The staffing crunch is so severe that the NIMH has asked its intramural grad students and postdocs to volunteer in this admin capacity temporarily. Also: the institute's acting deputy director - the second in charge - is devoting half of her time to grants management.

NEW: A serious staffing shortage — of the Trump admin's own making — is delaying the agency's ability to send billions to universities around the US, leaving labs reeling. “I thought we were at rock bottom”, a senior NIH official said. “We are below rock bottom now.”

Note: @Doudna_lab is not an official account and appears to be impersonating the lab. We are working to have it taken down.

We need a more nimble regulatory framework for outbreaks like hantavirus. There is already a compelling therapeutic candidate: a human mAb isolated from a recovered patient, with strong preclinical activity against the Andes variant. Yet access remains months to years away.

A short write-up about the journey of our lab. Starting as T cell immunologists, we stumbled across Wnt signaling in flies and frogs. Worked on colon cancer. Then Nick Barker (left) discovered the gut stem cell and Toshi Sato invented organoids authors.elsevier.com/a/1n3No…

Breaking news: Canvas hackers gave up the site after receiving million student requests to raise their grades.

Ever wondered why only inflammasomes that use ASC, but not those that do not use ASC, can mature IL-1β? ASC helps to recruit pro-IL-1β to ASC for caspase-1 processing! See: "Inflammasome adaptor protein ASC is a mechanistic checkpoint in IL-1β maturation" pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.25…

Where are NHL Headquarters located?

Brutal: Judge sentences man to 15 Red Sox games

Akiko Iwasaki at Yale University argues open debate in science is shrinking and avoiding controversial questions like vaccine risks or virus origins may erode trust and slow progress. nature.com/articles/s41577-0…

99-98 with 3 minutes left. Sixers finish with 2-6 shooting The Boston Celtics:

We are thrilled to announce the election of 120 members and 25 international members to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continued achievements in original research. Congratulations to our new #NASmembers and welcome to the Academy! 🎊

In today's @washingtonpost, a terrific piece on the risk of AI-based deskilling in medicine, along with some sensible recommendations. I'm quoted, along with @CarlaPughMDPhD. Authors: Rebecca Adams/Laura Landry. wpintelligence.washingtonpos…

Bacteria in our BRAINS?? Surprisingly, we observe translocation of gut bacteria to the brain via the vagus nerve. This occurs in mice fed a high fat diet, or without dietary changes in mouse models of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and autism. 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

A human SFB?? Finally?? nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

Excited to share an amazing video on the NLRP3 inflammasome pathway generated by talented Ann from the Iwasa lab @janetiwasa @Ann_HuiLiu. It shows the real cryo-EM structures of the pathway from #NLRP3, #ASC, #caspase-1, #GSDMD, #IL-1b, to #NINJ1. #cryoem @LeXiao17 Enjoy

New preprint released 🪇 Which tRNAs are used by ribosomes during translation? We introduce tRIBO-seq, a nanopore method to sequence ribosome-associated tRNAs and track how the active tRNA pool changes across stress conditions. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… A thread 🧵

I was thrilled to receive emails about formatting issues with my biosketch for NIH grant submission. I spent some of the most valuable time of my life on SciENcv, modifying my CV in so many ways that now I finally I understand what I have achieved in my life (not much) and also that the website is not even working today. I'm prepared to pay a lot more taxes to have the website fixed. It's so elaborate that it can output a PDF of your CV (when it's working) plus the certification "I also certify that, at the time of submission, I am not a party to a malign foreign talent recruitment program." Strongly recommend SciENcv to anyone--as an exercise in masochism. In case you are curious, malign is also spelled China.

NIH is not issuing awards. You may think that it's because they it is coming up with new directions of research...The apposite is true. Here is a graph showing how many fewer new funding opportunities that NIH has posted over time. -91%, a trend that started on Jan 2025.

This week @TheLancet cover and link to their accompanying editorial thelancet.com/journals/lance…