Trump ousts National Science Board members; The Washington Post, April 25, 2025

 Carolyn Y. Johnson , The Washington Post; Trump ousts National Science Board members

"Multiple scientists who serve on an independent board established to guide the nation’s nearly $9 billion basic science funding agency were terminated from their positions Friday by President Donald Trump.

Members of the National Science Board, which helps govern the National Science Foundation, were dismissed in a message from the Presidential Personnel Office thanking them for their service, according to screenshots shared with The Washington Post: “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I’m writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately.”

The National Science Board was established in 1950 to guide the governance of the National Science Foundation, in an unusual structure within the federal government that echoes the setup of a company board in the private sector. It helps guide an agency that operates Antarctic research stations, telescopes, a fleet of research vessels and supports basic science research in laboratories across the United States.

The NSF has a long history of supporting technology and research that powers many innovations the world relies on today. The agency helped language-learning app Duolingo get its start. NSF research has also helped evolve technology used in MRIs, cellphones and LASIK eye surgery.

The board’s members are scientists and engineers from universities and industry and are appointed by the president, but they serve six-year terms, ensuring overlap between different administrations. There are typically 25 members, but some slots are empty — including the NSF director, which has been vacant since the former director who was appointed during the first Trump administration, Sethuraman Panchanathan abruptly resigned a year ago."

MIT is first school to reject Trump administration's agenda in exchange for funding benefits; NBC News, October 10, 2025

 Kimmy Yam, NBC News ; MIT is first school to reject Trump administration's agenda in exchange for funding benefits

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday became the first school to reject an offer of federal funds in exchange for agreeing to the Trump administration's education agenda.

MIT disagreed with a number of aspects of the administration's proposal, which was sent to nine major universities last week, arguing that it would restrict the university's freedom of expression and independence, Sally Kornbluth, president of the Cambridge-based school, wrote in a letter Friday to the Department of Education.

“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences,” Kornbluth wrote. “Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”"

Opinion: Jane Goodall helped humans understand their place in the world; NPR, October 4, 2025

 Scott Simon, NPR ; Opinion: Jane Goodall helped humans understand their place in the world

[Kip Currier: Jane Goodall's 1960 keen-eyed field observation of chimpanzees using tools in the wild was a game-changer in how humans think about primates. It's also one of the great moments of scientific research in the past century. We should deeply consider what other scientific insights we are likely to miss when cuts to scientific research are made and the pursuit of knowledge is devalued.]

[Excerpt]

"Outside the Field Museum in Chicago, a bronze sculpture by artist Marla Friedman captures a moment a friendship was made.

It's called "The Red Palm Nut." A young woman sits barefoot on the ground, reaching out her hand to a chimpanzee, who sits about a yard away. And he lightly, seemingly shyly, takes her human fingers into his own. A bright, red palm nut has dropped on the soil between them.

The woman in the sculpture is the great primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall, at the moment she first earned the trust of a wild chimp. "He reached out and he took and dropped that palm nut," she later remembered. "But then very gently squeezed my fingers and that's how chimpanzees reassure each other. So in that moment we understood each other without the use of human words, the language of gestures."

Jane Goodall called the silvery-chinned chimp David Greybeard. She met him when she was in her 20s, a former secretary from Bournemouth, England, who saved cash tips she'd earned as a waitress to journey to Africa, where she talked herself into a job as assistant to the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey.

She had no college experience. But Jane Goodall convinced Leakey she would be just the person to live among and study a group of chimpanzees he had discovered on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

And on what she recalled was a rainy morning, November 4, 1960, she saw David Greybeard and other chimps take twigs from a tree, pluck their leaves, and use them as sticks to pierce a termite mound and slurp the insects off the end — almost like how those primates called human beings might lick peanut butter off a spoon.

What she saw and documented was startling: the chimps had made the twigs into tools. When she wrote about it to Louis Leakey, he famously replied, "We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as humans."

By the time Jane Goodall died this week, at the age of 91, she'd been honored around the world for her work with chimps and people, and established animal sanctuaries and forest conservation programs.

David Greybeard, I think she'd want us to note, died in 1968. Jane Goodall and her friend saw strangers in a jungle, reached out their hands, and began a friendship that changed how humans understood our place in the world."

