The cuts amounted to $500 million in funds. Thousands of planned deliveries were canceled without warning in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. The #USDA did not respond to questions or requests for comment. Read the story by Ruth Talbot and @nicolesantacruz.bsky.social.

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

Judge will hand down new TRO that "prohibits the relocation, federalization, or deployment of any National Guard under federal command" "within the state of Oregon"

IMO this hasn't gotten enough attention: a recent memo at NIH announces that peer review will be devalued in determining which grants get funded, granting more power to political appointees to make decisions based on the admin's whims over scientific merit kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

NEW: In an unprecedented move, the NIH will soon disinvite dozens of scientists about to take positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant funding. NIH staff were told to select others aligned with the Trump administration and told to expect placements by political appointees.

New week, new tool: Find our Protein Domain Designer tool to generate publication-ready protein domain diagrams here: domaindesigner.farnunglab.com

NEW WIRED led the way in reporting on Elon Musk's efforts to dismantle the US government. My colleagues and I spoke to 100s of employees at dozens of agencies to understand what happened. This is the definitive story of DOGE as told by those who experienced it www.wired.com/story/oral-h...

korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in

JUST IN: Bureau of Labor Statistics postpones key inflation data report

President of Texas A&M resigns. This is the second Texas A&M President chased out of College Station in two years as a result of right wing politicians and activists attacks on academic freedom. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...

Regardless of the disgraceful nonsense we will likely hear from this administration in the coming days on vaccine “recommendations,” Americas healthcare insurers issued a joint statement tonight saying coverage for Covid and flu shots will remain unchanged from prior years. Speaks for itself.

The union representing the musicians from Jimmy Kimmel’s band releases a statement calling the FCC’s pressure on Disney “state censorship.”

"I urge every government, every leader and every citizen to ask: What will we say when our children and grandchildren ask what we did while Gaza was burned to the ground? Every act of genocide is a test of the humanity that binds us." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/o...

Its H.R. 5300, "To guide the foreign policy of the United States, and for other purposes." This is a five-alarm fire.

The reality is that universities, faculty and students are living through an unprecedented assault on speech rights. If you care about protecting speech on campus, that is the battle. Weiss mostly doesn't care abt Trump clamping down on campus speech, because she is largely aligned with his goals.

Well, well, well, how about that: “Exclusive: Fed Governor Cook declared her Atlanta property as ‘vacation home,’ documents show” www.reuters.com/world/us/fed...

no, really: nazi shit (richard evans' Third Reich in Power)

Unbelievable levels of Texas A&M Mindset here. We've never seen numbers like this.

Meet the new vaccine panel advisors RFK Jr. is considering Two urged removal of mRNA coronavirus vaccines. One said physicians “blindly believed” in them. Another said covid isn’t “scary” noting Jesus touched lepers W @lenasun.bsky.social @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

New paper for anyone working with data: Better data viz - for free, in few clicks. Below, all N = 111, M = 0.04, SD = 0.27. One-sided t-tests vs. 0 yield: t(110) = 1.67, p = .049. Use raincloud plots. Or risk wrong conclusions! Plot w/ @jaspstats.bsky.social today! 🧪 📊 #PsychSciSky #StatsSky 🧵👇

Excited to share our new preprint in @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social "Cyclin-dependent kinase-like 5 (CDKL5) binds to talin and is anchored at the postsynaptic density via direct interaction with PDZ domains" Instead of a 🧵 the paper is summarised in this video. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It's also key to note that NIH thinks it'll have more power to terminate grants for policy reasons starting Oct 1. See earlier reporting from @aniloza.bsky.social. It's possible OGC / NIH is simply waiting to re-terminate until after Oct 1 so they can rely on this (still legally dubious) power. 8/

BREAKING: per email sent to agency staff NIH will _NOT_ reterminate the ~900 grants which were reinstated. "[W]e would strongly recommend against re-terminating such grants, because it will likely be viewed as a reapplication of the now-vacated Challenged Directives."

