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U.S. science is in chaos

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#521

Post by dnautics »

homerowilson wrote: post #407
simojo wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, Spain has their own set of politics worth losing sleep over; perhaps as an expat you won't be as attached though.

I (American) worked in Spain (Cáceres, Extremadura) ~2015-2017 in tech. It was a wonderful experience. Extremely talented, hard-working, and friendly co-workers. Great health-care and education systems. I think since then rising housing prices partially due to migration have become an issue, but it's a really, really nice place.

gotta be ready for the crazy heat in the summers, they don't call it extremadura for nothing. unironically best lodging is rooms that were dungeons in the castle.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#522

Post by rurp »

chasing wrote: post #426
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #19

> whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue. Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.

It certainly is when people are typing the word "black" into the search field when deciding what programs need to be cut...

Seriously. I hope everyone understands that this literally happened at a massive scale. So many projects were killed simply because the project name had a word on the banned words list. The idiots at doge and elsewhere have simply ctrl+f searched "woke" terms and ended projects without the faintest idea of what they were killing. All in the name of saving negative federal dollars.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#524

Post by AlexCoventry »

agumonkey wrote: post #512
dwa3592 wrote: post #307

My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.

russia: brain drain usa: brain drain where is everybody going ?

Canada, Europe, China.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#525

Post by teaearlgraycold »

evilos wrote: post #334
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly

The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless. The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.

If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#526

Post by mbivert »

itsamario wrote: post #510
dwa3592 wrote: post #307

My wife operates an optical trap (a sophisticated microscope, she uses it for studying gene/dna physical properties) and she's pretty good at working with that instrument. The number of people good at working that microscope are in the ballpark of 2000 (+- 1000) in the world! She has cried a lot in the last one year for the mess science research has become. We are moving out of the country at the end of August.

When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom. -Confucius I've read that asia is leading the world in scientific discoveries and therefore Mandarin gets the naming rights. That's privilege and the reason English is fleeting

I've read that too. Yet, I've also read stuff like [0]. The truth is probably somewhere it between

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01902-0

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#527

Post by Herring »

levocardia wrote: post #484
Herring wrote: post #134

Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...

...which is why there are no emerging far-right-populist political movements in welfare-heavy societies like the UK, France, and Germany, right?

You didn't read the article, did you? People there are getting radicalized because of cuts to social spending.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#528

Post by burningChrome »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #33

My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support the…

Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make.

He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest.

Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.

Re: U.S. science is in chaos

#529

Post by xmprt »

littlekey wrote: post #423
twothreeone wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which really tells you more about the state of mind of people asking that question. What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?

>What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.

I agree. But that's what functioning government is supposed to be for. You don't build centuries long institutions by focusing on day to day concerns. Sure putting food on the table is important, but also a lot of that food comes from decades of research on agriculture and how to breed genetically diverse yet resilient crops.

Today's standards are yesterday's luxuries which were the day before's scientific breakthroughs.

And the idea that science is what's breaking the bank when it's barely a rounding error in the US budget is laughable. It's hard to get exact numbers for all R&D funding vs how much we spent on the Iran war but my estimates put just the single Iran war at anywhere from 20-50% and the goals for the Iran war are even more abstract and arguably make things much worse for average Americans on a day to day basis.

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