Each Friday night, I write a briefing on what happened in US science & higher ed. 🧪  July 10 (Year 2, Week 28) ❗️Reminder: OMB comment deadline is Monday 👍 Some good news in higher ed litigation for once (in Florida!) 👎 New Ed Dept regulatory agenda & so much more buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

Of the many acts of destruction that RFK Jr unleashed upon US & global health, IMHO freezing US funding to Gavi (which will cause an estimated 600,000 child deaths), the dismantling of CDC & of the federal vaccine apparatus, & ending federal funding for mRNA vaccine R&D will end up as the deadliest

It's conference season, so I wanted to share the AI refusal statement I put at the end of my presentations and book talks. Feel free to use it!

related, I have sent this @drewmagary.bsky.social column to so many people lately. it really speaks to the moment of what ALL publishers — of any size, content type, funding model — are up against right now

Randomly feeling super proud of my kid for graduating w a biochem major, sense of humor and curiosity about the world intact! He loves bench research & is headed to Colorado State for PhD in Micro Immuno! 🥹 🧫

"Efficiency has been privileged over everything else, but efficiency alone is not a measurement of quality, certainly not in education, nor in health care." Here's the other thing: when we prioritize efficiency for teachers/educators, we are signaling that's okay for students, too.

Only one student enrolled in West Virginia University’s new Washington Center after GOP lawmakers mandated the creation of the program Lawmakers allocated around $3 million to the program in the last two years

The complete elimination of Meta would yield unambiguous, far reaching benefits for global society.

Me Too did not go far enough.

Keep those comments on the OMB proposed rule coming! www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

ICE is surging in the Seattle area. (Map shows activity in the last week) Do you have your whistle with you?

ICE is engaged in a very large escalation nationwide, with the agency claiming to be hitting record arrest numbers amid the return of quotas. This has gotten very little attention from the media because ICE learned lessons from the chaotic disasters of Kristi Noem’s tenure. Keep a watch.

Bare minimum The Trump administration is kidnapping adults & children, zip tying & tear gassing kids & locking kidnapped people up in inhumane detention centers that meet the definition of concentration camps—these are places of torture, disease, suffering, & death Yes to tribunals & prison time

These white men aren't defending another white man. They are defending themselves.

everyone should comment on these awful new regulations that would put politicians in charge of health research decisions & allow them to randomly stop trials midstream www.regulations.gov/document/OMB...

I’m so outrageously mad having realized a bunch of inane reviewer comments are probably AI. I’m also too busy and would rather be compen$ated for my reviews, but 1) who are we as academics if we don’t value reading and thinking about the literature and 2) dont waste my/student’s time with slop!!

Most unis, including mine, have left it up to the professors to deal with this stuff on their own, including us having to reinvent the way we teach and measure learning wholesale.

👇🎯 My frustration at the near-total lack of loud, public collective action by university presidents is precisely because of this. The idea that we can just ride out a year or two & it will all be fine & back to business as usual is head-in-the-sand denial. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

The most reliable thing in the world is that if you hear two stories about a guy behaving physically abusively toward women, there are five more you haven’t heard yet. People have patterns.

www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u... an ominous trend: graduate admissions are down 15 percent from last year, on top of an 11 percent decrease from the previous year we are destroying our seed corn

Astrophysicist Dr. Lydie Koch-Miramond helped lay the foundational groundwork for the study of cosmic rays. Her research advanced the scientific understanding of galactic radiation & hot cosmic plasmas. 1 of 72 women proposed to be added to the Eiffel Tower. Died #OTD 2023. #WomenInSTEM #astrosky

It's tragically appropriate that we spent a whole generation telling students that the humanities were moribund, and they should all study STEM, only for the greatest innovations in STEM to prove why the humanities were so essential all along.

45 years ago.

“Responsible use” of LLMs isn’t a thing! On the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, @savasavasava.myatproto.social joins @alexhanna.bsky.social and me to discuss the problems with AI “harm reduction” frameworks in edtech. Monday, July 6, noon Pacific twitch.tv/dair_institute

This framing is endemic in unis. For some reason, all academics have to be "responsible users" of this tech/teach responsible uses of this tech to students even if we personally don't want to use it or intend to use it in the classroom/our research. But thats not what my history classrooms are for.