"Tao is one of the most prominent mathematicians and academics to publicly oppose the administration’s actions, calling them an “existential threat” to his field, and academic science, more broadly. He said public advocacy is a priority over his research, for now." www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...

Wow. On NPR, @gbrumfiel.bsky.social reports a Social Security official “copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.” The source is a whistleblower, who is named: Charles Borges, SSN chief data officer.

EXCLUSIVE: The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.

There is no solace for NIH funded researchers in this Supreme Court decision. Grants that were ripped away on dubious grounds, restored by a reasonable judge are now again terminated by an out-of-control Supreme Court. Labs will shutter, people will lose jobs. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

Nice containerization of AlphaFold, Boltz, and Chai, and calculation of metrics (including our ipSAE score for protein-protein interactions). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧪 BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding. Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24. See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it. 🧵 1/3

🚨🚨New paper out in @natcomms.nature.com!! Come for the first large-scale analysis of plasmid copy number across species, stay for one of the most intriguing results of my lab: universal scaling laws in plasmid biology! 📈🧬 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After ruling the NIH grant cuts were illegal yesterday, Judge Young, a Reagan appointee on the bench since 1985, ended the hearing with a blistering 15-minute speech. I've cleaned up my notes — here are his remarks in full. 🧵

Check out the new pre-print from our lab on phage-assisted evolution of light-switchable, allosteric proteins. Congrats to first author @neuroscinikolai.bsky.social, co-corresponding author @jmathony.bsky.social and everyone from the @niopeklab.bsky.social involved! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I've spent the last few months examining the +1,450 grants terminated at the NIH, including reading hundreds of abstracts. Many were studying how to solve or improve health disparities – not just identify or explain them. Some of the terminated grants (h/t to @scott-delaney.bsky.social + team)

Elizabeth was a remarkable leader who helped craft many important improvements in how NIH grants are reviewed. Her removal is just another example of how the system is being demolished.

Breaking:   WASHINGTON (AP) - Health secretary removes every member of scientific committee that advises the CDC on how vaccines should be used.

🚨BREAKING: 300+ NIH employees call out the harm of censorship & politicized science in scathing email to Bhattacharya, demanding an end to political interference, a lift on funding freezes, & rehiring of fired staff whose work saves lives. This is historic - insiders are blowing the whistle. 🧵(1/5)

And here we go... #EMTALA

"Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered that VA physicians and scientists not publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned."

How can physics contribute to understanding the evolution of complexity? Although great results have been produced over the last decades, some recent "theories" appear to ignore key ideas from evolutionary theory and are seriously flawed. Check this paper in PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Super excited to release a huge evolution project on the works for many years: Evolution experiments synchronized across climates to understand rapid adaptation Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... All data available: www.grene-net.org/data #MOILAB @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social @hhmi.org 🧵👇

Deporting a gay man to Russia is beyond horrific, and yet this admin is happy to do it. And the verbal abuse he describes is abhorrent; and not new. Guards at detention centers, jails, and prisons get away with crap like this all the time. It’s appalling, it’s not new under Trump, just worse now.

Entropy tree networks of residue dynamics encode protein allostery https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656549v1

estrogen receptor conformational entropy maps across evolution www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Friday's Executive Order is part of a concerted plan. FDA head Marty Makary and his sidekick Vinay Prasad are already leveraging the language of "gold standard science" to create new and unprecedented roadblocks to vaccine approval. Last week in the NEJM they wrote: www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Antibiotics disrupt gut microbes, but what about their viruses? A new study finds that gut phages crash, bloom, and bounce back after antibiotics, helping restore microbial balance via kill-the-winner dynamics. ✍️ @eugenpfeifer.bsky.social & coll. 📖 shorturl.at/AtafX #MicroSky #AMR

tl;dr — this EO co-opts the language of open science to implement a system of political control wherein presidential appointees are given broad latitude to designate any number of reasonable scientific activities and inferences as scientific misconduct, and to penalize those involved accordingly.