Brian Umberger

Science peeps (and everyone who cares about science): Please comment on this. Yes, I know the relentless onslaught of this sort of thing is exhausting... But we must keep at it. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

It’s a crime there is not a word that means trying to find dog poop at dusk in leaves that are the same color as the poop 🐶 💩

Blerg. Here... we... go....

A compelling rationale for taking the road more travelled… ☕

Check out our new @grantwitness.org website! 18 months ago, we launched as a humble Google Sheet listing 8 terminated NIH grants. Today, we’ve launched a new site tracking tens of thousands of grants and new awards at several different agencies. THANK YOU to everyone who's made this possible! 🧵

Move fast and break things… including yourself 🤖

I am recruiting a PhD student in sensorimotor neuroscience to join my lab, with a start date of January 2027. This position is fully funded. If you are interested, please send your CV and a brief letter of interest by email. Reposts appreciated.

Because the 1st is a Saturday, “How is it August already?!” will be observed today, Friday, July 31, 2026. Please panic accordingly.

Most of the statistical tests you learned in stats class — t-test, ANOVA, correlation — are actually special cases of a single thing: linear regression. Ch 7 of Experimentology argues that thinking in models, not tests, is more flexible and a better foundation for theory. 🧵 experimentology.io

Inspired by Project Hail Mary, this video explores the biomechanics of living beyond Earth, from muscle and bone loss to the challenges of movement in microgravity. The science fiction is compelling. The science behind it is even more fascinating. 🚀 Watch here: youtu.be/h5ZN3B17FH4

Thinking about LLM use in research: Assembling text or images for models should be held to the same standards as other data collection methods. Otherwise, IRB would clobber us and rightfully so for using non-consensual data. ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, etc. don't meet that ethical standard.

Heading to Vancouver for the World Congress of Biomechanics? Don't miss out on the annual Women in Science event! This is a fantastic opportunity to network, share experiences, and connect across the biomechanics community. Register with the link in your ASB June E-blast by Sunday, June 28th.

Been wondering why NSF isn't spending most of its FY26 appropriation? A $1.5B tech initiative may be the reason. And big cuts to hundreds of research programs could be just the beginning of the bad news. www.science.org/content/arti...

“A single Tomahawk cruise missile runs about $3.6 million, roughly what it takes to fund one scientist’s multiyear grant. The entire National Science Foundation budget is less than what we spent in the first week of the war with Iran.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/o...

Thread about Frontiers journals worth reading... 😱

1/ How did the human skeleton evolve to support bipedalism and tool use? 🦴 A new study from my lab in Genome Biology and Evolution dives into the genomic changes that separate us from chimpanzees during skeletal development. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/.... Here's a quick overview of what we found:

Cameron Hill and co-authors from @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social identified distinct distributions of #myosin motor conformations during contraction of slow and fast skeletal #muscle ⚙️ 🔬 📜 Read the study: 🔗 physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/...

Scoop: NSF has been quietly blocking new funds and grants to four top universities: Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Dozens of proposals from PIs at these universities—and their collaborators—have been stuck at the Office of Award Management awaiting finalization for months.

The National Science Foundation is terminating and suspending grants again, and at Grant Witness we need you to help to track them! 🧪 We can only identify research being suppressed by under-the-radar suspensions directly from researchers. Please report! grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF

Tech CEO says he had no idea what he was talking about (In Time Magazine... not The Onion)

Come work with us!

Or in more detail: Robert Merton's (1942) famous norms describe the ethos of modern science. The second of these, universalism, precludes the consideration of national borders, race, or other personal characteristics in determining who may contribute to, and what constitutes, valid science.

"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Interesting job - Director Of Orthotics & Prosthetics Research at UCSF aprecruit.ucsf.edu/JPF06089

Cleve Moler has passed away #neuroskyence #academicsky #sensorimotor www.mathworks.com/company/abou...

Some extinct human ancestors and modern-day apes appear to share wrist traits that raise the question of whether our last common ancestor walked on its knuckles

Supported by fantastic collaborators, we have developed computer simulations of cardiac growth that reproduce eccentric and concentric growth associated with sarcomeric protein variants, mitochondrial dysfunction, hypertension, and valve insufficiency. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Updated my textbook with a cleaner lay-out, better accessibility, and eight new interactive visualizations made completely in html (such as this illustration of the positive predictive value). lakens.github.io/statistical_...

Still one of the best parts of the job. Congrats, Dr. Daphna Raz! Now a presidential postdoctoral fellow at CU Boulder.

"If you ask researchers, 'Why don't you do high-risk research?' they say, 'Well, the funding agencies won't fund it.' If you ask the agencies, they say, 'Well, the researchers won't propose it.'" #MetaSci

📣 Postdoc in Human Neurophysiology & Neurorehab 📣 The Real-Time NeuroRehabilitation Lab at the U of Iowa is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Scholar! Motor control, EEG/TMS, neurorehabilitation, and real-time multimodal methods. 📅 Summer/Fall 2026 📧 sara-hussain@uiowa.edu Please share!

Trump removes a thorn in his side by firing all 24 members of the National Science Board, NSF's oversight body. www.science.org/content/arti...

Nice coverage of what’s happening at NSF from @thehill.com! Two points from me: 1. NSF staff are hanging in like a hair in a biscuit and the admin isn’t making it easy. It’s a psyop every day. 2. Jim O’Neill is not the one to run NSF. Full stop. thehill.com/homenews/adm...

Preprint: What good is modeling? Introducing biology students to theory - arxiv.org/abs/2604.13344 - how to teach and think about what modeling contributes to science. How does it fit into the scientific method? This is often misunderstood.

"The spread of colleges into towns and cities across the country, which put a degree within reach of a growing share of the public, is one of the triumphs of postwar America," Jeffrey Selingo writes. "We’re now at risk of the process playing out in reverse."

Abstract Mad Libs

I was expecting more The Far Side content today 🌖

I am currently recruiting a PhD student to work on our "Motor complexity and aging" project funded by the @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

"We are watching two disciplines trade their worst habits. Neuroscience is mistaking benchmarked prediction for understanding, and machine learning is mistaking mechanistic language for mechanism. ..."

State election officials testifying under oath say that voting by mail is secure. But an AI video in the MAGA2028 Facebook group says it’s rife with fraud. For busy Supreme Court justices, it can be hard to know who to trust.