Beth Cimini 🔬💻📊

New Documents Reveal a Controversial Vaccine Study's Unusual Path to CDC Approval A new investigation has found irregularities in the ethics review of a grant to study effects of a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine in Guinea-Bissau.

New from @katherineeban.bsky.social in @rollingstone.com: CDC appointees bypassed the agency’s scientists to rush-fund a study questioning the hep B birth dose. The ethics committee president says his name was used on the approval without his knowledge.

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

"Nine agency sources told STAT at the time of her appointment that they were concerned Høeg’s lack of regulatory experience and apparent bias against certain products like SSRIs and RSV monoclonals could compromise the drug center."

Screenshot from an NIH website reading: "Table 1 shows the number of principal investigators (PIs) applying for or receiving an R01-equivalent grant in FYs 2021 to 2025, disaggregated by career stage. NIH supported 1,423 and 1,144 ESIs in FYs 2024 and 2025, respectively. The decrease seen in FY 2025 may likely be due in part to NIH implementing a requirement to use 50% of its remaining competing Research Project Grant (RPG) funds (starting in June 2025) for full-year funded competing RPGs, which was expected to lead to fewer awards and support fewer researchers overall."

Check this out straight from the NIH website, acknowledging that multiyear funding was likely responsible for a 20% decrease in early stage investigators.

And that it was expected.

A strange approach for someone so committed to the next generation of scientists.

grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Last night, I was notified that another person has died in ICE custody.

That’s 39 people who have died on ICE’s watch during Trump’s second term.

We cannot grow numb to this. There must be immediate oversight and accountability.

Microscopy image of keratin (cyan) and desmosomes (magenta)

There are an extremely limited number of open slots for the Analytical and Quantitative Light Microscopy @aqlm.bsky.social course at @mblscience.bsky.social April 29-May 8 2026.

www.mbl.edu/education/ad...
Apply here for this amazing opportunity!

BREAKING: The Supreme Court STRIKES DOWN Trump's "emergency" tariffs. The vote is 6–3. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

from reddit r/ExperiencedDevs • 21h ago Tech-Cowboy An AI CEO finally said something honest (Meta Dax Raad from anoma.ly might be the only CEO speaking honestly about Al right now. His most recent take: "everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code here's what things actually look like - your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping - majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life - they're not using Al to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend - the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon - even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real - your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills"

someone in AI fucked up and actually told the truth

Alysa Liu Is Skating Again, Her Way This Time

Her father fled China because he organized student protests during Tiananmen. He was a political refugee. The story of this family, and Alysa Liu, would have played out very differently today. This is what we're losing. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/w...

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed E.O. 9066, authorizing the forced relocation & incarceration of more than 125,000 Japanese Americans, solely because of their heritage.

Hmm. The US is giving $10 billion in taxpayer dollars, not appropriated by Congress, to a fake board set up by the President and which he put himself in charge of *for life*... seems very, very illegal.

Congrats to BART rider and Oakland legend Alysa Liu on winning a gold medal at the Olympics and making the Bay Area proud!

The left doesn't hate technology, we hate being exploited: aftermath.site/anthropic-clau...

The ‘Most Massive Attack On Free Speech’ Is Happening Right Now, And The Twitter Files Crew Is Mighty Quiet For the last five years, we had to endure an endless, breathless parade of hyperbole regarding the so-called “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, repeatedly and at high volume…

The silence from the "Twitter files" pearl clutchers on this abuse of power shows, once again, that they never cared about free speech, but rather controlling the narrative and suppressing dissent.

Thanks to @masnick.com for this important piece.

www.techdirt.com/2026/02/18/t...

So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine, has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.

In the middle line, shouldn't there only be one x^3?

A pilot in a submersible vehicle collecting sediments samples in 30 meters of water looking for Asgards (microbial relatives of eukaryotes)

One of the biggest questions in biology is how complex cells evolved about 2 billion years ago. Here's my new story on how scientists are solving the mystery of eukaryotes like us. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qMbo22

NIH Director Bhattacharya to lead CDC after O’Neill’s exit He's the third leader of the public health agency since this summer.

@chelseacirruzzo.bsky.social & I on Bhattacharya also leading the CDC:

As 16 of 27 of the IC's are led by acting directors, its top official will now have his attention split between two massive agencies

www.statnews.com/2026/02/18/c...

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide.

This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

I’ve always said the head of NIH should be a part time job.

Instead of "the left isn't paying enough attention to these machine gods" they're claiming to build, perhaps we should write an article about how effective altruists brand themselves "left", ask who is writing these articles, and trace their cults and sources of funding.

Today is the first day of Ramadan, the first day of Adar, Lunar New Year and Mardi Gras.

This means that for one reason or another, the majority of humans on the planet have a reason to eat fried food, and that is beautiful.

Another thing to add to the Dem platform: all of these contracts were plainly procured through fraud, not one of them will be honored, and all culpable parties will be prosecuted.

This isn't a "radical" demand, it's the bare minimum required to re-establish the rule of law.

People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.

Some had Shirley, others had Obama, but, Jesse was the beacon for so many of my generation, teaching us early on that perseverance has no limits and hope plus action are two of the greatest forces for change. Thank you, Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. May you rest in eternal peace and power.

Recent CBS News news:
1. Anderson Cooper leaves 60 Minutes after two decades
2. Stephen Colbert reveals network won’t let him air interview with Dem
3. Producer says politics dictating what airs
4. Owner’s bid for CNN parent back on the table.
5. Not firing Epstein pal.

gotta do investigations into DHS “waste, fraud and abuse” as pretext for killing the agency

The regime is now dictating what political views are acceptable to air on television and paramount/cbs are collaborating in that censorship bsky.app/profile/ditz...

Ep 25 - from our new AE/DB Bsky account! It's a great one from @erinweisbart.bsky.social - once we've done Cell Painting and gotten our data, how do we interpret the measurements into biology? She and @bethcimini.bsky.social walk you through it. PLUS, in honor of our silver episode, bonuses (1/2)

Extra special bonus - video of Erin and I in the same place! It does happen!