Bhattacharya, Letai & other politicals at NIH keep trying to to say all at NIH is fine, because they spent the full budget last year. This well researched article from @carolynyjohnson.bsky.social explains exactly why many scientists are still struggling. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...
“first drafts of Results, Discussion, and Introduction should be the trainee’s own work. AI can help with grammar…tightening prose…critiquing the logic of an argument you’ve already made. But the hard part of forming the argument needs to be yours.’ blekhman.substack.com/p/you-need-t...
This is not surprising, but DEEPLY troubling.
One of my first rules of leadership is encouraging people (and certainly not attacking them) to bring me bad news
Without this, you are losing your eyes and ears and problems with fester and grow without your awareness.
I realize this is the point...
Related to the posts on reduced NIH Fellowship numbers, I note that I'm seeing graduate school admissions offers for one program that are at roughly 25-40% of the number of offers in the years just prior to 2025.
How have your programs been responding to the chaos? Any change in offer numbers?
Just to clarify. You are talking about fewer offers, not less money?
13% success rates for FY2025 grant awards.
NIH finally releases some FY2025 success rate data drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/18/n...
Grant Witness is hiring! We're seeking a full-time data scientist to join our team building data resources to support journalism, litigation, and activism protecting science, public health, and the rule of law. grant-witness.us/apply.html #rstats
This was predictable, and we did predict it last summer when the multiyear funding policy first emerged.
This is how we know this admin is coming after science as a whole. Health equity, transgender health, mRNA vaccines… these areas are just the start.
Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities.
But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham.
It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why:
🧵1/
Why I think your single-cell cell annotation benchmarking is missing the mark 👇
You trained your model on large of number of cells (millions), and you use your model to annotate a new dataset.
1. The Supreme Court just handed down its 5th anti-trans decision in less than a year.
It could lead to forced outing of trans youth across the country, with 40 cases pending that it may impact.
It also forces CA teachers to misgender some trans students.
Subscribe to support our journalism.
Perhaps not surprising, funding during FY2025 was down across the board thanks to multi-year funding (MYF). Levels are likely to be similar for 2026 given the requirement for the same % of MYF. Early career investigators (aka, ESIs) are getting hit hard. Supposedly leadership is committed to….
Essential reading for conservation scientists & ecologists (in fact anyone doing science across borders!) 🌍🧪onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.70227
Remote-control science is an internet-enabled form of "parachute" science
FWIW, I see a lot of this in AI and macroecology research
A great read from someone who used to be inside NIH sharing why those of us still there may be quieter than expected:
elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-nih-s...
Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!
"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."
having so much fun with this vibe coding what used to take me two or three hours can now be done in a single day
Spoke with a PI whose postdoc is trapped abroad because of social media vetting. It appears the postdoc missed disclosing one account and it's unclear if they can come back… ever.
This is the country we live in now.
Alright that "ICE OUT" training from last night immediately came in handy (this is not a scary story).
Tonight at Teen Art Club one of the teens asked the others what their biggest fears were. One of the girls said "Is it bad if I say ICE?". I was like "No that's a totally understandable fear"
1/3
Fabulous piece by Dani Anderson from the @thedohertyinst.bsky.social about the dangers of the media inflating the risk of small, well contained Nipah virus outbreaks.
Do yourself a favour and take a read.
www.doherty.edu.au/news-events/...
dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!
- `filter_out()` for dropping rows
- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools
These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!
tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...
Key conclusions:
Ioannidis's paper, while important because it stimulated much discussion, is itself false. Most published findings are not false.
Director Bhattacharya weaponizes this paper without bothering to re-read it carefully enough to get even the most basic facts about it right.
8/9
Event image with title Statistics for Every Body: Inclusive Data Communication for Audiences with Visual and Auditory Impairments
There's still time to sign up for tomorrow's @rssdiversity.bsky.social online session! 📊
Topic - Statistics for Every Body: Inclusive Data Communication for Audiences with Visual and Auditory Impairments
Date - Wednesday 28 January 2026, 12.00PM - 1.30PM
Location - Online
#DataViz #RStats
Been hearing some horrifying chatter about dealing with the new #NIH common form and #ScienCV system, so I put together a short video with some tricks for mitigating some of those pain points.
Hope it helps? 🧪
open.substack.com/pub/emptymod...
Iran protesters tell of brutal police response as regime lashes out
Warning security forces could be preparing to commit ‘massacre’ under cover of internet shutdown
That’s great news!
Always use the mic at a conference even if you’re loud. People who can’t hear you *can’t hear you * when you ask if you can hear them in the back. Some of us went to one too many hardcore shows in our youth without ear plugs and our hearing ain’t what it used to be 🥺
#SICB2026
