Nicole Dubilier

The suspensions landed perhaps most heavily in math. NSF suspended a $25 million grant for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), an international center at UCLA that hosts about 2000 visiting researchers every year for workshops and other programs. One of its stars, Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner frequently named as one of the greatest living mathematicians, also had his only NSF grant suspended. The $750,000 award was in its first year and supported Tao’s own research and a handful of graduate students in developing tools to tell whether a set of numbers is structured or random. Tao says he now cannot offer research assistant opportunities during the academic year, and he calls the cuts to IPAM “quite disastrous.”

NSF and NIH cut off almost 300 grants to UCLA. Story by @dangaristo.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Methane-munching symbionts fuel sea spiders in the deep sea | PNAS Methane-munching symbionts fuel sea spiders in the deep sea

Greatly enjoyed learning all about sea spiders and their methane-oxidizing symbionts while writing this commentary for a paper by Bianca Dal Bó, Vic Orphan, Shana Goffredi et al. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
| PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Just a thought: what if we stopped measuring the economy by the state of the stock market and started measuring it based The Biggest Economic Lies We’re Told | Robert Reich

Just a thought: what if we stopped measuring the economy by the state of the stock market and started measuring it based on how many people are housed and clothed and fed? https://youtu.be/tFjoDq0HfFw?si=vtbE2QNmXskvutjF

🦠🧍‍♀️From bacterial to human immunity.

We report in @science.org the discovery of a human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins that participates in the TLR pathway of animal innate immunity.
Co-led wt @enzopoirier.bsky.social by D. Bonhomme and @hugovaysset.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

People dying from lack of aid every day in Gaza: WFP official The hunger crisis in Gaza has reached new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row, a senior official with the UN World Food Programm...

Aid organizations report that thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of starvation while trucks full of food sit waiting across the border.

The full flow of humanitarian assistance must be restored immediately. news.un.org/en/story/202...

When you’re so busy crowing about your political motivations that you forget to pretend you did it for the Jews.

Absolutely. It's a whole team inside NIH who conceived of and wrote the #BethesdaDeclaration. And @standupforscience.bsky.social and @cdelawalla.bsky.social have been great partners in getting this all out to the public.

Tomorrow at 19:30 a huge demonstration in Tel Aviv - The Israeli Academia demands to end the war NOW. These horrors are unbearable and must stop.

De novo mutations mediate phenotypic switching in an opportunistic human lung pathogen - Nature Communications Bacteria evolving within humans employ strategies to overcome trade-offs. Here, the authors report that the cystic fibrosis-associated pathogen Burkholderia dolosa alternates phenotypes in vivo by acc...

How likely are SNP-based phenotypic reversions during human infection/coloniziation?

Our latest paper on the rare CF pathogen B. dolosa -- a great collaboration with folks I've worked with since my PhD and led by Alex Poret -- adds to the evidence that reversions are likely in large populations.

✊ Sign your support for all three here⬇️

NASA: actionnetwork.org/forms/suppor...

EPA: act.standupforscience.net/forms/epa-ad...

NIH: act.standupforscience.net/forms/add-na...

In scathing letter, NASA workers rebuke ‘rapid and wasteful changes’ at agency | CNN Current and former NASA employees have co-signed a declaration protesting changes at the agency that some say pose a grave risk to astronauts.

Hundreds of NASA employees have sounded the alarm.

They took the risk. Now it’s your turn. Stand with NASA employees calling out corruption and dangerous cuts.

Sign your support for the brave #NASA employees here➡️ zurl.co/X4CZT

zurl.co/Ob1wt

#StandUpForScience
#VoyagerDeclaration

Scenes from a science crisis: a selection of recent developments 🧵1/6

I still can’t believe that all NIH grants to my colleagues at Harvard and Harvard Medical School have been nullified. And that, as a nation, we’re somehow okay with this illegal, arbitrary, and petty act. Just think of the consequences: scientists, students, and patients will all suffer.

Summer #fieldwork of our @fischerlab.bsky.social ... 😳

Sampling high-altitude Alpine lakes for the #ERC-funded #CAPSOLUTION project to study the diversity of #viruses, #bacteria, and #protists therein.

@lqueiss.bsky.social

Both are excellent papers!

The Hologenome Concept: Helpful or Hollow? It is accepted that microbial symbionts are important to the biology of their hosts, but this essay asks what evidence is needed to determine whether symbionts and hosts have coevolved and whether the...

And also gonna re-read this: The Hologenome Concept: Helpful or Hollow? journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Holes in the Hologenome: Why Host-Microbe Symbioses Are Not Holobionts | mBio ABSTRACT The advent of relatively inexpensive tools for characterizing microbial communities has led to an explosion of research exploring the diversity, ecology, and evolution of microbe-host systems...

Re-reading this journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... “Holes in the Hologenome: Why Host-Microbe Symbioses Are Not Holobionts” and agreeing with a lot of it

Preprint: “Structural modeling reveals viral proteins that manipulate host immune signaling”

Using AI-guided structural modeling, we find new families of viral proteins that sequester or cleave host immune signaling molecules

Congrats Nitzan Tal!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

two sentences from the abstract of a paper that resonate with us way more than you can imagine...

Kristi Noem must resign now.

Nature: US senators poised to reject Trump’s proposed massive science cuts Committee gives first hint that policymakers might preserve, rather than slash, funding for US National Science Foundation and other agencies.

DO NOT GIVE UP!

Our advocacy is working.

A key Senate committee has indicated that it will reject Trump’s proposed cuts to science agencies including NASA and the NSF.

Keep speaking up and calling your electeds 🗣️🗣️🗣️

Bluesky is now giving notifications for likes on reposts to the reposter. Excited that this may help folks recognize how high engagement is here.

Just a reminder that reposts are critical here without the algorithm. Late reposts are especially helpful for those who log in infrequently.

A celebratory cake at the 40th anniversary of the Gordon conference that says “ 40 years Micro Pop Bio Answering big questions with little things” .

This week I am at the #GRC meeting for Microbial Population Biology. It is my favourite meeting. There is nothing like these small meetings for gathering a community together, and I learn a huge amount here every time. Here is to 40 more years of this incredible conference!

Deep-sea mining could start soon — before we understand its risks The U.S. push to mine international waters for metals defies global efforts to control and protect these fragile ecosystems.

“To date, the record indicates that deep-sea mining is a risky and unprofitable investment. [It] is a multibillion-dollar solution to problems that do not exist.” --Justin Alger

www.sciencenews.org/article/deep...

I missed this great thread about Marcia McNutt’s assertion that defending science from attacks is partisan.

My conclusion is that there aren’t scenarios where it is a partisan political position to counter lies with the truth.

There’s a debate in the other place - if scientific bodies speak out when a president makes factually incorrect statements or disputes established scientific principles, are they being politically partisan? A short 🧵 with some scenarios to help us think this through.

Congratulations @cpogoreutz@bsky.social - wonderful news!

ISME congratulates @ilafores.bsky.social from @usherbrooke.bsky.social as the winner of the Alma Dal Co Award, recognizing her as an exceptional early-career scholar who has made important contributions to microbial ecology.
isme-microbes.org/winner-of-th...
#MicrobialEcology #microbes #isme20

Let's chat! Can't wait to hear about your pink berry transposons!