Liz Haswell

An outstanding meditation on the morality we love to press onto the world! Bravo Latour

I endorse this message.

This was an incredible episode!!! For all scientists who love solving problems just to solve them, for anyone who fears for our students and our future--

Last call for Boston-area grad students & postdocs. We are hosting a one-day #scicomm & public engagement workshop on Tuesday, Oct 20. This is made possible by faculty sponsors at Brown & Harvard, and will be hosted at MIT. Application closes Friday - apply ASAP at bit.ly/ENGAGE-Bosto...

They should try something more challenging Like ricin Or polonium-210

“It would seem to me that proofs without stories, or even stories without struggle or mystery, and first glimpses of strange beasts, are not very meaningful or valuable to us humans”—Kai Shaikh, math PhD student at U Toronto www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/s...

Another Nobel Prize for 7 transmembrane receptors!!

This has to be a joke post, right?

Good end-of-FY coverage by the Times. The amount of unspent funds has wiggled but it was pretty clear for some time now that NSF was simply not going to spend a substantial portion of its congressional appropriation this year.

👏👏👏

I don't wanna COUCH my words here: I know JD Vance, his eyeliner, and absent Ashley Moody are used to running away from people when things get tough because they care more about themselves and their billionaire buddies than the people they represent. But this is my home. /1

Why is Title IX?

I recommend people read this to get a sense of the president's grave cognitive impairment. Trump is either unwilling or unable (or maybe both) to answer the questions he's actually asked, so he just rants and raves while the interviewers do their best to provide structure to his random brain firings

I am pleased to receive the AAB President medal !! Thanks to the amazing people that nominated me and to @blackinplantsci.bsky.social for giving me a pathway to give back to the whole Plant Science community by contributing to the important call for diversity and inclusion #happy

We are going to occasionally talk about AI, work, data politics, and sociality here for everyday people. Some ground rules: 1. we won’t cotton to a lot of intellectual elitism (“morons” etc.) 2. This will focus on how I ask questions. This is *my* lens on the world. YMMV is always implied.

NSF employees speaking out: democrats-science.house.gov/imo/media/do...

Apparently the safest place to commit a crime against a woman is a college campus, like tax shelters but for sexual predators?

In my latest for @undark.org, I compare AI adoption in science to the Ship of Theseus: "If you swap out every wooden plank on a ship over time, is it still the same vessel?" I argue that science derives authority from something more than data generation + publication. undark.org/2026/09/25/o...

A telling quote in this @npr.org analysis: "I think it was clear to just about every observer, left, right, and center, that the NIH of recent decades is a very unhealthy institution and has really desperately needed substantial reform." -Ian Banks, Foundation for American Innovation 🧵

Trump tells the UN he is officially changing the name of Artificial Intelligence to "Super Intelligence" and says all US government documents will now be changed to refer to "SI"

A beautiful, honest, devastating article. My daughter is the same age as Hannah-Jones’ daughter, and we’ve had related, though significantly smaller (and whiter), experiences with schools in St. Louis and in Portland. The tension between living your values and helping your kid get ahead is real.

found at ucsf

Many of you may have heard the terrible news of Dr. Meng Chen's sudden death. I just found this tribute from UC Riverside cnas.ucr.edu/news/2026/09... and a beautiful review article he contributed to @plantphys.bsky.social earlier this year, "25 years of photobodies" doi.org/10.1093/plph... 💔

Wearing black 🪦

For the record, "fewer larger grants" is the opposite of how to fund good research. Give a bunch of researchers financial stability and basic funding, without wasting their time on increasingly competitive applications and widening the have/have-not gap, and look how far we'll go.

Here is a pretty view

Hug your local Director of Graduate Studies, they are already tired.

haha what da fuck nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Statem...

professors are workers

Under pressure, the DOD just released the text of its secret 10-year agreement with the NIH. Here are the biggest revelations from the document 🧵

Impressive spin. Duke decides to close its Herbarium and get rid of its collection, initially seeming to think they could SELL it. UNC bids to acquire it, and does a lot of ground work to make that possible. 1/n

Hood to Coast relay: 200 miles, 12 runners, 30 hours, never again

A massive update: At least ~15 companies~ are selling scientists antibodies using faked validation data. We've documented 18,000+ manipulated images on 17,000+ products sold by leading laboratory suppliers including Thermo Fisher, Abcam, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Millipore Sigma and Bio-Techne. 1/🧵

If you saw our new paper and thought "I didn't know aquatic plants use CAM!" boy do we have a fun project for you! Our lab is developing high throughput methods to screen plants for CAM. Do you work on, or know of, a plant that you think could be using CAM? Let us know! 👉 forms.gle/AyQc5KgzEYoM...

No one could honestly spend years of their life ensconced in academia and emerge with scathing critiques of Black people and ONLY Black people being unfairly advanced or promoted. To construct such a narrative requires extreme levels of intellectual dishonesty, internalized anti blackness or both.

IMHO, this is the only way forward. US scientists must break free of their attachment to individual achievement and personal accolades and start working collectively.

Scientist friends, please read the thread & share your thoughts (Doesn’t have to be public, you know how to reach me!) re:blast radius question, we have a survey out right now trying to get a handle on overall impacts, how close labs are to funding cliff & coping strategies

Ahhh, Oregon

More than 65,000 people have been displaced by the Spokane Complex Fires — and hundreds have lost their homes. If you have even $5 to go towards short and long term assistance, here's a trusted community source: innovia.org

It will depress you! Sorry about that but it’s kind of my jam. I selected well-written books, some of them are even wryly funny at times — if you come from a culture with macabre humor. Still, the issue is big, complex, and scary. All the more reason for us to face it together.

Collette is right on target: Fight back and we can win. Write your Senator now to make sure its included in the final bill

An inevitable outcome of the "plant intelligence" discourse

Periodic reminder to use the resources at @unbreaking.org where we are documenting the damage done by the current administration--to medical research funding 🧪 and in so many other areas. We'd love you to join us!

This is crucially important.