Ivan Aprahamian

Tell the Supreme Court: No Stay. Hands off NIH The Supreme Court is poised to allow Trump to illegally terminate NIH grants. Let's speak out. There is not much time.

Important new document available regarding SCOTUS and NIH grants.

scienceandfreedomalliance.substack.com/p/tell-the-s...

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BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Maybe stop coming up with new journals ever other day (for profit).

No mention of war crimes and ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan, prisoners of war who are being tortured, 120K displaced Armenians who will never be able to return to their ancestral lands in Artsakh.... But hey some people will make a lot of money.
thehill.com/homenews/adm...

Coupling synthetic negative feedback loops While coupled biochemical feedback loops are optimized over millions of years of evolution, the rational design of synthetic counterparts, not possess…

🎉Congrats to David @anbismillah.bsky.social the whole crew + collab Albert Wong on the new @cp-chem.bsky.social paper bit.ly/3J5FFse What started with an effort to tune the activation thresholds in negative #feedback loops so we can couple them took a wild turn #ChemSky #molswitch #chemsky ⚗️🧪

Coupling synthetic negative feedback loops Coupling synthetic negative feedback loops (NFLs) offers a step toward instilling order in solutions and achieving the spatiotemporal control seen in biological systems. This study shows that coupling up to three NFLs with different activation thresholds results in hierarchical behavior. Resource competition over Zn(II) mimics ecological interspecific competition—the stronger loop (i.e., the mandrill in the figure) reduces the fitness of the weaker one (i.e., the gray monkeys that do not eat), unless the latter cooperate to overcome the disadvantage.

Online now: Coupling synthetic negative feedback loops

I read something this year (probably on here, for my sins) that, contemporaneously, no one knew the Roman Empire was falling forever, just that one day an important bridge collapsed and no one ever came to fix it. I think about this all the time.

Surprisingly, and because of the competition for a shared resource (Zn), the negative feedback loops exhibit hierarchical behavior, reminiscent of interspecific competition seen in ecology (i.e., stronger binders effectively suppress the activity of weaker ones, unless they fight back as a group)

Why does this matter? Biology uses coupled feedback loops to instill order into an isotropic medium, which is the ultimate goal with this project. The coupled loops for now release defined amounts of a product/reagent on demand to the solution, a step towards programmable chemical reactivity 1/2

Coupling synthetic negative feedback loops While coupled biochemical feedback loops are optimized over millions of years of evolution, the rational design of synthetic counterparts, not possess…

🎉Congrats to David @anbismillah.bsky.social the whole crew + collab Albert Wong on the new @cp-chem.bsky.social paper bit.ly/3J5FFse What started with an effort to tune the activation thresholds in negative #feedback loops so we can couple them took a wild turn #ChemSky #molswitch #chemsky ⚗️🧪

Has NSF defied a court order by suspending 300 UCLA grants? Federal judge to hear arguments relating to preliminary injunction to restore funding for other UC grants

A federal judge in California wants NSF to explain why its decision to freeze 300 grants to scientists at UCLA isn’t a violation of her earlier ruling in another case that such blanket grant terminations are probably illegal. scim.ag/4fnlgei

RFK Jr and HHS just ended all US supported mRNA vaccine development
www.hhs.gov/press-room/h...

Link? :)

Law firms, universities, media companies, and now banks. If people don’t understand what’s happening to our country, it’s because they don’t want to.

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere. The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Duffy to announce nuclear reactor on the moon This is the first major agency effort by the interim NASA administrator, who is also the Transportation secretary and a former Fox News host.

Today in space policy: kill a satellite that measures greenhouse gases, make up a pretend plan to build a nuclear reactor on the moon.

www.npr.org/2025/08/04/n...

www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

What the Columbia Settlement Really Means

The Columbia settlement is an “astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to . . . an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day.” New @knightcolumbia.org analysis of the Columbia settlement, just published. knightcolumbia.org/blog/what-th...

Trans activist detained in Dubai – demand justice now Lilit Martirosyan was humiliated and denied rights while in transit through Dubai – just for being trans. Emirates refuses to investigate. Sign now for justice.

Lilit, a trans human rights defender, was detained in Dubai, denied her rights, and humiliated – all during a layover. Emirates won’t investigate. Demand justice and accountability now. Sign and share! ✈️🏳️‍⚧️✊ a.allout.org/s/PyeDM/

“Garber, in a conversation with one faculty member, said that the suggestion that Harvard was open to paying $500 million is ‘false’ and claimed that the figure was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials...”

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation

The most corrupt White House in history. Here is an account of what people are paying, directly to a PAC called MAGA Inc, in order to meet the president, get pardons, change policy

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/u...

How Aid Is Distributed In Gaza STEP 4 Palestinians in line asked if they want to film a short thank you video for Trump

How Aid Is Distributed In Gaza
theonion.com/how-aid...

This interview is so clear & quietly devastating. Public media as we understand it is over.

This is not about the end of NPR & PBS. They might be able to find ways to continue to make programs. Instead of content, this is about the capacity to broadcast at all - antennae, transmitters, licenses. 🧵

Recorded

Democratic erosion on the march

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If you are in San Diego Monday morning and somehow have nothing better to do at 8am (🤔), swing by the convention center to hear all about adaptive liquid crystals #SPIE #chemsky 🧪⚗️☕👀

Proud to share our new paper in ACS Central Science! We show that hydrogen bonding—often considered ineffective in water—can enable strong, selective binding of the hydrophilic carbohydrate glucuronate, when combined with [C–H···π] and electrostatic interactions. bit.ly/4o8oA0S

😳😱😳

Bending the knee one after the next

Mr. Digre's company has long manufactured speakers in Minnesota for export, including to a major customer in Canada. His firm relies on certain materials from China, the only place to get many small components needed for speakers. But Mr. Digre must now pay a 55 percent tariff on those Chinese imports. As a result, manufacturing for that customer from the United States no longer makes sense. So Mr. Digre has shifted speaker production to a factory in China, where he will export directly to Canada and bypass the United States entirely.

Read this paragraph, please.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/b...