Dogs and drones: how scientists are saving Washington’s endangered orcas; The Guardian, October 2, 2025

The Guardian; Dogs and drones: how scientists are saving Washington’s endangered orcas

"Dressed in a bright orange lifejacket – and sometimes goggles – Eba perches atop Giles’s research boat, scanning the wind. When she catches a whiff of orca faeces, she raises her nose, sometimes whimpering or wagging her tail to point Giles in the right direction. Orca-detecting dogs have become an unlikely ally in the fight to save the whales.

“We wanted to use Eba because it allows us to stay really far away from the whales and not stress them out,” says Giles, a member of the marine conservation organisation SeaDoc Society.

Through the study of whale faeces, researchers can uncover a wealth of biological insights from a single sample, including diet, hormone levels, exposure to toxins, pregnancy, gut microbiome composition and the amount of microplastics in their system, as well as the presence of parasites, bacteria and fungi...

Out on the boat with Giles are James Sheppard, a scientist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and Charlie Welch, an SDZWA volunteer and head of Proper Voltage, a company focused on sustainable battery technology. Together, they have spent a decade developing conservation drones that can capture samples of the cloud-like plumes of breath from orcas’ blowholes with mounts holding petri dishes.

Sheppard says: “We need to get data that is robust and as close to real-time as possible, so that we can find out if there’s a real problem. Then the animal-care staff can go in and stage an intervention if it’s needed.”"

Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project; The New York Times, August 12, 2025

 Garrett M. Graff , The New York Times; Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project

"The Manhattan Project was a towering achievement, one of the great stories of human effort and accomplishment. Yet the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the culture of research that the Manhattan Project and World War II bequeathed us, a culture that propelled American prosperity.

At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together."

UVA President James Ryan Caved to MAGA—and They Forced Him Out Anyway; The New Republic, June 27, 2025

 Siva Vaidhyanathan, The New Republic ; UVA President James Ryan Caved to MAGA—and They Forced Him Out Anyway

[Kip Currier: Capitulation to Trump almost never gives people and organizations what they think or hope it will. For examples, just look to the craven law firms that have debased themselves and are paying the price for submission.

The forcing out of UVA President James Ryan is just another step in what Trump et al have planned for higher education.]

[Excerpt]

"Thomas Jefferson’s vision for a noble and educated republic has been dealt a firm blow. The enemies of free and open inquiry, of science, and of informed, democratic citizenship have chopped off the head of the very university Jefferson founded to make his vision real. 

On Friday, the Trump administration, aided by a board appointed entirely by Republican Governor Glenn Younkin, forced University of Virginia President James Ryan to resign. The Justice Department had threatened to block all federal funds to the second-oldest public university in the country if Ryan remained in office.   

Ryan and the board had eliminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in March, even though the specious executive order commanding such changes was already under challenge by the courts. The university chose to comply rather than fight.   

But, in a turn that Franz Kafka would appreciate (and perhaps inspired), the Trump administration declared that capitulation insufficient. In a clumsily worded letter to the university sent in April, the Department of Justice claimed that it had “received complaints that [Ryan’s] office and the University may have failed to implement these directives and further that you have refused to produce the report on the matter.”...

To this day, no one at the university has a clear idea what the university could or should have done. The New York Times reported Thursday that the only specific move the Justice Department demanded in recent weeks was Ryan’s resignation. 

Laying the attack on the University of Virginia on DEI was brilliant and maddening. What, exactly, is DEI? Those of us who work in universities have a good idea. It is the collection of efforts and programs that allow students who have served in the military, do not come from homes that have had college students before, graduated from high schools deep in the coal fields of Appalachia, arrived on student visas from Nigeria, have endured sexual violence or harassment, or occupy segments of society that are constantly under attack from the majority to succeed and graduate. They are not zero-sum programs. They do not deny anyone else an opportunity to attend a university or thrive at one.   

DEI programs recognize that society and the world are complex, diverse places."

‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history; The Guardian, March 30, 2025

  David Smith, The Guardian; ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history

"The US president, who has sought to root out “wokeness” since returning to power in January, accused the Smithsonian of trying to rewrite history on issues of race and gender. In an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he directed the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its storied museums.

