Student government leaders of MIT, UVA, U of AZ, Dartmouth, UPenn, Brown, and Vanderbilt united in their opposition to the "compact" proposed by the Trump administration.

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door. 

It wasn’t the feds —  it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help. He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days. chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

This is the way www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

MIT Rejects the Compact! I am so proud. "The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief ...

Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

Hey US scientists, the NY Times wants to hear from you if you've had your funding cut. 🌊🧪

CHICAGO — Outside an elementary school during dismissal… horrifying. What have we become?

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

Over the weekend ICE abducted an NIH contractor when he showed up to a courthouse for his green card hearing. He is documented. His wife is a citizen. He is also member of the skeleton crew of animal care staff that works through a shutdown, to ensure the health and wellbeing of research animals.

Need some RAND game theorists to weigh in on how this effectively protests while also being impossible to show on fox news as a war zone.

I'm excited to share the news that our climate change project won the @spspnews.bsky.social Robert Cialdini Prize for a "paper that uses field methods and demonstrates the relevance of social psychology to outside groups and communities"! You can read it here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉 I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty). See lab page and doc below for details!

I am proud of MIT, where our branch of AAUP has voted unanimously to endorse this statement urging MIT leadership and the MIT Corporation to reject the Compact wholesale docs.google.com/document/d/1...

A judge blocked Trump from sending Oregon's National Guard into Portland. That same judge then blocked Trump from deploying California's National Guard to Portland instead. This isn't a "left wing" judge — Trump appointed her. Says a lot about Trump's authoritarian power grab.

Out today! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Dwayne has his job back because we organized for it. We fight or we die. Join AAUP today www.aaup.org/join

super cool study found human artifacts in Bearded vulture nests, incl. "weaponry like a crossbow bolt and wooden lance, decorated sheep leather, and parts of a slingshot....a shoe made from twigs and grass is ~675-years-old." link to paper: doi.org/10.1002/ecy..... www.popsci.com/environment/... 🧪🌍🦉

Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️

Remember when it was a national scandal on the right that the White House pushed to take down a few tweets?

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com Trump’s proposed “compact” with nine major universities “is extortion, plain and simple,” Erwin Chemerinsky writes in a guest essay. “It is not hyperbole to say that the future of higher education in America requires that every university reject it.”

@sciencehomecoming.bsky.social has tools for finding local newspapers and writing for them!

Gavin Newsom announces that any California university that caves to Trump and signs his “loyalty pledge” will be immediately defunded. “CALIFORNIA WILL NOT BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS.”

thanks for speaking out @markhisted.org

A paper by Josh Rule from my lab providing some formal tools for how to think about innateness -- and trying to pinpoint exactly why Fodor's claims that everything is innate is nonsense. arxiv.org/abs/2505.18277

Donald Trump can take the Department of Justice’s independence and its commitment to the rule of law. But he can never take its norms. by Merrick Garland

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

Coincidentally, another group published results today on a very similar question: What research wouldn't have gotten done had the NIH's budget been cut by 40%, as Trump proposed? Under that scenario, NIH-funded research on more than half of 557 drugs approved 2000-2023 would have never happened!

UCLA’s funds reinstated after yesterday’s court order! Thanks to the brave researchers and their amazing counsel, including Dean Chemerinsky, who brought suit. This is just another turn in the ongoing fight, but a great result for now.

First they came for the Immigrants. And I wrote a memo. Then they came for trans people. And I wrote a memo. Then they came for the comedians. And I wrote a memo. Then they came for me. And there was no one to write a memo for me.

It’s rare that one clip can both be grounds for a massive corporate lawsuit and grounds for the 25th Amendment at the same time.

Opinion| Could releasing the Epstein files cause autism?

Trump is pronouncing "acetaminophen" the right way. by Ezra Klein

New paper: We argue that linearization in language production is a foraging process, with speakers navigating semantic and spatial clusters. Lead author: Karina Tachihara, former UC Davis postdoc, now faculty at UIUC! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I cannot emphasize this enough: The regime has overextended itself. It is vulnerable to protest and dissent. They have not consolidated power and we are entirely capable of keeping them from doing so. Doomers are not realists.

me telling my grandkids what it was like to have vaccines

Can reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)

Today, the New York Times published a long essay glorifying Jay Bhattacharya, the Trump NIH director. What?⁉️ Here’s the explanation: That essay was written by the editor of a Trumpist Republican journal, funded by a Trumpist org that hates science. SHAME on the Times. 🧪1/

Tom Homan took a bag of cash from an undercover FBI agent the right way. by Ezra Klein

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

I have to keep this deliberately vague, but this is a total disaster for academic research. And imposing it so suddenly is just cruel. I’ve got friends scrambling to get back to the US before midnight tonight. Do you know how hard that is to do on 36 hours of notice?

"basic cognitive processes underlying explanatory reasoning give rise to a systematic inherence bias among practicing scientists—a tendency to explain phenomena in terms of their inherent properties rather than external factors" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The recommendation from the West Coast Health Alliance of Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaiʻi is that all adults get the flu and COVID vaccines. www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PREVE...

NEWS --> Anna Gomez, the lone Dem on the FCC, tells me the Trump admin's pressure to oust Jimmy Kimmel may be unlawful as well as unconstitutional. FCC chair Brendan Carr may be committing censorship in violation of federal law. That and much more in my new piece: newrepublic.com/article/2006...

Donald Trump's assault on free speech presents the perfect opportunity for me to lecture my liberal friends about the dangers of trigger warnings.

“If people cannot access vaccines, we will see the return of diseases that once caused serious health issues for children. These diseases are now almost entirely preventable, and as a pediatrician it is heartbreaking to see a child and family suffer in this way." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/h...