Scientists claim they have brought the dire wolf species back from extinction after 13,000 years, thanks to genetic engineering.
On Monday, the Texas-based biotechnology and genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences announced that three dire wolf pups were born last fall. The species became popular in modern culture thanks to their inclusion in the popular HBO series “Game of Thrones,” which inspired the company to name the young wolves Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, which references characters in the series.
“Our team took DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies,” Colossal CEO Ben Lamm said, per the <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/04/07/us-news/dire-wolf-from-game-of-thrones-revived-in-de-extinction-project/">New York Post</a>. “It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on and its broader impact on conservation.”
The team used &#8221; somatic cell nuclear transfer&#8221; to clone high-quality cell lines, which were transferred into donor egg cells and then implanted into a surrogate, the Post reported. 
Two pups were born in October 2024, while a third was born in January 2025.
Colossal made headlines last month for engineering a “woolly mouse,” which they made by injecting mammoth DNA into mice to make them grow thick coats. Per <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14580605/colossal-biosciences-extinction-revive-dire-wolf-remus.html">The Daily Mail</a>, the company has a stated goal of bringing the woolly mammoth back from extinction by 2028. 
Paleontologist Julie Meachen told <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/science/colossal-dire-wolf-deextinction.html">The New York Times</a> that dire wolves lived in North America during the Ice Age and were contemporaries of mastodons and saber tooth tigers. Their closest living relatives are gray wolves, which are about 25% smaller. Dire wolves also have more muscular jaws and shoulders. 
The company’s announcement has inspired many reactions online, ranging from excitement to skepticism. The official “Jurassic World” account posted its response to X, saying, “We see no possible way this could go wrong.”
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We see no possible way this could go wrong <a href="https://t.co/EQaOH4fJYk">https://t.co/EQaOH4fJYk</a>
&mdash; Jurassic World (@JurassicWorld) <a href="https://twitter.com/JurassicWorld/status/1909386233744330991?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 7, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Many commenters said it was a stretch to call these genetically modified wolf cubs actual dire wolves.
“While these genetically engineered wolves exhibit physical and behavioral traits reminiscent of dire wolves, they are not true dire wolves,” one person <a href="https://x.com/CryptoNDN/status/1909287183309037846">wrote</a>. “The genetic modifications introduced specific dire wolf characteristics into the gray wolf genome, resulting in animals that are essentially gray wolves with selected phenotypic traits of dire wolves, rather than exact replicas of the extinct species.”
&#8220;This isn’t life finding a way, this is human interference,&#8221; another person <a href="https://x.com/thehamburglar33/status/1909575090544820231">observed</a>. &#8220;Someone forgot the lesson of just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. Or in other terms did they step back and ask the question &#8216;why are we doing this?'&#8221;

Howling wolf

Scientists Claim They Brought Back Extinct Dire Wolves With Birth Of 3 New Pups

Animals

Science

Technology

United States

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed Tuesday night by the Senate in a party-line vote to lead the National Institutes of Health.
The Senate voted 53-47 to confirm Bhattacharya with all Republicans supporting his nomination and every Democrat voting against confirming the Stanford School of Medicine medical professor. Bhattacharya has promised to bring more accountability to the NIH, which oversees tens of billions of dollars in federal grant dollars. 
“The mission of the NIH is to address the health needs the American people have and to expand life expectancy of the American people. And we have not achieved that. It’s flatlined,” Bhattacharya <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/jay-bhattacharya-promises-to-bring-accountability-to-nih-after-covid-failure" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> during his confirmation hearing earlier this month before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
Bhattacharya widely rose to prominence during the COVID pandemic, when he was a sharp critic of the government-imposed lockdowns and was one of the first to express concerns about the safety and efficacy of vaccine mandates. During COVID, he was an advisor to Florida, aiding Governor Ron DeSantis in the reopening of the Sunshine State. 
“Science should be an engine for freedom. Knowledge and freedom … it shouldn’t be pushing mandates for vaccines like the COVID vaccines,” Bhattacharya said during his confirmation hearing. “The role of the scientist should not be to say that you can’t send your kid to school for two years.”
In his nomination announcement, President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-nominates-dr-jay-bhattacharya-to-lead-nih" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> that Bhattacharya would work alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “Make America Healthy Again” and “restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease.”
Bhattacharya also promised during his confirmation hearing that he would support experiments that take different approaches to an issue, saying that much of the established scientific community has failed to provide satisfactory answers. 
On Tuesday, the Senate <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-names-marty-makary-to-lead-food-and-drug-administration" target="_blank" rel="noopener">also voted</a> 56-44 to confirm Dr. Marty Makary to head up the Food and Drug Administration. Democrat Senators Dick Durbin (IL), Maggie Hassan (NH), and Jeanne Shaheen (NH) joined Republicans in voting for Makary. 
When he nominated Makary, Trump said that he would work with RFK Jr. to “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our Nation’s food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our Nation’s youth, so that we can finally address the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic.”

