Kendra Maas, PhD
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dnakendra.bsky.social
Kendra Maas, PhD
@dnakendra.bsky.social
Queer scientist mom r nerd gardner she/her
I imported my former spouse. The interview was both terrifying and no big deal. The backlog was so long we'd been married 4 years by the time we got our interview (applied the week after we we married). The system sucks and is designed to suck and now people are being torn apart because of backlogs.
I need everybody to read this and understand what’s going on. These are spouses of US citizens in the country legally. They have entry clearance and green cards, they’ve passed background checks and have no criminal records. ICE is taking them anyway.

Gift link:

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...
Green Card Interviews End in Handcuffs for Spouses of U.S. Citizens
www.nytimes.com
November 26, 2025 at 9:14 PM
Oil is nice, water is life. We've made a very bad trade.
November 26, 2025 at 2:36 AM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
5/ Over and over, all over the country, that's all it took: a traffic stop.

We counted around 150 kids who ended up in federal shelters — oftentimes separated from their families — because they were in a vehicle that got pulled over.
ICE Sent 600 Immigrant Kids to Detention in Federal Shelters This Year. It’s a New Record.
Under a zero tolerance policy, the first Trump administration separated immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. New data suggests separations are happening all over the count...
www.propublica.org
November 25, 2025 at 2:06 AM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
DOGE was always a very thinly disguised con to dress up data theft and extraction class destruction of federal corporate oversight as innovative, and it's important to remember that part of the reason it worked so well is that the press helped legitimize it
hey don't be so hard on yourselves; it delivered oceans of sensitive government and citizen data to billionaires
Musk’s DOGE Quietly Killed Off After Delivering Almost Nothing
The agency disbanded eight months ahead of schedule.
www.thedailybeast.com
November 24, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
Elon Musk donated $277 million to Trump so he could steal the federal government’s data, dismantle the nation’s infrastructure, and stop foreign aid from going to nonwhite people. It’s a quid pro quo breathtaking in scope, corruption, and damage, & completely unprecedented in American history.
Bye bye, “DOGE”.

It no longer exists as a “centralized entity”, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

@reuters.com
www.reuters.com/world/us/dog...
November 23, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
One of the bragging rights that the US ed system had in the 20th century is that we didn't have education tracks. Essentially, any kid could go to a CC or state school & major in whatever they wanted to (obviously an oversimplification). I fear this aspect of the American dream is dying.
November 23, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.
One of the bragging rights that the US ed system had in the 20th century is that we didn't have education tracks. Essentially, any kid could go to a CC or state school & major in whatever they wanted to (obviously an oversimplification). I fear this aspect of the American dream is dying.
November 23, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
Kavanaugh should personally have to pay for all the broken windows, bandages and tow fees that called trivial.
The teenager told officers he was a U.S. citizen, but an officer broke the car’s driver’s side window and detained him. In a video, the boy can be heard telling an officer that he is a citizen, to which the officer replies, “Get out of the car” and “I don’t care.”
www.oregonlive.com/portland/202...
High school senior, a U.S. citizen, detained by ICE in Oregon
The 17-year-old was held more than five hours Friday in an ICE facility, his brother said.
www.oregonlive.com
November 22, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Tried to figure out a way to get my teen to a ct town about an hour away. There is no public transit option that less than 5hrs for a 1 hr drive.
November 22, 2025 at 7:28 PM
People who work with Hela, does this look realistic?

🧪🔬
I tried an even harder example on Gemini Pro image generation and this is quite scary/amazing. I asked for a microscopy image of around 20 HeLa cells, GFP tagged 20% nuclear, 10% membrane, +1 nuclear staining, + overlap. Image below and prompt in the following post.
November 22, 2025 at 2:18 AM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
There are many people in the ND community that either can't or don't feel comfortable speaking out about Kennedy, so i think it's incumbent on those of us who can to do so to help protect those of us who cannot. Our neurodiversity isn't our problem, our problem is this quack has so much power. 6/x
November 21, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
THREAD: Judge Ellis is the first federal judge to review extensive body cam video of DHS's actions in Chicago. She finds that DHS *repeatedly* misled the public and made claims that were disproven by agents' own videos.

I'll go through some of the most egregious ones here.
November 20, 2025 at 11:04 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
The corruption is staggering.

As you pay more for health care, groceries, and utilities, Donald Trump and his administration gets kickbacks with your taxpayer dollars.
Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts
The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rule...
www.propublica.org
November 19, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
NEW: A risk assessment found that leading general-use chatbots — ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, and Claude — are "fundamentally unsafe" for teen mental health support, failing to catch important red flags and responding inappropriately to users exhibiting signs of crisis.

futurism.com/artificial-i...
Report Finds That Leading Chatbots Are a Disaster for Teens Facing Mental Health Struggles
A report found that leading chatbots are "fundamentally unsafe" for teens looking for mental health support, and failed to catch red flags.
futurism.com
November 20, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
This Texas woman developed preeclampsia, leading to still-birth. She DIED, leaving her young son behind.

This happens while an all-male panel in South Carolina is deciding whether women should be charged w/ murder for their pregnancies.

Abortion is healthcare.

How many more women have to die?
🧪
“Ticking Time Bomb”: A Pregnant Mother Kept Getting Sicker. She Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion in Texas.
Walker is one of several women ProPublica found with underlying health conditions who died when they couldn’t access abortions.
www.propublica.org
November 19, 2025 at 11:17 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
Poverty is a policy choice. Concentrated wealth is a policy choice. Inequality is a policy choice. None of it is natural or inevitable. Remember: We have the power to build a system that serves the many, not the powerful few.
November 19, 2025 at 9:01 PM
I look foreward to going through these steps repeatedly when copilot is turned back on with every update.
My new favorite kind of meme is "here are detailed instructions on how to turn off AI". 🔨
November 20, 2025 at 12:49 AM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
New: Reuters has tallied job losses, suspensions and investigations stemming from the reaction to Charlie Kirk's Sept. 10 assassination. Its findings: More than 600 Americans have been punished, and the figure is likely to be an under-count.

www.reuters.com/investigatio...
November 19, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
Hi, it's me again

I have these calendars. They are so pretty. @megstampede.bsky.social made them. They have a bunch of animals on them, like crows and humpbacks and cuttlefish and salamanders.

Each month has facts about the animals AND actions you can take to help them

Get one at Squidfacts.net!
November 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
Whoever came up with these tariffs in the first place should be fired.
November 17, 2025 at 11:59 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
Despite the evidence that it will do next to nothing to defend us, Trump remains all in on the Golden Dome project which is estimated to cost between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion over 20 years. So far, it seems like a marketing concept designed to enrich arms contractors and burnish Trump’s image.
November 17, 2025 at 10:45 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
For-profit healthcare is failing when it comes to saving money or providing care, but it's working when it comes to its actual purpose: stopping poor people from accessing the same healthcare as the wealthy.

It's class warfare. It's not even well-disguised class warfare, it's pretty blatant.
Insiders Detail Ways Alberta’s For-Profit Surgery Push Is Failing | The Tyee
The shift strong-arms doctors but hasn’t saved money or shortened waits for critical operations, sources say. A Tyee investigation.
thetyee.ca
November 17, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Reposted by Kendra Maas, PhD
Thread: Multi-omics sounds cool—until you actually try it. Here's are the nuances.
1/
You’ve got RNA-seq.
Methylation.
Proteomics.
Time to “integrate” the data.
But how? And why?
Let’s break it down.
November 17, 2025 at 2:15 PM