CoreyWelch_STEM

I love caves, inflatables and science communication. This month is #colorectal cancer awareness month - the disease that has been ruining me the last 20 months. Get a colonoscopy folks. It’s not as fun as what I’m doing here but it ain’t that bad either.

Private research that is useful for moving knowledge forward but not projected to be quite profitable enough never sees the light of day.

Then others, perhaps multiple other private or academic labs, will have to redo that research to gain that knowledge. That is the opposite of efficiency. (4/4)

Anyway, I think about this every time I see federal funding getting strangled by Trump and Russ Vought and the spineless Republicans that allow it.

The longtime conservative mantra is that "research can be privatized and be undertaken more efficiently" is complete BS and makes me so angry. (3/4)

The way he told me what I would find and the smug look on his face told me he clearly had done the research already.

Surely not as robustly as I managed by devoting years of my life to it.

However, he wasn't just predicting it based on background knowledge or intuition. (2/4)

When I first started PhD research on genetically modified poplar I went to a co-op meeting that helped fund the research.

I met a scientist who worked in private industry developing gm plants. He told me what my results would be and ended up being >90% correct. (1/4)

Delays in awards and funding calls worry NIH-funded researchers Many programs may be pushed into the next fiscal year, and some could face funding gaps

Delays in NIH funding and calls for proposals...

www.science.org/content/arti...

Private money cannot replace public funding of science Who should pay for American science? In the current political climate, many are looking to the private sector to compensate for cuts in public funding. At the Harvard School of Public Health—particula...

A response to the opinion that private $ can replace the NIH.

Businesses are not charities. They work on profit margins. Decades of $ is essential for research to progress from an initial discovery to treatment. Most of the dirty work goes on in academic labs.

🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Of course

Source: archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes....

Never forget that the primary tactic of this movement is distraction. They point to medical statements, procedural wins and tangentially related anecdotes because *they have no evidence of their core claim*

If lots of kids were transitioning without assessment they would be talking about that.

I think Harvard's plan to respond to the every-decade moral panic about grade inflation by capping A's is pedagogically obscene.

Grades should be a measure of learning, not competition.

Grade caps engender competition and anxiety where we should be teaching collaboration and a love of learning.

One of the most tangibly lifesaving efforts of @standupforscience.bsky.social to date was to send an on-the-ground investigator to Guinea Bissau to understand the context of the unethical &CDC funded Hep B infant vaccines study.

We presented to a packed room of horrified House and Senate folks.

Florida turtle ant (Cephalotes varians) Nature Ecology & Evolution - Corrie S. Moreau studies the evolution of extreme armour and gut microbiomes in turtle ants.

How fun! I was invited to write a "Species Spotlight" for Nature Ecology & Evolution @natecoevo.nature.com and I chose my favorite species the Florida turtle ant Cephalotes varians! rdcu.be/e5EZK Including a stunning photo of ants I collected by @alexwild.bsky.social

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

There were so many of us, exactly when these emails were being written, expressly working to undo the harms of sexual harassment and sexual discrimination in science. And so many people refused to believe us that any of it was real. It was all real.

19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

Holden Thorp’s slides from a recent talk.

The fundamental flaw with @holdenthorp.bsky.social’s argument is thinking that organizations and people can only do one thing at a time (even though he is really close to acknowledging it!)

Let’s break it down, bc I’m tired of this. 🧵

(cred: @ianlmorgan.bsky.social)

Yeah this “pre-Watergate worldview” where the president has more power and there was less influence of Congress is

1. Not the way NIH has worked since the 1940s and

2. Incompatible with successful science.

Congratulations!

THE UNBOXING IS UPON US

I'm not sure if it's worth adding this, but in case anyone's wondering, @AmandaAskell is a brilliant philosopher doing by far the most important philosophical research anyone in the world is doing right now (in terms of both impact and philosophical interest). I've had the privilege of seeing her at many stages along this journey, from a chance meeting in the hallways of Coombs (the building where ANU Philosophy used to be) back in about maybe 2015, to a visit with her at OpenAI's offices on the day, more or less, that she and others decided to leave OpenAI to form Anthropic, to a number of workshops and other things since, where she showed an incredible generosity of spirit to the folks both in philosophy and in the FAccT community who most needed to learn from her work.

I helped build the FAccT academic conference, and white men like Seth have to come along and make sure that the people we tried to get away from, the TESCREAL eugenicist ghouls, have every academic space in addition to the billions they're drowning in.

This Thread. UGH.

General challenge: Show me where AI and/or Private Equity have systemically improved things that outweighs their cost/damage.

YouTube video by Nightloop Jesse Jackson’s - Wattstax Music Festival Opening Speech (1972)

I. AM. SOMEBODY. ✊🏽

Rest in Power, Reverend Jesse Jackson.

youtu.be/NTVwT3j_zqY?...

I love it when the scientists reinvent the humanities for the 14th time in a decade.

The universe genuinely is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us! So today is a good day to preorder my new book The Edge of Space-Time, which urges readers to see the cosmos through new eyes and in the process learn skills we use to resist authoritarianism. #BookSky

A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 across NSF. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.

NSF Update

Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit.

Now by Directorate...

1/11

The Epstein Emails Show How the Powerful Talk About Race The files reveal the disgraced financier’s interest in “race science.”

A great piece from @alibreland.bsky.social on Epstein's race science obsession—one he shares with much of the contemporary right wing elite www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

If there’s a discussion you want to have, you can go ahead and have it, but it’s not gonna help to start the discussion by saying omg why is everyone ELSE so irrational

A post that states that everyone else is being super unreasonable in their positions is not starting a discussion in good faith so it’s not surprising if the discussion doesn’t proceed that way (and that applies to both Chris’s post and yours!)

Hey so remember when I said white women are endangering their own freedom when they cozy up to white supremacy? And that the hard right fantasies do not include sharing power with women? Yeah so the not so quiet part is here

The real problem isn’t that private equity is driving up costs, wages have stagnated, and unregulated hotel chains like AirBnB are gobbling up stock. It’s your relentless appetite for—I’m sorry, I’m getting a breaking update…they’re saying that it’s no longer avocado toast, it’s gut-friendly juices.