No one says to legit business owners, "hey I see there's an underground market selling toxic knock-offs of your product: how will you incorporate the toxic product AND protect your customers against its harms?" But apparently it's fine to make this suggestion to educators with respect to AI.

Yes, the absolute absurdity of it is this is hoarding to the point where money loses any value. These people have some sort of mental illness.

www.statnews.com/2025/12/18/n... A 11 percentage point in grant funding for early career researchers in 2025. So it begins. 🧪

Watched Princess Bride today. RIP Mr Reiner

Good science news to greet the holidays. Our paper is now out @natcomms.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Outstanding work by two of my postdocs, Aloran and Tyler, and collabs with Nic Fusco, Carol Manhart @templechemistry.bsky.social & Matthew Bainbridge @radychildrensoc.bsky.social 🧵🧪/1

Nice work by @amulyasreekumar.bsky.social 🧪🎇

If nature publishing group of making half a billion $ in profit, feels like maybe they can afford to pay reviewers for their time and expertise 🧪 group.springernature.com/gp/group/med...

When you develop a tool that is truly useful to scientists, you do not have to force it down their throats. I don't see Molecular Devices sending me an email about ten great things I can do with their spectrophotometer to extend my research. The day I need AI to tell me what to think, I'll quit🧪

"Pronatalists like Dean Spears and Michael Geruso worry that low birth rates mean “fewer and fewer people to discover new ideas”—but having more babies risks derailing the careers of already-born women today." Love it! What about the already-born and their new ideas? 1/2

Preprints are gold for getting your results out there, setting up collaborations, visibility for your lab, and convincing grant reviewers that you aren't blowing smoke when you say "manuscript in submission" #AcademicSky 🧪

The first administration that has proudly stood up to fight against cancer research. The folly and evil of purposeful ignorance and blatant lying is robbing the US of its position as a leader in science, and the world of its progress towards health and prosperity for all before our eyes 🧪

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

Can confirm, @sdsuresearch.bsky.social has seen increasing enrollment every year, coupled with threats of budget cuts from the state that squeeze faculty on both sides to continue to provide the quality of education that our students have (rightly) come to expect. #EduSky

I've already heard several of my colleagues say they don't see the point of participating in peer review because of the low funding rates. This could easily be the straw that broke the camel's back when asking scientists to spend valuable time evaluating the ideas of their peers 🧪

I gotta take this opportunity to pump up @sandiegostate.bsky.social. I love that we take our mission of keeping higher education affordable quite seriously. At least for now. And still an R1. At least for now.

Woot!!

It is important to listen to people who are using AI and understand how or why they're using them, and importantly whether they know that using it has different consequences from using, let's say, Google. I talk to my students and my lab members about this a fair bit. Many people just don't know.

Yet to ever buy a new car. My current car is one I bought in graduate school, second hand. Living the fat cat life here.

My 6 year old had to decorate this outline of a turkey for school. I came home to find him working hard at the dining table in the middle of what appeared to be a glitter explosion. His dad thinks it's the most Bollywood turkey ever. Can't disagree.

Such a thoughtful and heartbreaking piece (gift link). The actions of this administration, their war against biomed research, will leave resounding echoes of the silence of clinical trials that won't happen, and lives that won't be saved. For years to come www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/o...

Our latest story in preprint (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...) and one of my favorites so far. More detailed thread to come. Tldr we show that the distinctive collagen patterning we see in black breast cancer patients is caused by tumor intrinsic signaling and is critical for metastasis 1/3 🧪

One of the many reasons I've often thought that grant awards for federally funded research should be based on performance rather than potential for success 🧪

We know they have the capacity to be "decent" to people whom they consider to be worthy of decency which is in itself indecent

Before AI and even Grammarly, not just ESL writers but all writers at the beginning of their academic careers would ask more senior academics to give their work a read through. This was a huge entryway to getting senior colleagues to read your work and champion it.

I honestly don’t get the value of this company. They hoover up energy and water. Their product constantly gets things wrong and, in extreme cases, coaches people into suicide. And it’s all built on what seems to be malicious and vast intellectual property theft. What does OpenAI offer the world?

