terminate or reject your grant anytime for any reason. This might have some impact on how science works, folks. And maybe just maybe not a positive one.

This is so bad. If the proposed changes go into effect, this will kill science in the US (which is their goal anyway). Now is a good time to comment, call your reps and be loud.

🚨UPDATE: We will launch our action center on this issue tomorrow. 📣JOIN US: Emergency Science Meeting (Virtual) June 2nd at 4pm et. Details to come. Our Policy Team has read through the entire 400 page hot mess express from Russ Vought...here are the high level details. A Thread🧵 1/x

An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:

Once again, @dereklowe.bsky.social is not holding back and I am here for it. www.science.org/content/blog... 1/2

Probably shouldn't have let a handful of weird business perverts unwind the cultural miracle of American research universities

Spoke to a reporter today about being a young scientist in this environment. What I keep trying to communicate is there’s clearly a lot of new effective disincentives for partnering with the federal government. The issue is that they are making the risks so big y even bother for the reward?

Doesn't speak for me, either. I don't touch the stuff. Storytelling is a human endeavor. Publishing is a human endeavor. Writing and reading and being-read is all about humans reaching out to humans. No AI. Fuck AI.

What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/o... 👉 "For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent" ⚡That's a good summary of the problem!⚡

Campos: While I want to thank CBS news for funding this generous gift towards my education, I want to acknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.

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

Serious question. Has the Democratic Party pledged to rebuild NPR? And PBS? And the NEH? And the NEA? And the NSF? And the CDC? And the NIH? And USAID? And, and, and... Is there an office within the party that's tracking the destruction & coming up with ways to undo the damage? If not, why not?

President of MIT not mincing words today in @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...

🌾 Doubled haploid technology now works in sorghum! 🌱 Genome editing applied to MATL/PLA1/NLD, and DMP genes (but PLD3 didn’t induce haploid) 📖 doi.org/10.1126/scia... out @ ScienceAdvanes

Great first day of our NSF PGRP sponsored maize transformation workshop at Rutgers with Andrea Gallavotti, Margaret Young @revealplant.bsky.social, Dave Jackson, and special guest Kan Wang! Wonderful group of participants getting their hands dirty in the lab 🤓

Cultivating “scientific identity”: insights from plant cell and developmental biology (Drew and Nagel, 2026 @theplantcell.bsky.social) Very nice comparison of how intrinsic and extrinsic factors help shape identity, in people and guard cells 💚 doi.org/10.1093/plce...

New research! Danforth Center PI Erin Sparks & Bayer used the SMURF device to show that shorter corn plants have more flexible roots — helping them take wind damage at less than half the rate of conventional corn. Watch the SMURF in action 👇

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

“I’m not a scientist or a policy expert. But I understand this: The drug that kept me alive for my children was built on a foundation of public investment.” Science saves lives.

Autopsies show how hard doctors tried to save babies who died after not getting a vitamin K shot: tubes inserted in their airways, blood transfusions. They’re excruciating to read because they underscore how preventable these deaths could have been. By @deldeib.bsky.social

Welcome Patrick! Looking forward to you joining us in Corvallis!

I’m starting at Oregon State University this September as Herbarium Director and Assistant Professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology. An absolute dream job and I am so grateful! Looking to grow the lab soon and will update here. In the meantime please don’t hesitate to reach out!

You can find the full story of what happened on my Instagram (video too long for bsky) I would appreciate any signal boosting www.instagram.com/jeymccreight...

Here it finally is: our protocol for boosting maize transformation. We’ve already shared it at several conferences, and it was overdue to give it its final shape and submit it. We hope it will be useful for the community! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📣 We are now accepting applications for the second Plant Synthetic Biology Hackathon! 📣 Check out this unique opportunity to learn the newest tools and approaches in plant engineering! Hosted by Nicola Patron and myself as part of the Plant Cell Atlas RCN, July 12-13, 2026 at MIT.

Don’t miss the opportunity! This is a wonderful course. Being a good mentor should really be the top priority for every scientist. That’s the most important impact you can have as a scientist.

Social Identity Matters in Mentoring: Applications are NOW OPEN for the Fall SI-MI Mentoring Course. This is a free, online training aimed to help plant scientists be more effective mentors, emphasizing how social identity impacts the mentoring relationship. rootandshoot.org/simi2026/

The NIH has been holding back grants from funds Congress has already approved. www.wsj.com/opinion/get-...

Good reporting from @weiss-a-woni.bsky.social on the reopening on the Indiana University labs.

Turns out that symmetric and asymmetric divisions are broken in different ways in maize katanin mutants: symmetric divisions are misoriented because the PPB is in the wrong place while in asym divs, the PPB is poorly formed. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... with Steph Martinez 🧪🔬🌽

Big congrats to Dr. Callwood and Mr. Faith Olusegun who just earned their graduate degrees in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from ISU! So proud of you.

Tired of translating everything to B73 IDs just to run GO enrichment? Introducing FETA: a one-stop functional enrichment tool for all 26 maize NAM genomes. Includes multiple ontology types, RNA-seq integration, and paper-ready figures. Led by Olivia Haley. feta.maizegdb.org

The stories & photos from today’s voting rights marches in Alabama deserve to be seen by people who weren’t able to stand there in person. If this piece moves you, please share it widely & help make sure these voices aren’t lost in the noise of a crowded news cycle. open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

American science is under siege & the firing of the NSB is the latest iteration of a continuous line of attacks under Trump. Visit the link in our bio to sign your support for the restoration of the NSB, and to email your Members of Congress Sign: zurl.co/7c7kc Email: zurl.co/6bPfX

The funniest thing about the “fertility debate” is that it has an easy answer as far as America is concerned (let in more immigrants) but people are like that is neither racist nor misogynist enough

A colleague received bad news from her NIH program officer today: my colleague’s grant got a great score, but NIH still can’t pay it, and my colleague will have to closer her lab. The call ended with the program officer (not my colleague) crying. Awful on so many levels.

Absolutely devastating read. www.them.us/story/slain-...

📢Out now on bioRxiv: We used Plant STARR-seq to characterize the species- and condition-specific enhancer activity of over 350,000 sequences derived from four plant species. For more, see below and read the paper at: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is the money paragraph for me.

RFK Jr. did HWAT kffhealthnews.org/public-healt...

interesting rationale from a prospective juror in the Elon Musk Twitter stock manipulation case

Watching a series of former Confederate states rush to eliminate any vestige of black representation in the House pretty much answers the question whether the Voting Rights Act was still necessary.

Cell fate acquisition at a de novo developmental boundary in the maize leaf | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

While BioNtech & Moderna become household names because of their Covid vaccines, those emerged from different projects: finding ways to treat the most challenging cancers. They hypothesized that we could vaccinate patients against their own tumors, & evidence is mounting that they were right! 1/n 🧪