kkbaldwin.bsky.social

Live 65-hour recording of rat hippocampal neuron growth | 2025 Small World in Motion Competition Louis Romette - Live 65-hour recording of rat hippocampal neuron growth (day 3 to day 6)

Congrats to our PhD student Louis Romette, among the winners in this year's @healthcare.nikon.com Nikon Small World competition! His hard work optimizing long-term live-cell imaging of developing neurons makes for mesmerizing movies (and lots of insights)
www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20...

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional

ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool

Exactly.

this is the conscice thing I've been mulling over all day

We cannot use race and ethnicity for college admissions but we can for arrests?

🚨NEW: Maine Governor Janet Mills is strongly considering a run for the U.S. Senate against GOP incumbent Susan Collins.

RETWEET if you would support Governor Mills for the Senate!

Seeing Kamala Harris openly say that the system is broken was so powerful.

Just having someone in her position say it so candidly without qualification was beyond powerful.

"Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

i can't say for sure, but it was definitely this

I would like to start a petition to rename the JFK airport in New York. My experiences there really suggest it should be called RFK. New Yorkers.. will you sign ?

Front-page-style graphic titled “BREAKING NEWS” with photos of RFK Jr. and Dr. Bhattacharya in front of a government hearing chamber. Text reads: “NIH Scientists Sound the Alarm as Health Research Faces Historic Threat” and “NIH Employees Send Trump Cronies Scathing Wake-Up Call.”

🚨BREAKING: 300+ NIH employees call out the harm of censorship & politicized science in scathing email to Bhattacharya, demanding an end to political interference, a lift on funding freezes, & rehiring of fired staff whose work saves lives.

This is historic - insiders are blowing the whistle.
🧵(1/5)

N.I.H. Workers Denounce Trump’s ‘Harmful’ Health Policies

New York Times story about #BethedaDeclaration is up.

(Gift Link)

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/h...

NIH scientists have been angry for months. Now some are rebelling. More than 90 NIH scientists sign their names to the “Bethesda declaration” in protest of Trump administration policies they say are harming people’s health.

Washington Post story about #BethesdaDeclaration

www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

1/n

This seems like a great day to remind Bluesky that Stephen Miller lived four doors down from me freshman year

And our student council person asked him (and everyone) to sign a birthday card for our dorm’s janitor

And he threw a tantrum and wrote an op-ed about not socializing with “the help.”

Here again is the remarkable impact of immunotherapy for intractable cancer via engineered T cells
gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/h...

Former DOGE engineer says federal waste and fraud were 'relatively nonexistent' NPR's Juana Summers talks with Sahil Lavingia, who worked for the Department of Government Efficiency as a software engineer assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about his experience.

"I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing." www.npr.org/2025/06/02/n...

Human embryo editing against disease is unsafe and unproven — despite rosy predictions Pitfalls of heritable genome editing undermine theoretical benefits.

Human embryo editing against disease is unsafe and unproven — despite rosy predictions www.nature.com/articles/d41... with @shaicarmi.bsky.social and @hankgreely.bsky.social

thanks to ardem and the other brave scientists trying to tell our most beautiful stories of discovery, curing disease and international cooperation -

Cutting the NIH—The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe This JAMA Forum discusses the recent budget cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH), the effects of these cuts on scientific research and health of individuals in the US, and the prospects for cha...

"Our calculations suggest that the proposed budgetary cuts to the NIH will create a social cost that is 16 times greater than the savings that the administration is attempting to achieve."
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Babies will die when they could have been saved. People will lose good jobs. All of us will be poorer financially and personally. It's like building a rocket that could take man to the moon - and being about to go up. And then saying - great but now we will only pay for the fuel and the radio.

All of NIH funding to Northwestern University is frozen. This pause includes noncompeting approved funding, new and competing grants with fundable scores. No reimbursements for money already spent have been received since March. This situation is rarely reported so please Please get the word out!

Trump’s NIH And NSF Cuts Estimated To Cost The U.S. Economy $10 Billion Annually Economists find public R&D drives U.S. productivity growth — and pays for itself

New Forbes story about the economic consequences of science cuts.

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Thoughtful and thorough analysis.

1/n

They say sports builds character. Here, perhaps, is some real evidence for the claim:

exactly

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first. One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish. Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points. We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are. Anelise Feldman Freshman, Yarmouth High School Yarmouth

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

Wow!

This is so important for us to understand

hard to not say I told. you so

it is awful and insane and illegal -