NIH Director Nominee Jayanta Bhattacharya

Senate Confirms COVID Lockdown Opponent Dr. Jay Bhattacharya To Lead NIH

COVID-19

Donald Trump

Jay Bhattacharya

Lockdowns

Senate

Stanford University

Trump Administration

Genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Missouri federal court, leaving one question on everyone&#8217;s minds: what happens to all the DNA it collected?
The company was once valued at more than $6 billion thanks to its at-home DNA testing kits allowing customers to gain insight into their ancestry and genetic profiles, CNBC <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/24/23andme-files-for-bankruptcy-anne-wojcicki-steps-down-as-ceo.html">reported</a>. In 2021, the company went public and was valued at $3.5 billion. But soon after, its stock began to fall as it failed to continue to find viable recurring revenue. It currently has a market capitalization of just $25 million, CNBC reported.
The company made clear that the bankruptcy filing would not change how it stores or manages the data it has received from customers, but there are concerns that the bankruptcy filing could mean that customer DNA profiles are sold to the highest bidder. The Harvard Gazette published a <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/03/what-happens-to-your-genetic-data-if-23andme-collapses/">report</a> recently discussing these exact concerns and noted that certain laws protecting health information would not be covered since 23andMe is not a hospital or physician. The company has already shared customer data with service providers and contractors.
They did note, however, that in “some instances, bankruptcy law had required a consumer privacy ombudsperson to investigate a sale and determine whether it’s keeping with the bankrupt company’s privacy statements, as well as the law,” meaning customer data could be protected.
In September 2024, 23andMe <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/23andme-settles-data-breach-lawsuit-30-million-2024-09-13/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">settled a lawsuit</a> accusing it of failing to protect customer data after 6.9 million users&#8217; personal information was exposed during a data breach.
The once billion-dollar company has struggled in recent years to generate recurring revenue and build lasting research and therapeutics businesses, CNBC <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/24/23andme-files-for-bankruptcy-anne-wojcicki-steps-down-as-ceo.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. Early Monday morning, company CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki announced she was resigning from her executive role but would remain on the company’s board.
“The 23andMe Special Committee released news today indicating their plan to take the company through the Chapter 11 process,” Wojcicki wrote on X. “While I am disappointed that we have come to this conclusion and my bid was rejected, I am supportive of the company and I intend to be a bidder. I have resigned as CEO of the company so I can be in the best position to pursue the company as an independent bidder.”
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The 23andMe Special Committee released news today indicating their plan to take the company through the Chapter 11 process. While I am disappointed that we have come to this conclusion and my bid was rejected, I am supportive of the company and I intend to be a bidder. I have…
— Anne Wojcicki (@annewoj23) <a href="https://twitter.com/annewoj23/status/1904036140077969563?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 24, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Last March, the company formed a committee to come up with solutions. Wojcicki devised several proposals to take the company private but was rejected.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy doesn’t require the liquidation of assets, but 23andMe’s bankruptcy proposal <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.moeb.462638/gov.uscourts.moeb.462638.1.0.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">filed</a> with the court includes a plan to sell off company assets. The plan calls for the company to “actively solicit qualified” bids over a 45-day process, CNBC reported. In her note on X, however, Wojcicki said she was looking to secure the assets herself.
“If I am fortunate enough to secure the company’s assets through the restructuring process, I remain committed to our long-term vision of being a global leader in genetics and establishing genetics as a fundamental part of healthcare ecosystems worldwide,” she wrote.
The company has between $100 million and $500 million in estimated assets, but between the same amount in estimated liabilities, per the <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.moeb.462638/gov.uscourts.moeb.462638.1.0.pdf">bankruptcy filing</a>.

