5. The right-wing enthusiasm for AI science is not about doing better science faster. It’s about eliminating one of the most effective forms of societal resistance to authoritarian control.
"To retreat from [diversity, equity and inclusion] is to close the door to possibilities for better science and a better future. This is not the time to step back. It’s unquestionably the time to step forward." @anthrofuentes.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The $50 billion that NIH spends every year does more for Americans than Jeff Bezos could hope to dream of.
Bezos is a smart guy, in the right place at the right time who built a delivery business.
NIH and NSF are THE engines of American discovery and innovation.
GTFO
That is 54, 5-year NIH biomedical research grants.
Or 270 years worth of biomedical research.
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.
Graph
Trump's NSF funding down 51% from the 10-year average www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Heartbroken to hear that the @hhmi.org Hanna Grey fellowship competition is being cancelled this year. I poured so much work and creativity into this app and am very grateful for everyone who helped me revise. It is such a difficult time to be a young scientist.
Can we get more of this? “The Japanese American National Museum will ‘scrub nothing,’ Fujioka said, and instead will highlight the importance of DEI.
“Our community is based on diversity, equity is guaranteed to us in the Constitution, and inclusion is what we believe in,” Fujioka said.
Congratulations to Emma Hammond! Excellent paper on negative effects of oxytocin on wound healing…..but it depends on social context
This was a great paper to work on! The effects of intranasal oxytocin are context dependent - when California mice are isolated, oxytocin *increases* wound inflammation in a dose-dependent manner. Exciting implications for how neuropeptides interact with the immune system!
Excited to share that I just published my first ever first-author paper in Psychoneuroendocrinology in the Marler Lab. We found that oxytocin may impair wound healing when animals are isolated.
@cmarler.bsky.social
@patrickmonari.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
US map via scienceimpacts.org visualization of economic loss due to IDC cuts to 15% as part of Feb 7, 2025 executive order, with shading denoting intensity of cuts.
Working with an interdisciplinary team, we have developed a website to communicate how the White House's proposed cuts to health research would cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs.
Find out how your community may be impacted.
Explore more at SCIMaP: scienceimpacts.org
a 🧵
Wisconsinites will not be bought.
Our votes are not for sale.
Reporting from @msifry.bsky.social: Bernie Sanders, in the wake of his Fighting Oligarchy tour, is hiring full-time organizers in Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and several Western states. Among other things, they are working on Wisconsin's upcoming supreme court election and flipping swing House seats.
A statement by SBN (again co-written by the DEI Comm with edits from the Exe Comm) on why using rodent models of trans health are important studies for the community and everyone else!
This is a super clear and helpful article explaining why the 15% indirect cost rate is unfair, hurts science, and does NOT increase $ for research:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The ad-hoc termination of training grants, PhD fellowships, and center grants at Columbia is catastrophic and sends a message.
The WH will:
* Seek revenge at all costs
* Destroy science & higher ed, if it can
* Risk lives, careers and the economy.
Rest assured: they will not stop w/Columbia
Musk has now poured $8.3 million into buying the tie-breaking Wisconsin Supreme Court seat for Brad Schimel. That is vastly more than any other single donor—to eliminate a state-level check on his and Trump's power.
Help us fight back and elect Susan Crawford: PeopleVMusk.com
It is more clear than ever that we need grassroots antiracist organizing. When the system is built to harm groups of people, you need to work outside of it. I am so proud to have published this work with my peers on building antiracist communities in academia!
online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...
Excited to present the latest from the lab out today in Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... See Thread! 1/8
Huge shout out to @emmahammond.bsky.social @bendouglas.bsky.social and bsky-less Michelle Marji, Duncan Cleveland, and Candice Malone, as well as the rest of ALAN
So, I helped publish a thing. It's a recipe book that we (alaneuro.weebly.com) made over the past five years. It's about doing advocacy work in academia that is rooted in grassroots organizing. We think it's important. We hope you do too. 5/n
The current situation is a reminder that we cannot rely solely on DEI initiatives that are funded and sanctioned by academic institutions. We need to build our own communities that push for intersectional antiracist change, beyond what institutions tell us we can and can't do. 4/n
The fear among us is palpable too, and also understandable - why stick your neck out to do advocacy work when it could end poorly for you personally? Even those that recognize its importance are changing the language they use and how they communicate among themselves and with their institutions. 3/n
Funding for DEI initiatives is under extreme threat. Not only that, but countless examples of anticipatory compliance (both universities and public/private funding bodies) signal that, when the chips are down, institutions would rather align with dominant systems of power than exercise courage. 2/n
Antiracist change has always been needed (and fought for) in academia - right now is certainly no different. But it's also clear from the shift in conversations over the past month and a half that we're in a period of unique challenge, and necessity, for antiracist work. 1/n