The move was met with dismay from historians who saw it as an attempt to whitewash the past and suppress discussions of systemic racism and social justice. With Trump having also taken over the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, there are fears that, in authoritarian fashion, he is aiming to control the future by controlling the past.

“It is a five-alarm fire for public history, science and education in America,” said Samuel Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst."

Our greatest libraries are melting away; The Washington Post, April 7, 2021

 David Farrier , The Washington Post; Our greatest libraries are melting away

 

"Spending time in the library of ice reminds us that our history is bound up with that of the planet. As that library comes under ever increasing risk, we should remember the fate of another great library. Legend tells that the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground, but the truth is less spectacular. As the Roman Empire fell into decline, people simply neglected to protect and preserve the fragile papyrus manuscripts that were stored in the Library of Alexandria. Gone with it were the greatest treasures of the ancient world: hundreds of years of civilizations’ stories, memories, knowledge and wisdom.

The greatest library in history was lost to neglect. Unless we act now, the library of ice will meet the same fate."

How false hope spread about hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 — and the consequences that followed; The Washington Post, April 13, 2020

Elyse Samuels and Meg Kelly , The Washington Post; How false hope spread about hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 — and the consequences that followed

"The science 

As attention on the drugs became even more prolific — online, in the media and from the president — scientists say there is only “anecdotal evidence” on the drugs. To a layperson, that may not sound bad, but it’s actually an insult in the scientific community.

Anecdotal evidence refers to people’s personal stories about taking the drugs and has no basis in scientific data. It’s akin to a Yelp review."

The Russification of America; New York Times, February 21, 2017

Roger Cohen, New York Times; 

The Russification of America

"I’m skeptical of Trump ever running a disciplined administration. His feelings about Europe are already clear and won’t change. The European Union needs to step into the moral void by standing unequivocally for the values that must define the West: truth, facts, reason, science, tolerance, freedom, democracy and the rule of law. For now it’s unclear if the Trump administration is friend or foe in that fight."

Juno probe enters Jupiter's orbit after 'amazing' Nasa mission – as it happened; Guardian, 7/5/16

Michael Slezak, Guardian; Juno probe enters Jupiter's orbit after 'amazing' Nasa mission – as it happened:

"Well, what a day. What an achievement.

After a five year journey from Earth, Juno the solar-powered spacecraft squeezed through a narrow band, skimming Jupiter’s surface, avoiding the worst of both its radiation belt and its dangerous dust rings.

It fired its main engine, slowing its velocity, and allowing it to get captured into Jupiter’s hefty orbit.

After it was complete, jubilant scientists fronted a press conference, and tore up a “contingency communication strategy” they said they prepared in case things went wrong.

“To know we can go to bed tonight not worrying about what is going to happen tomorrow, is just amazing,” said Diane Brown, a project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Scott Bolton, principle investigator of the Juno mission told his colleagues: “You’re the best team ever! We just did the hardest thing Nasa has ever done.”"

What the Dalai Lama Taught Daniel Goleman About Emotional Intelligence; Harvard Business Review, 5/4/15

Andrea Ovans, Harvard Business Review; What the Dalai Lama Taught Daniel Goleman About Emotional Intelligence:

"Two decades before Daniel Goleman first wrote about emotional intelligence in the pages of HBR, he met his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama at Amherst College, who mentioned to the young science journalist for the New York Times that he was interested in meeting with scientists. Thus began a long, rich friendship as Goleman became involved over the years in arranging a series of what he calls “extended dialogues” between the Buddhist spiritual leader and researchers in fields ranging from ecology to neuroscience. Over the next 30 years, as Goleman has pursued his own work as a psychologist and business thinker, he has come to see the Dalai Lama as a highly uncommon leader. And so he was understandably delighted when, on the occasion of his friend’s 80th birthday, he was asked to write a book describing the Dalai Lama’s compassionate approach to addressing the world’s most intractable problems. Due out in June, Force for Good, which draws both on Goleman’s background in cognitive science and his long relationship with the Dalai Lama, is both an exploration of the science and the power of compassion and a call to action. Curious about the book and about how the Dalai Lama’s views on compassion informed Goleman’s thinking on emotional intelligence, I caught up with Goleman over the phone. What follows are edited excerpts from our conversation."