23andMe

23andMe Is Going Bankrupt. What Happens To All The DNA Samples?

23andMe Is Going Bankrupt – What Happens To All The DNA Samples?

bankruptcy

Genes

U.S.

A group of South African scientists trapped in a remote research station in Antarctica have sent a desperate email pleading to be rescued before it is too late, saying one member of the team had sexually assaulted another member and threatened to kill another.
&#8220;The 10-person team is trapped at the remote Sanae IV base, which is on a cliff edge about 105 miles inland from the ice shelf, by encroaching ice and weather as the southern hemisphere winter sets,” The Telegraph <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/03/17/scientists-trapped-antarctica-plead-help-sexual-assault/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">noted</a>.
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Frightened scientists are begging to come home from Antarctica. <a href="https://t.co/GFrbOymJe6">pic.twitter.com/GFrbOymJe6</a>
&mdash; Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) <a href="https://twitter.com/MailOnline/status/1901701951147933784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 17, 2025</a></blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/news/2025-03-16-sa-team-fear-for-safety-at-antarctica-base-after-assaults-death-threat/">The Sunday Times</a> out of South Africa reported that a member of the team sent the email to South African officials stating that the behavior of the dangerous member of the team had become “increasingly egregious,&#8221; and that they were &#8220;experiencing significant difficulty in feeling secure in his presence.”
“It is imperative that immediate action is taken to ensure my safety and the safety of all employees,” the email continued. “Regrettably, [his] behaviour has escalated to a point that is deeply disturbing. Specifically, he physically assaulted [name withheld], which is a grave violation of personal safety and workplace norms. Furthermore, he threatened to kill [name withheld], creating an environment of fear and intimidation. I remain deeply concerned about my own safety, constantly wondering if I might become the next victim.”
“There was a verbal altercation between the team leader and this person,” South African Environment Minister Dion George <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/antarctica-south-africa-scientists-research-base-violence-2045869" target="_blank" rel="noopener">confirmed</a>. “Then it escalated and then that person did physically assault the leader. You can imagine what it&#8217;s like, it is close quarters and people do get cabin fever. It can be very disorientating.”
The Sunday Times reported that the only escape would be to a German base roughly 190 miles away.
One source told the Times, “They were informed of the situation [at Sanae IV] well in advance – way before the season closed &#8230; Now there’s nothing they can do as there are no planes or ships going to or leaving Antarctica. &#8230; They had all the time to remedy the situation but they simply buried their heads in the sand hoping that it’ll go away. They were informed about the problem as early as December.”

NASA’s Operation IceBridge Studies Ice Loss In Antarctica

Horror Film Come To Life: Scientists Trapped In Antarctic Send Desperate Email About Violent Member

