A key point: the admin has made things worse & less efficient.

"American scientists already spend some 40 percent of their time on grant-related administrative tasks. Now they are being deluged by ever more paperwork, said Dr. Michael Lauer, who led external grantmaking at [NIH] until last year."

Happy Earth Day.

Today and everyday, I work to understand and preserve our blue planet.
#ScienceMatters

Photo credit: #NASA #ArtemisII

Yes. US science needs a Marshall Plan to rebuild in future. We will not fix science by just waiting and hoping the pendulum swings back.

One key:
Supreme Court reform is an absolute requirement. This SCOTUS will not allow the science agencies to do their jobs; it will inject politics.

Superpower Suicide The geopolitics of our moment

“Superpower Suicide” is a concept to help understand the approach of the Trump regime to the rest of the world. We are fighting a war for no reason we can name, losing it, and covering our defeat with genocidal and apocalyptic propaganda.
snyder.substack.com/p/superpower...

If you’re in Virginia, for the sake of everything that matters to the rest of the civilized world, please get out today and vote yes on the constitutional amendment

Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later.

There’s no routine screening for pancreatic cancer, most cases aren’t operable, and the five year survival rate after diagnosis is around 13%. It’s a traumatic news.

But new personalized mRNA immunotherapy is showing encouraging results in Phase 1 clinical trials.

Keep funding science!

Atlantic current shows two-decade decline across four deep-ocean monitoring sites A paper published in the journal Science Advances is adding to the growing body of research showing that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is weakening. In this new study, instead of relying mainly on computer models, scientists used two decades of direct ocean measurements to confirm the decline.

Atlantic Ocean sensors confirm a consistent two-decade decline in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Data from four mooring arrays across the western boundary verify a weakening transport signal below 1,000 meters, validating concerns of long-term circulation shifts.

Holy. Shit. This is Reid Wiseman's video he took with his iPhone while at the moon 🌙

As we read this about the Roberts Court let’s remember the shadow docket grievously harmed American scientific research, cancer cures, and public health over the past year.

For ex, KBJ’s “Calvinball” quote was in an NIH case. More, short 🧵 1/

INCREDIBLE reporting from the NYT’s @jodikantor.bsky.social and @adamliptak.bsky.social on the inner workings of the Supreme Court in the moment the justices unleashed the shadow docket.

I am so excited to share our new findings with you! We provide the structural evidence for a direct protein-to-DNA information pathway, showing how a bacterial enzyme 'reads' its own structure to 'write' DNA. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The ocean off California keeps breaking heat records The marine heat wave of 2026 is simmering the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, and experts are warning that it could lead to a warm, humid and stormy summer.

We acknowledge that more than 90% of the heat from global warming has gone into the ocean but then act surprised when this happens.

This is a handy little website if you want to keep track of how things are going with science funding.

sciencespending.org#overview

Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable If Viktor Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

How did Magyar win? A long running grassroots campaign in rural and small town Hungary; a refusal to be distracted by government propaganda; a focus on economic issues and corruption; a central promise to bring back democracy and the rule of law

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Octavia E. Butler, 1998:

An mRNA treatment for PANCREATIC CANCER was in trials, among many other uses. Choosing to end this research is choosing to sentence millions to an early, painful death

One of the most reassuring things I learned from Artemis II is that the public does give a shit about crewed space flight, they just don't care about SpaceX. When NASA does something it feels like a collective accomplishment of humanity. SpaceX? Not so much.

We got to the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of a poor year for this country. We had Vietnam. We had civil unrest. We had the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But we went around the moon and saw the far side for the first time. A script writer couldn't have done a better job of raising people's hope.

My quote of the day

Jim Lovell

Science is good. We should fund it.

It’s hard to overstate how much of this moment is driven by people who got a taste of accountability and were very, very mad about it.

Go science! Go art! #steam #stem

[alt text by NASA] The Moon, seen here backlit by the Sun during a solar eclipse on April 6, 2026, is photographed by one of the cameras on the Orion spacecraft’s solar array wings. Orion is visible in the foreground on the left. Earth is reflecting sunlight at the left edge of the Moon, which is slightly brighter than the rest of the disk. The bright spot visible just below the Moon’s bottom right edge is Saturn. Beyond that, the bright spot at the right edge of the image is Mars. Credit: NASA

Whoa 🤯

The Moon, in full eclipse, with the #Artemis II Orion spacecraft. Part of the Moon and spacecraft are lit by Earthshine, and both Saturn and Mars are visible to the lower right. Incredible. Details: images.nasa.gov/details/art0...

I agree with @joshuasweitz.bsky.social

Also, I think that by presenting such draconian cuts, the White House and OMB are making space for science opponents to "support" science by improving on the President's budget numbers while still doing considerable damage.

The White House holds its beacons of innovation with disdain and treats agencies as targets for elimination rather than as opportunities to advance America's interests and global leadership. The language is backed up by a proposal to cut NSF discretionary funding by ~$5B (55% cut).

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing.

I will say this again: Science isn’t just something that nerds do, it’s the foundation of the modern world.

It’s why this app exists. It’s why child mortality rate isn’t 50% anymore. It’s how we’re able to launch people to the moon. It’s how we’re able to grow food that feeds half the world.

Just a reminder that the senator who sponsored the bill which became law with broad bipartisan support that states a president cannot pull the US out of NATO without congressional approval was …

Marco Rubio.

Also - academic science - professors, research staff, postdocs & graduate students - is being slowly & painfully starved of funding (don’t know of anyone w/ new funding since early 2025). The system is slowly & silently imploding - 100% this admins doing. This will exacerbate economic devastation…

No ICE.
No war.
No Kings. #nokings