Recently chatted with people @americancancersoc.bsky.social about this. People are born scientists but often get socialized out of being curious by the time they reach adulthood. But everytime I manage to communicate my research well, I see that scientist inside their eyes peeking out delightedly

I sometimes teach a critical thinking class to graduate students and this comes up a lot, the way popular and social media have both-sided their way into making it impossible to evaluate the legitimacy of a debate unless you're already a domain expert or have oodles of time to do in-depth research

AI being forced on us by money grabbing tech powers is like if we all said we need to be asking Grammarly to come up with ideas because it's so good at grammar. Let's hire faculty with Grammarly expertise and write grant apps about how Grammarly can be used to make scientific breakthroughs. Say wut.

Wow! The President's Postdoctoral Fellowship was a tremendous opportunity for recruiting the brightest minds into the UC system and keeping them there. When do these shortsighted decisions end? And why are so many people telling on themselves so blatantly.

Truer words. University is an ideal and now it is apparent in all sides that faculty and staff know and live that ideal every day, while underpaid, unsupported and overworked.

I don't know much, I only run a research lab. But if I told my lab members that I didn't know any of the details relating to my job with such frequency, I don't think I'd have much of a lab left to run. And rightly so.

I struggle with this a lot. Should celebrities who have the protection of obscene amounts of money and privilege speak up against injustice? As Burke says, ""When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

There seem to be two types of academics: the ones who understand that critical review of literature & data analysis are integral to being an academic,& ones who consider these tasks to be chores to be outsourced. Understanding that makes all the AI pushing make sense www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Woot! 🧪

PROPOSAL: Lego sorting chambers that you can put a bunch of Lego bricks into and they will sort them into Lego sets you can build using only them (preferably with the option of providing manuals for selected sets)

I truly never know what to make of these arguments. Researchers in hypercompetitive fields, like cancer research, need CNS pubs to make it. This is doubly true if they're not white men. Whether it's Nature or Nat Comm, these are a means to status /1

We are in a timeline in which People Magazine is publishing legit hard-hitting news headlines while CBS and CNN publicly humiliate themselves. I don’t like this timeline. But I’m loving People Magazine right now.

The question often is Should we do this, not Can we do this. But people, equally often get the question wrong. Unfortunate

So close, Senator Tillis. You should have left out the first clause. Whether you're Rep or Dem, Congress has the power of the purse. You should all be requiring compliance from the Executive branch. For shame, with the partisanship at such a critical time in our history

My very Californian son's rendition of rangoli. Happy Deepavali to all who fight the good fight against the darkness in our own minds and in the world around us.

For goodness sake, I teach a graduate class on this to start discussions on how researchers have learnt, and should continue to learn, from the egregious arrogance of the past. This feels like a top 100 re-release of the Worst of Humanity.

I think few people realize the number of hours a peer reviewer spends writing detailed critiques prior to the actual meeting. Last cycle, because I couldn't make the rescheduled review meeting, those hours were just wasted time that I could have spent on oh, idk, mentoring, teaching, writing 🤷🏾‍♀️

I also saw groups of grannies holding up F$#k T$#@p flags on the corners of an intersection in the very conservative vanilla suburban neighborhood I live in. Never did I dream I'd see an 80 year old waving a flag like that. And all the cars honking as they drive by. #NoKings

Vote!

And I'm sure removing regulations regarding waste water treatment and telling women they can't take Tylenol when pregnant will push that fertility index right up

Same here. And here's the amazing thing, I know without doubt that every single scientist serving as peer reviewer on my panel will do their absolute best to make a rescheduled meeting work even as this administration burns their livelihood, career and research dreams to the ground around them

This is where we're at: global trust in the US govt to do the right thing re: AI regulation, is on par with global trust in the Chinese govt. Only 44% of Americans trust their govt to regulate AI and a similar % are more concerned than excited about AI. Not a coincidence.

When I first started doing NIH study sections this 👇🏾 shocked me out of thinking I'm objective. Now I have an Excel sheet which quantifies the major and monitor weaknesses and strengths I find in the application as I go, and then I write my critique to match the overall score my sheet computes.

No American scientist is surprised by the enormity of this graph as we've stood here watching our colleagues leave or make plans to leave over the last six months, and witnessed our postdocs and early career researchers struggle to move up the ladder as the rungs disappear under their feet 😔