astrokatie.com - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Lyft driver picked me up from UNC, turned out he was a medicinal chemistry post-doc in a building near mine, until his grant got cut last month. Worked on novel antivirals.

submitted 17 hours ago • 80 comments

Sign of the times: next week I'm going to a Pacific Northwest gravitational wave meeting at the LIGO site in Washington. The University of British Columbia sends ppl every year, but is not attending this time bc their university advises them to not cross the border into the US at this time. 🧪🔭

submitted 20 hours ago • 8 comments

“I would like to cure brain cancer. I think that's not particularly controversial.” Be that as it may, the NIH terminated that scientist's grant. Here's a huge survey of the 2,500 grants that NIH has killed or delayed...so far. Gift link: nyti.ms/43Jz1yJ

submitted 23 hours ago • 14 comments

applying for jobs again

submitted 31 days ago • 147 comments

What then remained?

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

I've seen folks talk about how "in four years" they'll be able to get back to their planned projects and I really don't think that's going to work out. People & projects losing funding now will not be able to hit pause and come back once funding is restored. Hard-won progress & capacity will be lost

submitted 1 day ago • 320 comments

A female Western Gull was recorded riding 150km in a garbage truck from San Francisco to a compost facility in Central CA, probably to forage. TWICE. An innovator, an icon, a genius. This is one of my favorite @waterbirdsociety.bsky.social papers I've ever handled as managing editor #ornithology

submitted 2 days ago • 52 comments

Briefly wandered over to The Other Place to gauge the response to the NASA budget devastation to encounter a bunch of gleeful 'we spend too much money, so this is great.' TO BE, ONCE AGAIN, PERFECTLY CLEAR, THE BUDGET REQUEST MOVES ALL THIS MONEY TO DEFENSE. IT SPENDS IT. NO MONEY IS SAVED.

submitted 4 days ago • 17 comments

Many others are posting abt this too but this graphic viscerally shows how dire the presidential budget is for NASA 🔭🧪and worldwide astronomy. I can’t express how sad this makes me, as an American scientist. And it’s mostly already paid for projects, so also no logic in terms of saving money.

submitted 4 days ago • 51 comments

its crazy how dominant germany was in science (especially chemistry) in the 19th century, it was basically the international language for scientists, people came from all over the world to train at heidelberg etc, and then....

submitted 5 days ago • 75 comments

something that stands out about this is just how cheap it is for us to have world-leading scientific capacity we spent ~6.75 trillion last year, and the combined budgets for NIH, NSF and NASA are barely more than 1% of that what an incredible waste to lose it all for a drop in the bucket

submitted 4 days ago • 44 comments

This is actively bananas. LIGO is doing (literally) Nobel winning work, and you need both of them -- the second one is not a spare or a nice to have; this is like buying a fire engine, but deciding it doesn't need wheels on the left hand side...

submitted 5 days ago • 11 comments

Musk should be asked about this in every interview he does now and forever. To ignore it is a dereliction of duty. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

submitted 5 days ago • 1307 comments

Internet Roadtrip is my favorite thing on the internet right now—it’s basically Twitch Plays Google Street View. They started in Boston, spent several weeks on a quest to cross the Canadian border, and are now exploring New Brunswick. neal.fun/internet-roa...

submitted 5 days ago • 76 comments

Witness the proposed devastation of NASA science. If this concerns you, consider exploring the tools provided to make your opinions known: www.planetary.org/save-nasa-sc...

submitted 5 days ago • 5 comments

My people, we need two LIGO sites to prove sources are astrophysical and not, like, a rabbit hopping nearby. ⚛️

submitted 5 days ago • 13 comments

Here's NASA astrophysics, if I read the president's proposed budget correctly. 🔭

submitted 5 days ago • 24 comments

SPACENEWS: NASA budget would cancel dozens of science missions, lay off thousands (But sets aside nearly $2 billion effectively earmarked for SpaceX) spacenews.com/nasa-budget-...

submitted 5 days ago • 138 comments

Breaking from @science.org: The Trump administration wants to kill off a host of active and healthy NASA climate and planetary spacecraft. It would be a "leaner, more focused" agency, they say -- and one far less capable of studying the Earth and exploring space.

submitted 5 days ago • 13 comments

TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, THE PROPOSED NSF BUDGET CUTS NEARLY A QUARTER OF A MILLION PEOPLE FROM NSF ACTIVITIES. FOR INSTANCE, JOBS.

submitted 5 days ago • 5 comments

Nature ran a piece finding that 25 million people could die as a result of ending USAID. This puts Trump and Musk in the category of the most brutal leaders of the 20th century in terms of unnecessary lives lost. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

submitted 6 days ago • 56 comments

“These are two totally different species of goose. But for some reason, they paired up – and they even produced eggs.”

submitted 6 days ago • 98 comments

Everyone involved in trying to pass off that ChatGPT-extruded disinformation manifesto as a scientific report should be, at the very least, barred from public office for life. The MAHA report is dangerous criminal misconduct and an offence to the process of science.

submitted 7 days ago • 26 comments

"Under the terms of the executive order, political appointees loyal to the president can willfully find justification to label any research finding as scientific misconduct" This should terrify every single scientist in America.

submitted 7 days ago • 9 comments

22 years ago I pivoted from working on antibiotic resistance to pandemic viruses. Since then, I've argued that if we care about saving US lives in expectation, advance capacity for producing bird flu vaccine offers by far the greatest expected return on investment. ... We were so goddamn close.

submitted 7 days ago • 112 comments

Gearing up to try the “ignore it and hope it goes away” approach on the next pandemic virus

submitted 7 days ago • 45 comments

"Scientific insiders." You mean...scientists? The people who do science and understand it? I'm not saying they're beyond suspicion, but when I look at the US over the past 20 years, I do not have the impression that our major problem is that _scientists_ have too much power.

submitted 7 days ago • 11 comments

10/10 for me but some of them required a pretty careful look. The analysis of what to look for in each was useful, though there’s no guarantees the “tells” will persist as the image generator algorithms improve, and even now not all generated images have them.

submitted 9 days ago • 56 comments