Amy LeMessurier

Court accepting updated list of plaintiffs/grantees impacted! MUST BE SUBMITTED BY AUGUST 1st 5pm EST! Please disseminate!!!

Message from ACLU team below:

1/n

"The government never asks me what I think."

Well, we're asking now and it's about gentle flute, so this is your moment.

It’s finally happening 🥹 save the date for our very first in-person event!! Fill out our interest form if you’ll be in SD for #sfn25 or otherwise, or fill it out even if you won’t be able to make it - we’re also gathering interest in a virtual streaming option!! Stay tuned for more details to come!!

Computational Urban Ecology of New York City Rats Urban rats are highly adaptable, thriving in the dynamic and often inhospitable conditions of modern cities. Despite substantial mitigation efforts, they remain an enduring presence in urban environme...

New preprint!



tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵

w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius

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

academics be like “come join my lab!” then want you to do a bunch of things there

Hi Jeremy, can you elaborate any further on this? Is it NIH-wide? Is it retroactive for the whole FY, or only for grants going forward from some date after the beginning of the FY?

The House committee for NSF/NASA/NOAA is meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) at noon ET. Now would be a good time to call anyone on this list & tell them to keep science funding at full 2025 levels. You can remind them that 75% of voters want tax-funded science and they're concerned about the impact of cuts.

Are We About to Have Labor Camps in the United States of America? If you think that’s far-fetched, then you really haven’t been paying attention to what the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been up to lately.

An astonishing figure in this piece:

Last year, the U.S. budgeted $12.8B for new affordable housing.

This country is now poised to spend $45B on immigrant detention centers.

That's nearly *four times* as much on cages as on homes—in the middle of a devastating housing and homelessness crisis.

With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.

An archipelago, if you will

$45 billion for ethnic cleansing

The cover of the book, in greenish blueish color. The title is "The autobiography of a transgender scientist" by one of the most badass human beings that have ever existed, Ben Barres

TIL that one of the books removed from the Armed Forces Library because it "had DEI" in it is Ben Barres' autobiography. Remember that you can buy and should read this book because Ben was badass and an amazing scientist mitpress.mit.edu/978026253954...

Graphical abstract for "Vocal communication is seasonal in social groups of wild, free-living house mice." The abstract has, from top to bottom, a title, four middle image panels, and two bottom text panels. Image title: "Vocal communication in social groups of wild-free living house mice" Middle image panels from left to right: (1) An aerial snap shot of the region where the study site is located, an agricultural landscape in rural Switzerland. (2) An image of the study site, a small barn in the forest inhabited by mice. (3) An image of a radio frequency identification (RFID) box used to track mouse social interactions. A mouse is entering the box from the left while another sits outside. (4) A spectrogram showing example vocalizations - one low frequency squeak and one ultrasonic call - recorded from an RFID box. Bottom panels: Left: Data Collection  - 10 years of RFID-based tracking data (from 6,946 mice) - 15 months of acoustic monitoring (totaling 6,594 hours) - Machine learning for vocal detection and labeling (CNN) Right: Key Findings - Vocalization is seasonal (most in spring and summer) - Vocalization is associated with the presence of pups - Vocalization is correlated with social group dynamics

Very happy to share the latest from my postdoc‬!

10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data ➡️ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model 🐁

paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD
data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk
code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx

#bioacoustics #neuroskyence

1/8

"I've sat on this bench now for 40 years. And I've never seen evidence of racial discrimination like this."

"How can this be? I don't see anyone pushing back against it??"

Calls out doctors and other senior administration officials as named defendants for not standing up to racial discrimination.

After ruling, with anger in his voice, Judge Young:

"This represents racial discrimination. And discrimination against America's LGBTQ community. That's what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out. And I do so."

Judge Young says he expects that the government will quickly comply with his order in this case.

To clarify: he's vacating the grant terminations at issue. And wants the money to start flowing ASAP.

Of note: the universe of grants "at issue" in this case is in dispute and will be litigated further

"This Court rules that the challenged directives . . . are arbitrary and capricious."

"They are of no force and effect."

"They are illegal and so are each of the terminations before this Court"

⚖️ HUGE day today in the NIH terminations cases

There's a trial (of sorts) at 10a ET in Boston today for arguments that NIH unlawfully terminated 100s of grants.

It's a 3 hour hearing and I'll post periodic updates.

Of note: this is the 1st lawsuit filed against the Trump Admin to go to trial.

How a discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR - Richmond Scientific A discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR, the gold-standard COVID-19 tests used to fight the global pandemic.

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪
www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...

a woman in a black and white dress is making a funny face . ALT: a woman in a black and white dress is making a funny face .

This morning, courageous NIH workers shared a document they are calling the “Bethesda Declaration” with Dr. Bhattacharya, urging him to reverse some of the actions that are badly misaligned with progress toward the NIH mission.

1/3

remember when Cuomo sent thousands of active Covid cases back to nursing homes, causing the deaths of like 6k people, and then covered it up?

UC Berkeley researchers team up for first-of-its-kind lawsuit over Trump funding cuts University of California staff members hope to use a class action lawsuit to restore their research funding.

“It makes a really powerful statement that the professors themselves are stakeholders and that it’s just not the institutions alone...It’s a way of saying, ‘Well, if you’re slow to the battlefield, we’re going to get there first.’”

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

These are the guys who want to take over our universities

the word alert is in a purple circle ALT: the word alert is in a purple circle

ACTION ITEM-----ACTION ITEM

Implementation of Schedule F

This is what a lot of us have been worried about.

This allows for many civil service positions to replaced with political appointees. This could include NIH institute directors and even POs.

BUT THERE IS A COMMENT PERIOD...

1/n

Looking to hire a super smart, motivated, all-around fantastic neuro lab tech, especially in the NY area? My undergrad assistant is graduating and looking for research tech positions. She's already a pro at behavior/histology/mouse surgery. Please send opportunities my way!

cosyne 2025 talk: Projection-specific cortical processing of vocalizations, Friday 3/28 5:15

Who’s at #COSYNE2025 ? Excited to present my postdoc work on projection-specific and multi-area auditory processing of (mouse) baby cries on Friday:

Many political observers have said that if Republicans end Social Security, they will be defeated soundly in the next election. But what if there is no next election?

This cure for sickle cell anemia was made possible by NIH-funded research to turn the gene for fetal hemoglobin back on. It was done predominantly by NIH researchers, including intramural researchers on the NIH campus.

irp.nih.gov/catalyst/33/...

Take a good look at who is speaking out. Grad students are running the biggest science protest because no one else would. Institutions are going to be targeted no matter what we do. Might as well go down fighting.