Antarctica

Violence

World

Last Friday we attended a “<a href="https://standupforscience2025.org/">Stand up for Science</a>” rally in Seattle, Washington. Given that we both have science PhDs, have spent years doing research, and think science is a great tool for investigating the world, we were hopeful we’d find something to agree with. It wasn’t easy.
The rally was part of a national movement of “Stand Up for Science” events in dozens of cities, including one on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The ostensible purpose was to protest budget cuts to science funding as part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. And certainly the rally we saw offered plenty of budgetary complaints. Some research scientists who had lost their jobs or funding told personal stories that tugged at our heartstrings. There was something palpable throughout the protest, however, that muddied those sympathetic messages: far-Left politics, and lots of it.
Multiple times, after dutifully declaring their personal pronouns, speakers mentioned the importance of preserving “diversity, equity and inclusion,” charged that “When they come after transgender people we must fight,” and lamented Israel’s “attack” on Palestine while asking “How many Palestinians have died in Gaza?” The crowd cheered, and held up numerous protest signs affirming these messages.
Many signs bore trans symbols (one said “Trans Girls for Truth!”), LGBTQ rainbows, Palestine flags, or progressive slogans like “Eat the Rich” (one of which was amusingly biologized as “Phagocytose the Rich”). Calls for DEI and “inclusion” were ubiquitous, with a popular slogan on multiple rainbow-colored signs saying, “Powered by Science, Strengthened by Diversity.” One sign echoed Luigi Mangione, the new progressive folk-hero currently awaiting trial for the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, saying “Deny Fascism, Defend Science, Depose Oligarchy.”
There were plenty of classic “anti-fascist” (aka cultural Marxist) slogans on display. One sign said, “Science over fascism,” another read “Believe scientists, not fascists,” another promoted the hashtag “#fightfascism,” and another declared “Real Americans reject fascism.” Perhaps the strangest showed a picture of a pipet and declared, “This machine kills fascists.” So it seems everyone working in a biology lab must now support Antifa.
We saw an occasional upside-down American flag. One sign showed Trump’s face crossed out, saying “America has no king, it just has a traitor.” Others said “Trust Science Not Trump,” “Farmers Against Trump,” “Dump Trump … Send Elon to Mars,” “Trash Trump,” and of course “F*** Trump.” One sign seemed to yearn for the death of the President, saying “Compost Trump” on one side, while the other side asked, “Is he dead yet?” to which the answer “No” was given, followed by “F***.”
The rally also pushed scientism — the idea that science is the only valid source of knowledge. One sign read “Without Science, It’s All Fiction,” while another turned science into a religion: “Believe, Call, Repent … Science Saves.”
<div id="attachment_890393" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-890393" class="size-large wp-image-890393" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2203278899-864x576.jpg" alt="US TV presenter and former mechanical engineer Bill Nye &quot;The Science Guy&quot; speaks as demonstrators take part in a &quot;Stand Up For Science&quot; rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on March 7, 2025. (Photo by Alex wroblewski / AFP) (Photo by ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2203278899-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2203278899-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2203278899-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2203278899.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images</div>
Amazingly, many in the crowd feigned ignorance that Left-wing ideology permeated the protest. Signs said, “Get your politics out of science!” or “Science is based on facts, not politics,” or “Science is Critical, Not Political.” Yet promoting an unholy union of science and politics is precisely what the “Stand Up for Science Rally” was about.
Most of the smart folks with PhDs at the protest seemed blissfully uninterested in the irony that they were protesting the interference of politics within science while they themselves endorsed the interference of politics within science. But, to his credit, one speaker got the point. Professor Chetan Seshadri of the University of Washington Department of Global Health told the audience precisely why their science funding was being cut.
“The root cause” of these budget cuts, he said, “is the erosion of trust in institutions” and “The erosion of trust in science by the voting public.” He then charged scientists in the audience to show more “humility” in how they do science.
Great idea! But if the rally wanted to reassure mainstream voters that taxpayer-funded science isn’t heavily infiltrated by Left-wing scientists-turned-activists, this absolutely was not the way.
Oh, and the rally repeatedly paid lip service to “academic freedom,” while trashing minority scientific views. The very ethos underlying the event was that “Science” represents a monolithic set of consensus ideas, and “Standing Up for Science” means not just promoting those viewpoints, but squelching those who disagree.
The public is rightfully repelled by this hypocrisy. In recent years they’ve witnessed too many politically motivated attempts to suppress credible scientists who challenged the consensus on Covid vaccines, pandemic lockdowns, evolution, climate change, and more. Here’s a final example.
One speaker at the main &#8220;Stand Up for Science&#8221; Rally in D.C. was Francis Collins, who headed the NIH from 2009 to 2021. As political scientist John West <a href="https://x.com/JGWestDI/status/1898198640331763734" target="_blank" rel="noopener">notes</a>, while Collins played guitar at the rally, “Behind him stood … people carrying signs like ‘Trump Trashes Science,’ ‘He Musk Go,’ and … ‘Diabolical Oligarch Grifting Efficiently’ (DOGE).” Also appearing at the D.C. rally was science popularizer Bill Nye “the science guy,” who charged that those on “the other side” must “oppose this suppression of science” and stop “censoring science.” Yet Collins himself has become notorious for doing just that.
In 2020, Collins sought to dismiss credible experts and lockdown critics like Jay Bhattacharya as “fringe” and “not mainstream science.” But Bhattacharya wasn’t fringe. He was a professor at Stanford, and author of the Great Barrington Declaration — a warning from epidemiologists and public health experts that the lockdowns were doing more harm than good. Scientists like Collins used name-calling and rank-pulling to shout down credible minority scientific viewpoints.
For the record, we’re not “anti-vax” (we both got the Covid vaccine), but much more than that, we are pro-academic freedom. So is the public — and their disgust at politically driven intolerance in the scientific community led them to vote accordingly last November.
As a consequence, Bhattacharya is now poised to replace Collins as head of the NIH, hopefully heralding a new era of real intellectual freedom and objectivity — showing what it really means to “stand up for science.”
* * *
<a href="https://caseyluskin.com/">Casey Luskin</a> and <a href="https://jonathanmclatchie.com/">Jonathan McLatchie</a> are PhD scientists working at Discovery Institute in Seattle.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Stand Up For Science Rally Held In D.C.

