How do infections strengthen capabilities exactly?

www.army.mil/article/2104...

I took part in one of these NASEM meetings. There was such hope for the new generation of women's health research bubbling up in so many areas.

In Oct 2024 when you *could feel* the changes happening

Persist in this moment so that we offer hope AND a blueprint to the next generation of scholars

💯Not only have we looked in the mirror, so many smart, nerdy people are POURING themselves into this profession to reimagine higher ed

But our budgets (blue & red states) have been slashed. And we're fighting policies of an administration-class only beholden to outside boards.

Figure showing number of competitive grants mentioning women from 2015-2025. The number was rising until recently, with a precipitous drop in the last year.

At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years.

Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.”

wapo.st/4euUt1c

It is DEEPLY important to get non-millionaires, non-tech-industry-hacks, and non-Wall-Street people onto Boards of Trustees of Colleges and Universities. I've seen @syed.nyc in action in the Working Families Party and hope you'll vote for him if you're a Wesleyan grad.

wait till they figure out how much faster the airplane, a machine invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903, can traverse the same distance

That's right....and so dreadfully wrong
www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

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!

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.

"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."

Oh well, we’re safe from robots taking our jobs for now.

This morning, I posted two important stories based on insider information from the FBI and SCOTUS, published in @theatlantic.com and @nytimes.com respectively.

This doesn’t happen by accident.

The source(s) have to know they’ll be protected, even if the reporters are threatened with jail.

Year 2, Week 16 Apr 11-17 - tomato/xitomatl

Each Friday night, I write a briefing on what happened in US science & higher ed. 🧪 

Apr 17 (Year 2, Week 16)
- new CDC director nominated w/ credentials!
- closure of Hampshire College. Other schools at risk
- changes to federal loans for grad students
& much more

buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

How the American oligarchy went hyperscale The AI boom is fueling a literal and metaphorical power grab by tech billionaires—and forcing a reckoning.

“The American oligarchy is an AI oligarchy”

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Screenshotted excerpt from linked article reading as follows: "In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis. When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately."

OOP

New York Times got receipts on John Roberts being like, 'I know this isn't how anything works, but a Democratic president is about to implement a policy!!'

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

We already KNOW how to make super babies, you eugenicist creeps! And it's all the things you fucking fucks are fucking up! THREAD!

The stories of this week have been horrific. 62M view rape academy,misogyny, and Lt Gov murderer as just some of the every day experiences

So many I know & love are in pain. No words to describe even a fraction of what they must be feeling.

May we continue to do the work to one day earn trust.

So many academic departments make up the fabric of a university. They teach the courses for their majors but also for students in other majors who either have to or want to take.

They're each part of what it means to offer well-rounded educational opportunities.

This is all a loss

Fantastic conversation today led by Prof. Britt Paris.

Thought provoking perspective article that has a lot of great points from our workshop:
academeblog.org/2025/07/22/f...

Check out this master class in really irresponsible, paternalistic, misogynistic reporting on a murder of a woman who deserves better from journalists covering these crimes. Seriously, reporters need to break the old patriarchy-defined molds of this kind of reporting.

It’s been 20 years since the NCAA banned Chief Illiniwek from championship games. Some students want U of I to move on - IPM Newsroom The University of Illinois retired Chief Illiniwek in 2007, without picking a new mascot. Native American faculty say the inaction is damaging.

U of I made $40,000 in licensing fees from Chief imagery. Our racist mascot was forced out by the NCAA twenty years ago and our leadership still refuses to choose a new mascot. #Kingfisher

UIUC CFA Event: AI is not Ineveitable poster

🚨 Great event this afternoon hosted by Illinois Campus Faculty Association.

A great chance for tenure-stream faculty at Illinois to think collectively about how we engage in scholarship and teaching at this moment.

it is wild to me to have a colleague say that using genAI to do a "first analysis" of a bunch of papers to get summaries and then engage with those summaries is a legitimate way to do any sort of scholarship like fucking hell how are you calling yourself a scholar

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

sciencespending.org#overview

For years I have used the voice-to-text module in windows (office-H) to write emails and short stetches of text. Super helpful.

All of a sudden it is shit. It is doing some larger 'learning' model that ends up with terrible text segments that are nearly impossible to locally edit. WTF

Exactly one year ago today:

Early Career Faculty Program | Freeman Hrabowski Scholars | HHMI The Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program offers comprehensive support to outstanding early career faculty committed to scientific excellence in their own research, and to fostering labs that expand the ...

@hhmi-science.bsky.social's
#FreemanHrabowski Scholars Program offers early career faculty up to $10M over 10 yrs, plus salary & benefits

Stable, sustained support can transform your career:

Senior Postdoc? This year's competition has a program for you too. Applications open 11/3! bit.ly/4vhC0LA

🧬🧪 New from JAX: Scientists have corrected an extremely rare and life-threatening genetic disease of the liver in mouse models and human patient cells, using the gene-editing approach that served as the basis for the historic, life-saving treatment of Baby KJ Muldoon in 2025.

NCI Designated. Illinois Powered. Cancer Center at Illinoi

Big News. Today the Cancer Center at Illinois becomes the 8th NCI Designated Basic Cancer Center.

www.cancer.gov/research/inf...

“Narrative paragraphs summarizing committee discussion will not be used. Instead, summaries will have a sentence describing the degree of consensus in the committee vote, plus bullets listing the main score driving points.“

Why not just give the score distribution and be done with it?

Over the past week, the president posted an image of himself as Jesus, the vice president challenged the pope on Catholic doctrine, and the secretary of defense quoted the speech of a fictional hit man and presented it as scripture.