Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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David A. Graham @dgraham.bsky.social · 10h

Craig Taborn is a genius, and a Genius: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/a...

MacArthur Foundation Announces 2025 ‘Genius Grant’ Winners

www.nytimes.com

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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 1d

when you try and get your PhD advisor to review your manuscript 😂

Nobel committee unable to reach prize winner who is ‘living his best life’ hiking off grid

Fred Ramsdell was among those honoured with a 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine but might not know because he is somewhere in Idaho and uncontactable

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Science Magazine @science.org · 2d

This year’s #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists for discovering how the immune system distinguishes friend from foe. https://scim.ag/3Wt5rdi

Medicine Nobel goes to three researchers who identified immune system’s security guards

Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi discovered regulatory T cells that prevent autoimmune disease

scim.ag

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Inside Higher Ed @insidehighered.com · 6d

Opinion | Anything but Basic

The push to reduce spending on foundational research is shortsighted, Tesla A. Monson and Marianne F. Brasil write. https://bit.ly/4nZ4BAX

#AcademicSky #HigherEd #EDUSky

A photo of rows of monkey skulls in wooden boxes in a museum collection.

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PombeDoc @pombedoc.bsky.social · 6d

🤬

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Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽 @needhibhalla.bsky.social · 9d

And please also thank the grants management specialists (GMS) who handle the business, non-programmatic matters of awarding grants!

American Society for Cell Biology @ascbiology.bsky.social · 9d

According to news reports, NIH is on track to award nearly all of its FY25 budget. Program officers—working long hours despite staff losses—made it possible. Take a moment to thank your PO for their dedication.

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 9d

A randomized trial of patients with advanced cancer who had genomically matched treatment vs standard of care showed substantial outcome improvement for the former
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Genomically matched therapy in advanced solid tumors: the randomized phase 2 ROME trial - Nature Medicine

In the proof-of-concept phase 2 ROME trial, comprehensive genomic profiling followed by molecular tumor board evaluation and randomization of patients with metastatic solid cancer to receive personalized therapy or standard of care led to a significantly higher objective response rate and longer progression-free survival in patients who received personalized therapy.

www.nature.com

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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 9d

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

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PombeDoc @pombedoc.bsky.social · 10d

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 10d

it may feel a little like homework, but i genuinely think people should read the lincoln-douglas debates to see what the practical politics of anti-slavery looked like in an environment where the public was neutral to hostile to the question of emancipation

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Sophie G Martin @sophiemartinlab.bsky.social · 10d

Super happy to see also this story out! 👇

7 years of amazing perseverance from @gaowen.bsky.social, who not only performed experimental evolution showing tradeoff between sexual and asexual reproduction, but also identified all key transcription and genome changes.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Gaowen Liu @gaowen.bsky.social · 10d

Sex or growth? Life must continually balance these strategies. We forced yeast to choose and captured the trade-off in real time. Evolution rewired existing regulators and fixed them through genetic assimilation, creating specialists for sex at the cost of growth.
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

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Daniel Bolnick @danielbolnick.bsky.social · 12d

The GRFP announcement from NSF cuts out an entire cohort of 2nd year students from consideration, without warning. This is so deeply unfair that it warrants a formal protest from the scientific community. If someone wants to work with me to craft an open letter and solicit signatures, LMK.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 12d

New: After a long wait, the GRFP solicitation is live! Deadlines have been extended to early November, so applicants have a bit over a month to submit. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

www.nsf.gov

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 13d

"in the largest sample of medical advances for which we have good data...we found extensive connections between medical advances and research that was funded by grants that would have been cut if the NIH budget was sharply reduced."

Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 13d

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What if NIH had been 40% smaller?

Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

www.science.org

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Jeremy BOO! Yoder 🎃💀🕷️ @jbyoder.org · 13d

Really cool, conceptually simple approach here: cross-referencing grant proposal scores with literature citations and explicit acknowledgments in drug patents to identify patents linked to projects that wouldn't have been funded given a smaller budget

Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 13d

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What if NIH had been 40% smaller?

Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

www.science.org

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Sophie G Martin @sophiemartinlab.bsky.social · 13d

Super excited that this story by @borissieber.bsky.social is now on BioRxiv!

For decades, we thought there was no MAPK scaffold for the ERK-like cascade that promotes sexual reproduction in fission yeast ... until Boris found it !

See the thread 👇 and enjoy the paper!

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Boris Sieber @borissieber.bsky.social · 13d

Mammalian cells have KSR, budding yeast has Ste5… and fission yeast has Sms1 as the MAPK scaffold for sexual reproduction!

Very excited to share my postdoc work where we discover that the hemi-arrestin Sms1 binds all components of the MAPK cascade, including ERK-like Spk1

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Schematic of MAPK signalling in fission yeast, budding yeast and Metazoa. No MAPK scaffold was known for ERK-like MAPK in fission yeast, as opposed to budding yeast Ste5 and metazoan KSR1/2.

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Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 13d

NEW: Nature trained AI to predict which NIH grants from 2014 would have been cut if the Trump admin had its way back then — and what science would have been lost to history.

"The results show the damage that cuts in funding can do to research, and the unpredictable nature of the research process."

Nature @nature.com · 13d

We used machine-learning tools in an attempt to recreate the method for cutting funding, and then applied it to past US NIH grants to reveal the broad-reaching consequences

go.nature.com/4pBArFH

What research might be lost after the NIH’s cuts? Nature trained a bot to find out

We used machine-learning tools in an attempt to recreate the method for cutting funding, and then applied it to past US National Institutes of Health grants to reveal the broad-reaching consequences of such action.

go.nature.com

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Dave Levitan @davelevitan.bsky.social · 13d

This is interesting — in a paper out today, researchers created an alternate history to estimate what Trump's desired cuts to NIH would look like. Of 557 drugs approved 2000-2023, *more than half* are at least partially linked to NIH research that would have not happened under a 40% reduction.

What if NIH had been 40% smaller?

Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

www.science.org

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 13d

Kimmel’s defiant return highlights one of the most disturbing dynamics of Trump II, that so many people in positions of leadership are chickenshit frauds who would rather fold in advance than put up anything resembling a fight www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Kimmel’s refusal to capitulate stands out because so many other well-situated people—those with the resources, platform, and power to stand up to the president, including, initially, the leaders of ABC—have surrendered, withdrawn, or become Trump sycophants themselves. One by one, American leaders supposedly committed to principles of free speech, due process, democracy, and equality have abandoned those ideals when menaced by the Trump administration. These cascading acts of cowardice from the people best positioned to resist Trump’s authoritarian power grabs have made Trump seem exponentially more powerful than he actually is, sapping strength from others who might have discovered the courage to stand up. Defending democracy requires a collective refusal to acquiesce to lawless behavior from many different sectors of society. All of these powerful people trying to save their own skin have effectively multiplied Trump’s attacks on constitutional government, by enhancing a false sense of inevitability and invincibility.

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Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 13d

. @adamserwer.bsky.social is correct. A major difference between Trump I and II is that lots of people decided not to fight this time around. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

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Barack Obama @barackobama.bsky.social · 13d

The degree to which those comments can undermine public health, do harm to women who are pregnant, create anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic – is violence against the truth.

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PombeDoc @pombedoc.bsky.social · 14d

Not mRNA, it’s micro or miRNA

Miraculous regardless

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PombeDoc @pombedoc.bsky.social · 14d

PombeDoc @pombedoc.bsky.social · 16d

How about you work on saving Democracy.

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PombeDoc @pombedoc.bsky.social · 16d

Those are the folks who have options and a market. Also need to factor in those who will retire early or go to industry. I’m seeing both of those.

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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 19d

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

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