Sean Prall

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

Our new paper is out today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B! How does rapid environmental change reshape human sleep, one of our most fundamental biological processes? 📄: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

🧵1/ The half-life of a grudge. Britain crushed the 1857 revolt in northern India with mass reprisals centered on Lucknow. For decades after, districts closer to that violence vaccinated their children less against smallpox and the effect faded as the generation that lived through 1857 died off.

New review out today in Evolutionary Anthropology on arranged marriage, coauthored with @dconroybeam.bsky.social and @davidwlawson.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1002/evan...

Trump’s new approach to global health is “extractive bilateralism”—he will only continue funding HIV medicines or other life saving treatments in a partner nation in exchange for that nation’s minerals or health data. It’s inhumane. I wrote about that for @bmj.com: www.bmj.com/content/bmj/...

Genuinely just bonkers to watch the USA do this to one of the most successful and innovative hubs of scientific research the world has ever seen. All those years of Free Speech On Campus debates and it turns out they actually wanted less cancer research. Absurd.

New paper examining the health locus of control concept on vaccine beliefs in NW Namibia. We find that external HLC dominates, but market integration shifts beliefs towards internal HLC, and internal HLC associated with lower interest in vaccination and lower perceptions of vaccine safety.

Put on your thinking caps and slip on your party shoes because EAS is coming to #Denver! Join us at #EASHBA2026 for a special symposium and a party to celebrate the return of EAS and award Dr. Eric Alden Smith our lifetime achievement award.

NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11

This has slowly been happening at all but flagship public universities. This would accelerate the practice, and I expect more states (including some blue states) to follow suit in the coming years.

You can ignore science, but science will never ignore you. Measles incidence in the United States.

🚨Job alert! The ENDOW project is hiring a Research Officer in Research Database Management, to be based at @lsemethodology.bsky.social. Oversee & expand our database & contribute to research on social & economic inequality. Deadline 15 February. Share & reach out! jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

New in @nytimes.com on how some research on human origins and genetics are being cut from federal science programs. @carlzimmer.com interviews Brenna Henn, who has done much to illuminate the genetic variation and history of southern African peoples. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/s...

Here's my latest contribution to the @nytimes "Lost Science" series. Brenna Henn's sweeping study of African genetics has been frozen. Gift link: nyti.ms/3Ypmm1A

The impacts of the Trump Administration's "let them eat cake" foreign policy outlined in grim detail www.propublica.org/article/usai...

New paper out today with Zhian Chen. We argue that modern intensive parenting is not only exhausting for parents, but in some cases disrupts healthy child development. What is 'overparenting'? And can evolutionary theory help us understand how we got here? academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

New paper out on the important role of social learning in breastfeeding! academic.oup.com/emph/article...

Simplistic stories about the dangers of polygamy can be compelling & intuitive, but what is the evidence that monogamous marriage is advantageous for society? theconversation.com/rethinking-p...

If one man marries two women, another man must go unmarried, right? No. Demography matters. If sex ratios are skewed towards women, then polygyny can exist alongside universal marriage for men (who want to marry women). If only more people understood demography 😊

"Public health is under siege in our country. This time it is not from fringe communities scattered across the nation but from our appointed leaders, who were nominated by our president and confirmed by our elected officials in the Senate." A must-read anonymous piece www.bmj.com/content/390/...

From a colleague: NSF proposal received FOUR "excellent" ratings (the highest possible...that almost never happens). Rated "highly competitive" in panel summary. 👎 ...but still rejected. Likely reason: It studied a topic disfavored by this admin.

Fun fact: even as UCLA is being extorted for $1B by a fascist government, its administration is requiring all faculty to install a “security” program that surveils everything we do and shares that information with the federal government.

Still a projection, but a devastating projection: 30-40% drop in international students at U.S. universities this fall www.nafsa.org/about/about-... Hard to wrap your head around the full implications of this for universities

My new paper "Post-pandemic inequalities: Evolutionary anthropological frameworks for long-term impacts of the 1918 influenza pandemic" is now published in Evolutionary Anthropology! Please check it out at the link below! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Pleased to present our new preprint on sleep and circadian rhythms among the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia. This is a fascinating system for exploring sleep biology. Lots of variation in light exposure, housing type, and subsistence. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 below.

Federal kindergarten vaccination data shows national rates for four major vaccines, which had held steady before the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen significantly since. In fact, measles vaccination rates were below herd immunity in most states in 2023. ➡️ Read more: propub.li/40KnM8n

The university of California is a powerhouse of innovation, healthcare, and social mobility for California and the US.

🚨🚨 Friday night news drop from National Science Foundation!! 🧪 NSF just released its detailed budget request for next year: nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF... We knew it was going to be bad...and it lives up. Guts direct NSF support for a **quarter million people** 🧵 on some highlights...

Happy to see an update to this classic from the Wall Street Journal (Tynan DeBold, Dov Friedman), this time by @scientificdiscovery.dev and @spoonerf.bsky.social at @ourworldindata.org. 📊 New: a log chart, new colours and three relevant annotations. Source: ourworldindata.org/measles-vacc...

In other news, my engineer father has published a book! Looks like a spicy read! link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

New paper on malaria in NW Namibia, highlighting significant differences between cultural models and biomedical ones that could be detrimental to malaria eradication efforts. malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

New at Can We Still Govern: An anonymous NIH employee maps out the GOP budget gameplan to permanently gut our most important science agency. Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

A new study forecasts more than 850,000 measles cases over the next 25 years if US vaccination rates stay the same. Millions of infections are possible if rates drop. www.wired.com/story/scient...

This statement from the NSF is insane. Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false. Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

I look at close to 100 stories a week and even more outside of work. I’ve done this ten years. This is among the most horrific things I’ve ever read — testimony from dying children whose access to medicine has been cut off by the Trump administration. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

Now there's a memorable stat! "Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined." wapo.st/3EvzMCI

The NYT has profiled Rufo repeatedly but never come close to asking the vital questions that Larry lays out so well here:

The real problem about science isn't about loss of trust. It's about not having a voice, a counter. @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41... Whai if the 300,000 scientists supported by NIH stood up? Or even half of them. Instead of <1%

The title tells the story and the 5 graphs amplify it www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New paper exploring how cultural models of vaccines influence vaccine decision-making. Implications for the KAP framework, historical mistrust on healthcare decisions, & health promotion where formal education is rare. Share link: kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

It’s crazy to me how bad this argument is, and how consistently it is used by lab leak people

"Grants are getting killed “without any scientific input anywhere. It is purely political,” said a member of a senior NIH leadership team. “The science in this country is going to be destroyed if you can change what the priorities are going to be every four years. You can’t do science that way.”"

DOGE/Musk preferentially cancelled grants and contracts to recipients in counties that voted for Harris in 2024. Among cancellations with election data available, 92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts.

I'm on the @science.org podcast this week with @maartenlarmuseau.bsky.social & @bscelza.bsky.social talking about genetic genealogy, cuckoldry and extra-pair paternity: www.science.org/content/podc... (Starting around 15:00)

The Trump administration terminates funding for polio, HIV, malaria and nutrition programs around the world. “People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”