@kateclancy.bsky.social is the person I go to for advice and insight on academic labor. Her thread will give you a little taste of why I trust her so much. Here’s the link to save & share. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

What a great article not only on faculty workloads, but how little our salaries actually factor in to most university budgets. A few highlights. First, our salaries are falling:

Been trying for years now to highlight that part of data centers' water footprint comes from producing the electricity they use, so it's good to see more mainstream coverage of it. (Again, yes we should reform agriculture, golf corses Should also be destroyed, & more than one thing can be bad)

It’s astounding how much the functioning of universities depends on a significant fraction of faculty being workaholic people pleasers with poor boundaries and ADHD

📢 A reminder: As of 1.1.2026, California became the first U.S. state to produce and sell its own insulin. Through CalRx and nonprofit manufacturer Civica Rx, long-acting insulin glargine pens are available for just $11 each. Progressive policies deliver ✅ Cut out the middlemen 🚫 #InsulinForAll 💉

"If scientists align with campaigns that pitch their opponents as anti-science, they should not be surprised if greater polarization is the result." I have some real strong thoughts on this piece. Let's talk about it... 1/? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NEW BLOG FOR YOU Google's energy consumption numbers in their new climate report are mind-blowing. 2 years ago they flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI: ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/g...

Reposting an old thread of mine to say as a former college athlete, I want trans girls and trans women to be able to participate in sports. Let them run, let them swim, let them play.

Authors' Own Words: Naloxone Distribution Models in the United States: A Scoping Review. "This review outlines the many ways in which naloxone is distributed in the US & emphasizes a need for improved outcomes data...." journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

The nuclear physicist Harriet Brooks, who was probably the first person to notice the recoil of an atomic nucleus due to emissions during nuclear decay, was born #OTD in 1876. 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬 Credit: Notman Archives/Musée McCord

The collective journalistic freakout over someone disliking a cafeteria sandwich at Oberlin or some Yale students asking their peers to be less racist at Halloween has generated far more copy and uproar than multiple universities illegally firing faculty for nonconservative speech they disliked.

🚨 HUGE ongoing surge of ICE arrests, with ICE directing 80% of all officers to go out into the field and round people up, aiming to hit 2,000 arrests a day; which would be more than during the Minneapolis surge. This may be why the nun in Texas got briefly picked up. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/u...

I know there's a lot going on today, but it has been confirmed that one airman was killed in the Lackland Air Force Base influenza outbreak. Vaccines matter. www.expressnews.com/news/article...

Fuck every single Democrat that has ever been willing to compromise on trans dignity, rights and humanity. I hope you assholes are pleased with yourselves. I don’t know if you could’ve prevented this moment, but you should’ve been fighting every step of the way.

Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or condemnation: us.macmillan.com/books/978037... 1/

𝐈'𝐦 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐩-𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐧𝐞𝐫 𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠. 𝐈𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟: 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡? 𝐈 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐟/𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧/𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐏𝐕.

Ford has rehired hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI backfired and has cost the company billions of dollars. AI adoption is blamed for Ford being the most recalled automaker in the U.S. with 51 recalls covering over 11 million vehicles in the first half of 2026 alone.

Shout out to THE @hcrichardson.bsky.social for covering the OMB rule. If you read this and want to take action, @standupforscience.net has you covered. Learn about the rule, leave public comment, and contact Congress at fight2win.standupforscience.net

Immunological mechanisms of mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases A flurry of recent studies has shed light on aspects of this vaccine modality’s modus operandi. Great overview. www.nature.com/artic... 1/3

NEW: A spokesperson for U.S. Health and Human Services confirmed to Stateline on Friday that the agency is canceling 53 out of 67 grants, worth about $68 million, under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, affecting grantees in more than two dozen states.

This is deeply unethical NIH grantees are being told to leave out published papers with foreign coauthors in their progress reports—they’re being ordered to be dishonest & to suppress their own work! And pre-emptively removing foreign authors from papers that they coauthored is SO unethical!

He's right. "Nothing short of devastating" By @holdenthorp.bsky.social @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"The Extreme Sentences Handed to Anti-ICE Protesters Should Terrify Us All" 30-100 years! Perhaps the most important and scary story you'll read all week:

‼️ Following @kkjetelina.bsky.social’s article, here is a hugely important one by @celinegounder.com “Flu ads pulled mid-season, a vaccine panel marked for replacement, a database the Secretary wanted to buy, & career staff documenting all of it on the record” www.celinegounder.com/p/cdc-emails...

Just think of the stories like this we're going to miss out on because Trump has devastated biomedical research.