This ‘Science’ Rally Took A Hard Left Turn. We Were There.

This 'Science' Rally Took A Hard Left Turn. We Were There.

Bill Nye

Francis Collins

Leftists

Opinion

Seattle

Washington D.C.

Woke Culture

In a first in the history of physics, scientists have turned light into a supersolid.
“A supersolid is a counter-intuitive phase of matter in which its constituent particles are arranged into a crystalline structure, yet they are free to flow without friction,” the abstract for the study in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08616-9">Nature</a> revealed.
“We actually made light into a solid. That’s pretty awesome,” Dimitris Trypogeorgos, from the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy, enthused. Along with his colleagues, he took a different route from prior research, which created supersolids in experiments using extremely cold atoms. Instead, they used the semiconductor aluminium gallium arsenide and a laser, as New Scientist <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2470908-light-has-been-transformed-into-a-supersolid-for-the-first-time/?utm_source=nsnew&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=nsnew_060325&amp;utm_term=Newsletter%20NSNEW_Weekly" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>, adding that the connections between the light and the material created a “polariton,” which formed the supersolid.
“To create their supersolid, the researchers fired a laser at a piece of gallium arsenide that had been shaped with special ridges. As the light struck the ridges, interactions between it and the material resulted in the formation of polaritons—a kind of hybrid particle—which were constrained by the ridges in a predesigned way,” <a href="https://phys.org/news/2025-03-laser-supersolid.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">phys.org</a> wrote. “Doing so forced the polaritons into forming themselves into a supersolid.”
“To confirm that their system had entered a supersolid phase, the researchers measured the density of the polaritons. They exhibited a ‘distinct modulation’ in space, as if it were crystallizing. But they also observed signs of coherence — a sign that the system maintained its superfluid character,” ZME Science <a href="https://www.zmescience.com/science/scientists-just-turned-light-into-a-supersolid-both-solid-and-liquid-at-the-same-time/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stated</a>.
The advantages of supersolids include use as coolants for quantum devices, aiding the stability of qubits, which store data and perform calculations in quantum computing, use in high-capacity batteries or supercapacitors, or as high-performance lubricants in precision engineering, thus cutting down wear and tear on machinery.
“This is really at the beginning of something new,” Trypogeorgos concluded.
Trypogeorgos has co-authored <a href="https://polaritonics.nanotec.cnr.it/people/dimitris-trypogeorgos/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">many articles</a> regarding working with light, including, “Condensation Dynamics in a Two-Dimensional Photonic Crystal Waveguide,” “Supersolidity of Polariton Condensates in Photonic Crystal Waveguides,” “Emerging Supersolidity from a Polariton Condensate in a Photonic Crystal Waveguide,” “Reconfigurable Quantum Fluid Molecules of Bound States in the Continuum,” and “Exciton-Polariton Ring Josephson Junction.”

