Michael Zanis

And the new NCI Director moves to piss away his scientific credibility.

First, killing cancer cells is a very low bar; many compounds kill cancer cells and are not the least bit useful for treating cancer.

1/2

Even after Trump is gone, the world will remember that he threatened to forcibly seize the territory of a peaceful democratic ally, and our institutions failed to immediately remove him. That makes US dangerously unreliable, not just one senile gangster.

Inside Donald Trump’s Attack on NASA’s Science Missions During his first year back in office, the president tried to bring America’s age of discovery to an end.

I wrote about the cosmic grandeur of American space science and this president’s foolish attempts to sabotage it

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

OK, crash course in oil. Oil has two main gradings, viscosity (light or heavy) and sulfur (sweet or sour). A light (low viscosity) and sweet (low sulfur) oil is easier to process into gasoline and other products than a heavy and sour one, so the light & sweet oil commands a premium price.

Microscopy Bat signal!

I want to compile a list of biological samples that demonstrate microscope capabilities, including the reagents to generate them. Please send me anything you know of!! Beads are great for QC, but there's a different teaching benefit with biology. 1/n

The Nobel Prize committee should announce the World Cup winner tomorrow

While this is so deeply beautiful and moving about the important place of art in society and I'm so glad Dr. Baum shared this with us, I'm sad Stoppard never knew.

Please tell people how much their work impacts you. Write to a playwright, academic, artist, etc and let them know how they moved you.

The late Miocene possibly had lower athmospheric pCO2 than we have right now (but higher than pre-industrial), but that was enough for there not to be permafrost in North Greenland.
Once a local threshold is reached, that is enough sometimes. 🧪

Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

green and yellow cover of University Keywords, ed by Andy Hines

Table of contents for University Keywords University: An Introduction, Andy Hines Academic Freedom, Jennifer Ruth and Ellen Schrecker Adjunct, Heather Steffen Admissions, Scott Gelber Alternative Institutions, Andy Hines and Eli Meyerhoff Athletics, Wayne L. Black Board of Trustees, Asheesh Siddique Kapur Budget, Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra Campus, Davarian Baldwin Classroom, Richard Simpson Critical University Studies, Rana M. Jaleel, Isaac Kamola, and Heather Steffen Debt, Eleni Schirmer and Jason Wozniak Degree, Christopher Newfield Discipline, Vineeta Singh Diversity, p.s. kehal EdTech, Annie McClanahan and Louise McCune Endowment, Dennis M. Hogan Entrepreneurship, Jesse Goldstein

Table of contents for university keywords Fiction, Jeffrey J. Williams Legislation, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Noncitizen Student, Abigail Boggs Police, Yalile Suriel and Grace Watkins Ranking, Jelena Brankovic and Stefan Wilbers Revenue, Dan Nemser and Brian Whitener Risk Management, Mattie Armstrong-Price Sustainability, Kai Bosworth, Jesse Goldstein, Andy Hines, and Eli Meyerhoff Title IX, Rana M. Jaleel Union, Zach Schwartz-Weinstein Appendix: Questions to Consider for Composing a Keywords Entry Contributor Bios Acknowledgments Index

It's publication day for UNIVERSITY KEYWORDS. Across 27 sharp essays, the book offers a critical account of the political economy of US higher education, how it came to be structured this way, and how together we might build a better university together.

When does sloppiness become misconduct?
What level of manipulation becomes fabrication?
If authors say it is an error, should we trust them?
If raw data is missing, is there any justification for proceeding?
Should you report to the institution?
#AIMOS2025

Q: Why is international collaboration essential for advancing research?
A: Understand global initiatives
No: It promotes shared standards
#AIMOS2025

Hackathon Speaker/Chair = Ginny Barbour Janet Catterall Topic/Title = Hacking the system: improving research assessment by stealth Outline = The aims of this session are to: 1. Ensure participants are familiar with key principles of responsible research assessment 2. Understand the link between responsible research assessment, open science and research quality 3. Take away 2-3 concrete actions that participants can use to ""hack"" research assessment at their institution Many researchers are keen to see improvements in research assessment in order for it to support open and reproducible research. However, it is often the case that researchers don‚Äôt know where to start with change at their institution, and may feel relatively powerless in doing so. Using the new guide from DORA - A Practical Guide to Implementing Responsible Research Assessment at Research Performing Organizations (https://sfdora.org/resource/practical-guide/) we will outline key starting points and tools for effecting change. Through group discussions, we will collaboratively develop a set of simple ways that individuals - especially early and mid-career researchers (who are often poorly represented in policy discussions) - can take back to their institutions, and via their own local networks and peer groups help initiate and catalyse responsible research assessment ‚ especially as it relates to open science and research quality.

