mal sarma, phd

Subcommittee Markup of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

🧪 BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding.

Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24.

See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it.

🧵 1/3

Feeling Outrage Fatigue at the News? These Tips May Help Repeated exposure to outrage-inducing news or events can lead to emotional exhaustion. An expert who studies online outrage says there are ways to cope

Rage farmers are out in force this morning, deceptively recycling months-old news as #breaking for clicks. Don't let them manipulate you, outrage fatigue is real. Seeing the same outrage over & over can wear you down emotionally. Here's how to deal with it. www.scientificamerican.com/article/outr...

💕 these fellowship grants build science in America.

This is why Trump AND the Senate Republicans are a danger to all Americans:

They’ve allowed a man with no medical degree, medical training, or medical experience to be the federal government’s mouthpiece on health issues.

Deaths from heart disease down 75%, that’s NIH.

Deaths from stroke down 75%, that’s NIH.

HIV/AIDS no longer a death sentence, that’s NIH.

99% of FDA approved drugs in the last decade, that’s NIH.

Please show this video to anyone who doesn’t understand why the NIH is so important.

Rethinking Gender/Sex Identity Until quite recently, investigations of gender/sex development operated from a baseline assumption that gender/sex is dichotomous or binary. Most such studies constructed gender/sex outside of or adj....

1/5 I am pleased to announce a new paper, based on a talk I gave last year at the annual meeting of the Human Biology Association. This link is open 4 a free read for a while but eventually it will get pay-walled because I can't afford open access. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Social movements are more likely to have success when three factors are present: elite conflict, shifting public opinion, and elite blunders.

Mass collective action can create the conditions for these factors to emerge and deepen.

The return of diseases measles and whooping cough is not a failure of science or public health

It’s a failure of leadership and governance

The variable nature of sex An anthropologist shows why we should think beyond the binary

"Sex Is a Spectrum will be important for introducing a
wide readership to the nuances of scientific
understandings of variability in sex and of
the biocultural constitution of humans, and
I believe that there is much for biologists to
appreciate in the book as well." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics.

Like so many of the trends of the 1880’s-1920’s, eugenics is on the rise. Scientists have a moral obligation to speak up.

This is your regular reminder that executive orders are not royal decrees. Because America has no king.

NIH cancels its first and largest study centered on women The Women’s Health Initiative has produced numerous influential findings

Today in the USA, women are TWICE as likely to DIE giving birth than their mothers were a generation ago.
And TRUMP's War on Women continues with ending the landmark Women's Health Study: www.science.org/content/arti...

This is incredibly cool: if you search for a condition that’s affected your family, the site returns stats on how much NIH has done for that disease, *and* a contact form for reaching out to tell your Members of Congress why you want to see them defend NIH.

Pass it on!

One reason these “pronatalist” proposals won’t work is that they’re organised around a family model that is highly unusual & involves relatively novel gender roles.

Petition to have “traditional” family values renamed: Conservative? Novel? Unnatural…?

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

NIH Grant Cuts Aren't Saving Money. They're Wasting It. The Trump administration says the canceled funding is about cost efficiency, but data shows that the opposite is happening.

“Health and Human Services data show that some $373 million had already been spent on the 242 discontinued R01 grants”

Terminating grants partway through eliminates any possibility for return on investment. The result is not savings of public funds, but waste.

www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Last night was the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's midnight ride to warn the Minutemen of approaching British troops.

I want to take a moment to share an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence's grievances against King George III.

Remind you of anyone?

Just a reminder:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lacks formal education or professional credentials in critical scientific fields such as biology, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, immunology, virology, epidemiology, genetics, pharmacology, or medicine.

Call them what they are: robber barons. Billionaires are destroying the federal government so they can profit off deregulation and privatization. They're stealing from us only to sell it back as AI. And just like in the Gilded Age, they're blaming everything on immigrants, instead of class warfare.

MIT following Harvard's lead here

Keep the faith. Take action. Be honest about risk. Be prudent (with words, acquaintances, and technology).

@juliaangwin.com and @amifieldsmeyer.bsky.social distill the wisdom of elders and of the ages into a primer for The Opposition™️

Your weekend #mustread

BREAKING: The country of Norway just entered a bill to give transgender Americans asylum in the country of Norway…

LGBTQ+ STRONG! 🌈✨

a couple of wolves are playing with each other on the ground . Alt: a couple of wolves are playing with each other on the ground .

NO THEY ARE NOT DIRE WOLVES.

These animals do not have their ecosystem to return to.

These animals do not have a real pack to rear them.

And DO NOT BE BAMBOOZLED- storing and archiving animal's genetic material is NOT an effective bulwark against the human-driven planetary extinction crisis.

Don’t be overwhelmed
Just do #OneThing each day to
Build community
Stand up against evil
Love your neighbor
Serve the oppressed
Show compassion
Advance justice
Defend democracy
Spread joy
Today=not one but two art parties

Fear has a way of being contagious.

But courage is also contagious.

Another must-read book from @anthrofuentes.bsky.social

New York Times headline reading "New York says it does not intend to comply with D.E.I. order on schools"

Elementary school principals going where university presidents fear to tread...

A line graph showing an increasing number of cumulative protests so far from Jan 22, 2025-March 31, 2025--surpassing 6000 protests--compared with just over 2000 during the same period in 2017.

I'm not a programming guy but MSNBC and CNN should be airing this Cory Booker thing in the same way you take over programming if there's a no-hitter or a basketball player with 60 points in three quarters. It's a physical feat! Cut in for this kind of thing. Costs nothing, gooses ratings, good TV.

1/7 No surprise that in the latest EO the administration attacks the resoundingly scientifically supported view that race is “not a biological reality” but is a social construct with real lived impacts. They also attack the well documented reality that race is a human invention

Cory Booker delivers record-breaking Senate floor speech as he protests Trump’s actions for more than 24 hours Booker, the senior Democrat from New Jersey, on Tuesday broke the previously-held record for an individual speech given in 1957 by then-Democratic Sen. Strom Thurmond.

U.S. Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, has now delivered a record-breaking Senate floor speech, protesting President Donald Trump’s actions for more than 24 hours.