Clark Gray

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

UNC-Chapel Hill Concludes Civics School Investigation, Won’t Release Findings A law firm's external investigation into UNC-CH's civics school is complete, but the university won't provide details.

unc has concluded it's investigation into the school of civic life and leadership and it's standing behind jed atkins as dean.

beyond that, we didn't learn anything specific about what they found or what they're doing about it

www.theassemblync.com/news/educati...

INBOX: data from the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migrations show that in the most recent three months, every single one of the 1,651 refugees accepted into the United States were of (white) South African origin.

www.rpc.state.gov/documents/Re...

Applications are open for the 2026 Peking University–IIASA Postdoctoral Program (2-year fellowship). Open to postdocs of all nationalities interested in systems analysis and interdisciplinary research.
📅 Apply by 10 April 2026. @pku1898.bsky.social
iiasa.ac.at/opportunitie...

USAID’s Emergency Food Security Program spent $4 billion in FY2022 to feed 114 million people in 55 countries. We just blew that much money in four days of this war.

#demography #fertility

📢We updated Short-Term Fertility Fluctuations #STFF data series!
✔️Monthly births for 47 countries and areas
✔️Seasonally & calendar adjusted monthly births & TFRs for 32 countries

Interested in short-term fertility trends?😉👇
humanfertility.org/Data/STFF

Fuqua should focus on preparing students, not surveilling them Transcripts are fed to an in-house AI system that "objectively" grades participation by assessing comment relevance and whether statements spur conversation. While framed as innovation, this transform...

"Fuqua classrooms are equipped with cameras and microphones. Under the new system, students would check in by scanning NFC tags at their seats. This would be used to ascertain the exact position of speakers. Transcripts are then fed to an in-house AI system that "objectively" grades participation."

If anyone is friends with any Georgian air traffic controllers, buy them a nice bottle of wine. As guardians of pretty much the only narrow gap still available between Europe and Asia that avoids both Iran, the Gulf, Ukraine and Russia, they are under some substantial pressure.

👀 new storm events database site at @noaa.gov , and it's not terrible!

Go check out the beta site and break it!

www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/storm...

Heads up US demographers. Our main NIH study sections (SSPA/SSPB) are being disbanded. I don’t know what this means. public.csr.nih.gov/StudySection...

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

What would you think if a hypothetical biology professor at a hypothetical public university in a state starting with an N, who was involved in helping organize a Stand Up for Science Rally this week, and got a visit from their hypothetical Department chair and... 1/2

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

7/10

UNC-CH Will ‘Scrap’ New Recording Policy, Chancellor Says The move comes less than three weeks after the controversial rules were enacted.

UNC-Chapel Hill will “scrap” a policy that would have allowed administrators to secretly record professors, Chancellor Lee Roberts said Friday. The move comes less than three weeks after the controversial rules were enacted.

www.theassemblync.com/news/educati...

Deaths per 100,000 by Daily temperature for different sectors, primary, not employed, service sector, technical/manual, and professional/managerial

4/4
@rdbressler.bsky.social, @annapappp.bsky.social, Luis Sarmiento, Jeffrey G. Shrader & Andrew J. Wilson find that #climate vulnerability isn’t just about where you live – it’s about what you do for work. #MortalitySpecialIssue

Read the full article here: doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

But multi-year awards are capped at last year's rate, so success rates will continue to be low 😢

Jobs | Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Join our team!

We're hiring!

Our Climate & Health Postdoc Fellow will advance research on the health benefits of climate mitigation and adaptation activities, and contribute to case studies, economic evaluation and modeling efforts of specific climate actions.

Learn more and apply: buff.ly/aGbLbU3

Another fun one!:

Adrian Tchaikovsky
Martha Wells
Anne Leckie
Ursula Vernon
Jeff VanderMeer

Another photo from last night's aurora show.

The decline of child stunting in 122 countries: a systematic review of child growth studies since the 19th century Introduction Child stunting, a measure of malnutrition, is a major global health challenge affecting 148.1 million children in 2022. Global stunting rates have declined from 47.2% in 1985 to 22.3% in ...

Eradicating child stunting was a central feature of the modern health transition. A new paper reviews 923 child growth studies in 122 countries 1814-2016 to show massive decline in child stunting in the 20th century even in hi income countries & surprising heterogeneity in the regional trajectories.

Temperature and sex ratios at birth | PNAS Human sex ratios at birth (SRBs) shape population composition and are closely linked to maternal health and gender discrimination. In the context o...

"We show that high temperatures in the nine months before birth are negatively associated with male births in sub-Saharan Africa and India. The exposure timing demonstrates that ambient heat can increase prenatal mortality in early pregnancy, particularly among males"

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Do disaster-relief cash transfers trap people in risky areas, or help them adapt? Disaster relief can discourage people from adapting to future disasters – for example, by reducing incentives to relocate. But in low-income settings, cash relief can also ease liquidity constraints and enable adaptation. Evidence from Pakistan’s 2010 floods shows that both of these forces exist but that they offset each other, so that cash relief does not cause more people to stay in disaster-prone areas.

🆕 Do disaster-relief cash transfers trap people in risky areas, or help them adapt?

Today on VoxDev, Muhammad Bin Khalid (Harvard) & Martin Mattsson (NUS) discuss how disaster relief enabled climate adaptation in Pakistan: https://ow.ly/XAgU50YiFE7

Valuing wildfire smoke–related mortality benefits from climate mitigation | PNAS Human-induced climate change has increased wildfire risks, associated air pollution, and health damages in North America. Despite its large potenti...

🚨🔥 NEW: Increasing mortality from wildfire smoke is directly traceable to greenhouse gas emissions. In our new paper in @pnas.org , we show that every megaton of CO2 emitted costs the US more than 10 million dollars in health costs from wildfire smoke. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I wish it was this easy...

📢 #episky #mortality #opendata
📈 #US #HMD series updated through 2024

🔓 Data is freely available at mortality.org

Continuing divergence in #lifeexpectancy at birth between the US and other high-income countries in 2024.

We love books too LOL!

Wikipedia is far superior IMO!

A screenshot of the CRU-TS national time series dashboard

New dashboard to visualise CRU-TS country averages (i.e. CRU-CY) for temperature, precipitation, humidity and drought area (using our scPDSI indicator).

(It takes a little while to first load, but is quite responsive after that)

climate.uea.co/CRU-Timeseri...

postdoctoral associate at Princeton ad

New Postdoctoral Research Associate positions at @Princeton's Office of Population Research!

A large yellowish blob in the upper-left centre, with two dimmer dots to the lower right marked by arrows. These dots are giant exoplanets. The remaining dots without arrows are background stars, and the features around the main blob are imaging artefacts.

See those two dots with arrows pointing to them?

They're giant gas planets orbiting their star, located 307 lightyears away.

These are directly imaged exoplanets.