Slide about DORA

Now attending the Hackaton "Hacking the system: improving research assessment by stealth"
DORA: Valuing academics by a wider range of scholarly products (wider than number of publications/citations), such as sharing datasets, protocols, software.
sfdora.org
#AIMOS2025

Speaker and title slide

1. Madeleen van der Merwe: Statistical Errors in Health Journal Articles. A systematic review.
We looked at 53 articles - identified 940 statistical errors
#AIMOS2025

NIH grant cuts have disrupted hundreds of clinical trials, study finds The second Trump administration has been defined by widespread cuts to federal spending, including at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). | The second Trump administration has been defined by wid...

Cuts to NIH grants have disrupted at least 383 clinical trials, with infectious disease research hit especially hard. A stark example of the real-world repercussions of Trump and co.'s health policy 🧪 my latest:

Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health This cross-sectional study summarizes the number of trials with terminated grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and calculates the proportion of affected trials among those with previou...

Important new analysis identifying the scope of clinical trials disrupted because of NIH shenanigans.

> 74 thousand trial participants affected

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

1/4

Post-Trump Reform Requires Reinvigorating American Democracy After I wrote this “status interview” piece on Tuesday, I heard from...

Post-Trump Reform Requires Reinvigorating American Democracy talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/post-...

how the cave generator i'm working on works!

this uses patches (see rainbows, beginning of each run) with distinct cellular automata assigned to them.

patches which are along edges are given a chance of becoming a wall, which chews up edges and makes it less rectangular.

then it will connect up

weird js bug. does anyone know how an undefined is creeping into this iteration over an array with no undefined in it? chrome, windows if it's implementation specific.

i have tested a number of times and it seems not to happen in windows firefox.

Old joke: If a genie gave Democrats three wishes, they'd negotiate down to one, and then wish for something they think Republicans might like.

Do not cave in on the shutdown!

Do not cave in on the shutdown!

Remembering my sister Rosalind Franklin Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 aged 37 years. Sympathy and feminism have combined to give us her familiar image as a downtrodden woman scientist, brilliant but neglected, a heroine t...

Her sister wrote my favorite essay about her. She points out that RF would have been famous even if she'd never looked at DNA

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

We are going to live in a world where the the marginal cost of electricity is very close to zero

I'm gonna keep quoting myself until this crime against civilization starts getting serious notice.

Exciting day for the lab: our 1rst paper is officially out in @currentbiology.bsky.social 🥳 Wonderful collaboration wt @gautamdey.bsky.social showing how Cryo-ExM achieves consistent immunostaining in diverse diatoms, from the lab and the natural environment 1/n
#ProtistsOnSky
tinyurl.com/2zxaund7

🚨Our collaboration with @centriolelab.bsky.social & @gautamdey.bsky.social is out today in @cp-cell.bsky.social
We show that #Expansion #Microscopy is a broad-spectrum modality for Euks, enabling 3D phenotypic maps rooted to phylogeny.
#ProtistsOnSky #SciComm #SciSky

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

A River Restoration in Oregon Gets Fast Results: The Salmon Swam Right Back The fish had been missing from the headwaters of the Klamath River for more than a century. Just a year after the removal of a final dam, they’ve returned.

Chinook salmon have returned to the Klamath River in Oregon after being absent for more than a century. The announcement came roughly a year after the last of four major hydroelectric dams on the river was demolished.

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.

MIT’s NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI deployments fail after interviewing 150 execs, surveying 350 workers, and analyzing 300 projects. The real “productivity gains” seem to come from layoffs and squeezing more work from fewer people not AI.

screengrab from the marketplace reading $2262 per month, office visits $30, generic drugs $20.

So I've been paying $1200 a month this year for an ACA plan.

2026 preview site from the regime just went up.

This is what the exact same plan will cost me per month in 2026.

I'm beside myself.