alexwitze.bsky.social
Science journalist and correspondent for Nature (she/her). Reach me at alexwitze.01 (Signal) or witzescience (@gmail.com) or awitze (@protonmail.com).
411 posts
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For sure. But the budget includes a major proposed restructuring of agency priorities.
Who knows what Congress will do with it all, of course.
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I personally don't care much whether we get bootprints on Mars. But it'll be fascinating to see whether these ideas gain momentum — or sputter out, like US human spaceflight programs so often do.
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🪴For other perspectives on human interactions with Mars, see the recent @natastron.nature.com cover article on terraforming research, by @erika-alden.bsky.social et al. "We need an inordinate number of people doing a lot more research," she told me. (Ugly preview here, but free access.)
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🤔 These and other issues, including the ethics of interplanetary colonization, are explored by @weinersmith.bsky.social @zachweinersmith.bsky.social in their recent book A CITY ON MARS. Here they chat with our @nature.com podcast:
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👩🚀 There are also huge technical challenges to be overcome about how to keep astronauts alive, healthy & fed on such a journey. For more on solving some of those problems, see this recent comment piece by Farhan Asrar.
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💸 There’s ~$1 billion in the FY26 budget request for things related to crewed Mars exploration. But, ah, a crewed mission to Mars is on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. And of course the White House has proposed slashing NASA’s budget, including existing Mars research & missions.
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Should have guessed
I look forward to CO2 groaners
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I’m pre-ordering even with the knowledge of this sentence 😅
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Yesssssss
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Yessssssss 💫
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But see also some nuance on this argument, from a new paper that suggests research with lasting impact is on the rise. By @jeffreybrainard.bsky.social yesterday in @science.org:
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I have Reviewer #2
Always critical of the amount of tuna in the house
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All of these now-terminated grants were so designated: "This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria."
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There is probably a faster way to extract it but my slow method is to click on the grant title in the database and scroll down to 'NSF award search link' and click through for the PI name.
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As a physics journalist, it is fairly wild to see the names of the PIs with terminated grants: Misha Lukin, Philip Kim, Lisa Randall, Subir Sachdev, John Doyle...
bsky.app/profile/benn...
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Brb moving to Clacton-on-Sea
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For background, see @dangaristo.bsky.social's story from early April:
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aaaaaaaah noooooooo
so sorry to hear this 😞
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Yep!
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Spectacular!
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I have not. Thanks for the suggestion.