RFK is undoing human subjects protections so he can conduct placebo trials of vaccines. That means infecting people knowingly. I wonder who will “volunteer” for these trials? If history is any guide, a lot of incarcerated and other powerless people.

“You can win elections by tacking to the middle; lots of people have. But you can also win elections by staking a moral position and convincing people to agree with you. You can earn support by demonstrating what is important to you instead of just being determined to nod along with what you hear.”

Hell yes, Pittsburgh. Love Yinz. No Kings.

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

As always, @ianjames.bsky.social finding a great story water story to bring into full public view. www.latimes.com/environment/...

DARTMOUTH OUT! We are at 6 rejections. Vanderbilt is the only private left standing "considering" the compact along with UT Austin and the University of Arizona.

Take note of all these people turning out for protests in small towns in red states. Remember them the next time you’re inclined to write an area off because “they voted for this.”

BOOM! After over a thousand students, faculty, & workers gathered on campus to demand a rejection of Trump’s bribe, UVA SAYS NO LOYALTY OATH! ✊🏼✊🏿✊🏻✊🏾 M.I.T. ☑️ BROWN ☑️ PENN ☑️ USC☑️ UVA ☑️ This is People Power in Action. #DefendHigherEd

Very happy with these! The planter has the San Joaquin River (California), the orbs are the Rivanna River (Virginia) and the Kuparuk River (Alaska)

The last part of this interview is about how the public local station (KYUK) that is covering the funding has been impacted by a $1.2 million budget cut. This makes it exceptionally difficult to do the kind of reporting that is needed after a disaster like this one.

This is good reporting on the disaster in Alaska if you're looking for a reliable summary. This is a bigger disaster than I think most are realizing. 1500 people have been displaced by the flooding with an exceptionally complicated response and recovery. www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5kz...

Disgraceful anonymous sneering EPA spokes drone. Also geographically challenged as Kipnuk despite being in the YK Delta is neither on the Yukon nor on the Kuskokwim River.

Another resource for direct support of people in Western Alaska

This tiktok is a guy showing where houses (!) used to be before the storm vs where they are now. Just... Unfathomable, except it's real.This is part 1 of 4. I can't stop watching these. This will be Kotzebue in a few more years. www.tiktok.com/t/ZTMPwspLs/

Western Alaska was hit hard by the recent storms. Houses floated away in Kipnuk, houses flipped over, people lost everything from the flooding that came with the storms. Please donate if you can. This group has a long history of supporting AK communities. alaskacf.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/c...

These people are lifelong mobsters. They aren't funding your cancer research, not when they can get a yacht for that guy they owe a favor to, or maybe take a trip to Patagonia, or something. The compact slams a university as a spigot into the funding pot for their friends. Not for you.

Scientists at UT eyeing the vague promise of "increased funding preferences" as if Trump will escort you tp the front of the NIH line. No. What they mean is, they're gonna hire the unqualified nephew of a Senator for something, and now they've made a mechanism to give him the federal money instead.

With the latest budget cuts to polar science, we’re not necessarily losing the raw data - but we are losing its translation... The stories behind the numbers, the context for decision-making, and the communication of the Arctic and Antarctic’s far-reaching impacts throughout the year.

‘It’s catastrophic in Kipnuk. Let’s not paint any other picture,’ said one state emergency official via @AP www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-a...

Western Alaska has been devastated by recent storms. The National Guard is evacuating villages, but pets are being left behind. Consider contributing a few to this Bethel-based rescue thats hoping to charter a plane to retrieve some of the pets! www.facebook.com/story.php?st...

New on Peatpedia - an attempt to demystify #peatland carbon stores, sinks, and other gassy issues! open.substack.com/pub/peatpedi...

Unless and until some kind of compelling legal and moral argument is presented as to why this is a legitimate use of deadly force, this is just…mass murder.

yearly reminder to people insisting that we view Christopher Columbus as "a man of his time" that *the people responsible for the Spanish Inquisition* thought Columbus was out of pocket

Wyoming is by an order of magnitude the US's largest coal producer (and produces more than the whole of the northern Appalachia and Midwest states *combined*). Nearly all of that comes out of the Powder River Basin. Coal is a dead industry.

Courtesy of colleagues at Penn

Picture how big the Hoover Dam is. An absolute unit. The Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW). The solar farm that the Admin just cancelled could have produces 6.2 GW of power. That's more than 3 Hoover Dams.

Y'all. I just got ChatGPT to do everything in R for this manuscript. I mean EVERYTHING. And it's all legit and reproducible. I'm shook. How are we mentoring our trainees in statistics now? Who needs to learn coding in R line by line, and who doesn't? scienceforeveryone.science/statistics-i...

My dope friend Adrian, who is trans, interviewed 90 transgender Texans. His project is finally out: www.dallasnews.com/news/politic...

I quite like @maryroach.bsky.social , but having "cozy corner" consist entirely of her books is A Choice

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Virginia State Senate Dems just brought down fire and fury regarding the “Compact,” notifying the President and Rector that UVA would lose ALL STATE APPROPRIATIONS if it signs and cedes the University to “federal political control.” Notably, their letter directly restates points made here by @siva.

I'll be updating next week's current-state-of-state-higher-ed-policy slides. Left is an article about the VA senate dems telling UVA their state funding will be in question if they agree to that odious compact. On the right is the key part of the senate letter. www.cbs19news.com/news/state-s...

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

Good God

Really @utaustin.bsky.social?

Today marks the first day in public media’s history without federal funding. And we’re not going anywhere. Listeners like you keep our mission alive. Protect one of the last places where America comes together to hear itself. Stand with us today. Donate at this link: n.pr/46wamAj

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

Electricity now costs up to 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

End of an era and a sad day for those that care about Arctic work done in the best ways possible. 😢 Nonetheless "… the goal of broadening participation in Arctic-focused research, education, and policy is still an important mission to achieve." #Arctic

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

"After nearly 40 years, the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, or ARCUS, will close September 30." "The Arctic Research Consortium of the United States funded programs that aided Indigenous communities and tracked melting sea ice, among dozens of initiatives."

“I’m emotionally shellshocked right now,” said one professor in the Texas Tech system. “What does it say about academic freedom? It says we don’t have it.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

South Texas game cam catches a raccoon riding a javelina (Dicotyles tajacu). The deer feeder corn attracts a lot of other species, but maybe we should worry about them all teaming up against us? (📷: Jeff Davis, TAMU-Kingsville alumni forum)

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, HBCUs received terroristic threats. Black students have been expelled or forced to withdraw. Black professors and teachers have been fired and placed on leave. A Black firefighter was placed on leave. A Black journalist was fired thebarbedwire.com/2025/09/26/f...

Commercial hand block printing has mostly disappeared from Western Europe bc it's too laborious and thus expensive. But the craft lives on in India. You can find Indian block printed clothes from Kartik Research, Kardo, Harago, 11.11/eleven eleven, and 18 East — if you can put up with the tariffs.

Let me tell you a beautiful story about this couch. 🧵 IG msviciousdesign

NSF today released instructions for the next round of applicants to its Graduate Research Fellowship Program. A key group—second-year Ph.D. students—is no longer eligible, and students who are still able to apply will face an unusually narrow timeframe. https://scim.ag/3KlQkQk

"the benefits of NIH research in general are wide and diffuse. A very large number of advances—roughly one in two during the 21st century—are linked to NIH grants that are cut in our counterfactual scenario."