The most impt change at #NIH and to US science this year is bigger than grant cancellations— it’s how the agency is governed. For 75 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. That’s changed this year. New piece from me and @nataliebaviles.bsky.social in @nature.com 🧪

So far the war on Iran has cost $9.4 billion. That's $1 billion per day. $41,666,667 per hour. $11,574 per second. Thousands of lives lost. People don't want this. They want a living wage. They want healthcare. They want to be able to afford a home. They want their basic needs met.

If the Dems who win in the 2026 midterms get squeamish about prosecuting this administration, we'll need to elect a bunch of new people running on Nuremberg shit for 2028. This isn't a joke. It's the law. It's justice. Biden let Trump back in the WH and this happened because Joe didn't do his job

Medical experts say that if you contract pneumonia you should visit a doctor. A guy who eats dogs and snorts cocaine off toilet seats says you should just bathe in raw sewage instead. For busy Americans, it can be hard to know who to trust.

ending her career lying about an orwell quote while the entire room is getting news notifications about how she’s been fired and clearly doesn’t know it, perfect

IMPORTANT---IMPORTANT---IMPORTANT NIH is seeking input for the NIH-wide Strategic Plan. Open to everyone but Registration is Required! Your chance to listen and get your 2 or more cents in. grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Balint to Noem: "You're the secretary of DHS -- for now. And you think you're immune from accountability. But I promise you this: one day he is not gonna be president anymore. And when that day comes, we will still be here. And in hearings like this, we are going to continue to prove your guilt."

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

I'm only partway through, but it's clear that this book by Chater & Lowenstein is one of the most important books to ever come out of psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

The National Science Foundation is systematically being converted to the National AI and Quantum Research Foundation. “I see it as the administration exerting political control over what has traditionally been NSF’s ability to fund the best science.”

The Biden administration did a lot of good things that did not generate political gain. This paper argues that "voters need to be able to trace them back to the responsible political actors" made harder by federalism and the role of private actors in delivery www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Cover of The Lancet: @thelancet.com www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41... - new paper with Clinton Haarlem, Cliodhna Hynes and colleagues Different species see the world as fast as they need to...

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Doctors say that vaccines are the best way to protect children against measles. A guy who eats dogs and snorts cocaine off toilet seats says they should just swim in untreated sewage water instead. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

Good to see journalists scrutinizing “The Edge Network,” an intellectual circle of academic men who think that women are inherently inferior to men. (and great interview by @laurenaulet.bsky.social) 19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

Epstein responds in the affirmative, insisting "no really smart women---none." Schank, in turn, admits that his "very best Phd student was female," but laments that she "decided to quit being a professor," adding "that is the point; no matter how smart, she wanted to be liked or some such crap."

The FBI Director, everyone. You paid for it.

Trump wins the FIFA gold medal for downhill skiing

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

“my children might see the children I voted to put in shackles, how shall they grow up”

Trainees: check out the Neurobiology of Cognition Gordon Research Seminar that is taking place this summer in New Hampshire. The theme is "Cells, Circuits, and Computation". www.grc.org/neurobiology...

Resist. Trump will keep losing. And his legal battles and Epstein are stretching the DOJ thin. He has dropped his appeal of the $1.2B demand from UCLA. This fight was not from tepid administrators or the faculty senate It was from the DeFacto faculty union and the UAW.

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence. The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

New story up on the Homeland Security Department’s new tactic: flood social media companies with subpoenas to unmask anonymous accounts that criticize ICE or monitor the movements of ICE agents. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond

“He said, ‘Mom, they’re kidnapping kids,’” Mr. Pretti said, recalling a conversation. “‘Why would anybody do that? Why would people treat each other like that? That just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason to.’” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/u...

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

It's a once in a lifetime opportunity for Democrats, @schumer.senate.gov

This picture is going to stick with me for a while.

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

Scan your intellectual events for women who might object to inviting a sex offender Epstein replied: “last year, at the last minute the women said no epstein. . am i going to have the same issue again…” “In terms of women, I don’t see a problem with this list,” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

New Epstein files say that Steven Pinker was paid $10,000 to help Epstein’s defense (even though Pinker previously said he wasn't paid).

There are approximately 1000 research groups on the #NIH campuses, including Steve Rosenberg's research group, which develops groundbreaking T-cell therapies for cancer. Effectively all of those groups were suddenly prohibited from buying any (!) supplies last year. That is on the leadership.

The thing that a lot of these guys have in common is that for them science is about personal brand-building and advancement of the self. Their norms serve their status competition, not a greater good.

Standing up to Trump worked for Harvard. Here's why it never would have worked at Columbia.

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Ban anyone employed by ICE from serving in CA state police. States can fight back and show that what ICE is doing has no place here. calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202... Please support it @buffywicks.bsky.social

Unfinished. #LiamRamos

BREAKING: Judge Jia Cobb issues a TRO blocking DHS Sec Noem's Jan 8 memo purporting to require 7-day notices by members of Congress to perform oversight visits to immigration detention facilities. The effect is that congressional oversight visits are allowed on request, as is required by Sec. 527.

America's Sleeping Giant roared when police attacked civil rights marchers. And when Nixon tried to cover up Watergate. Today it roars in Minneapolis and around the country — at the jack-booted thugs occupying our cities.

"the hysteria that has developed around the abuse of women"

The way men like these pucker and grovel around money is a core problem

I saw it too:

This is good news for NIH-funded behavioral scientists and for the public; it resolves an unfortunate Catch-22 situation that inflated administrative burden and occasionally excluded basic behavioral science from funding opportunities: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...