3D rendering abstract background

Historic First: Scientists Turn Light Into Supersolid

Light

Quantum computing

Starting Friday evening and lasting for a few more evenings, humans will have the rare opportunity to view all seven non-Earth planets in the solar system at the same time. The next time such an opportunity will arise won’t be until 2040.
The planets will be formed in what is called a planetary alignment, or “planetary parade.” Normally, such a view is not possible because the orbital period of each planet is different.
“The eight planets in our solar system orbit the sun in roughly the same plane because they all originally formed from the same <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2260005-weve-seen-a-planet-being-born-while-its-star-is-still-forming/">disc of debris</a> around the sun,” New Scientist <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2470069-how-to-see-every-planet-in-the-solar-system-at-once-this-week/">explains</a>. “The line the sun traces across the daytime sky – called the ecliptic – aligns with this plane, so when the planets appear in the sky, they all appear roughly along the ecliptic. It isn’t a perfect line of planets, because their orbits are tilted slightly, but it is fairly close.&#8221;
The outlet stated that the best time to view the planets is just after sunset. Mars, Jupiter, and Uranus, unlike Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and Neptune will not lie close to the horizon and thus will not disappear as quickly.
“It’s great to see the interest the planetary parade is generating,” Professor David Armstrong of the University of Warwick, U.K., reflected. “Engagement in astronomy, looking up at the sky, and appreciating the wonder of our solar system are all fantastic, and I encourage anyone interested to take the time to step outside and see the planets with their own eyes if they get the chance over the next few days, and a clear sky.”
Ed Krupp, director of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, cautioned that people needed more than the naked eye to see the planets. He asserted that the planets “are always more or less on the same path, and occasionally a few more of them are visible in the night sky. But the general message is that, ‘I will go outside and see these planets strung like pearls across the sky.’ That’s just not the case.”
“If you wanted to see Mercury, you might get lucky around the evening, shortly after the sunset, in the twilight, but only if you knew where to look,” Krupp added. “Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all up in the sky between the western horizon and a bit overhead to the east.”
“Uranus and Neptune are hard to spot without a telescope, as both planets are blue and orbit in the dim outskirts of the solar system,” The Los Angeles Times <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-02-26/7-planet-parade-lines-up-in-the-sky-on-friday-how-to-see-it-from-socal">noted</a>.

Outer Space

All 7 Other Planets Visible Simultaneously Over Next Few Days

Earth

General

Imagine we&#8217;re back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. You&#8217;re feeling depressed and no one wants to talk to you, so you pay a psychiatrist to listen to your problems. But even after talking things out with your shrink, you&#8217;re still not feeling great. All hope seems lost. Then the shrink tells you not to despair, because you have the opportunity to participate in a clinical trial for a new class of drug that has the potential to cure all of your symptoms, called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs.
If you enter the trial, you have a chance of getting the new SSRI drug, or you could get a placebo that does nothing. You&#8217;re told it&#8217;s a win-win: If you participate in the clinical trial, Big Pharma will get some more data on whether this new class of drugs actually works. And you have a chance of being cured. If you&#8217;re not cured, then in all likelihood, the worst-case scenario isn&#8217;t a big deal. Either you get a placebo and nothing changes, or you get the real drug, which has relatively modest side effects — like dry mouth, nausea, dizziness, and so on. And in exchange for enduring those side effects, your depression might go away. So what do you have to lose?
This was the process drug companies used to convince the world that SSRIs worked. After running a bunch of &#8220;double-blind&#8221; clinical trials, they found that people who took the SSRIs ultimately reported that they felt better than people who received the placebo. Therefore, we were told that the whole &#8220;serotonin theory of depression&#8221; must be true. After all, when people took SSRIs and had more serotonin in their brains, their depression went away. The people who took the sugar pill didn&#8217;t do as well. So there you have it. Science wins again.
There&#8217;s a major problem with this whole methodology, however. It&#8217;s a problem that somehow didn&#8217;t occur to any of the media outlets or physicians who pushed SSRIs for decades. You might have to think about it for a few minutes, but eventually it becomes obvious. Here&#8217;s the issue: In practice, these clinical trials weren&#8217;t actually double-blind. The vast majority of patients were able to &#8220;break blind,&#8221; as they say in the industry. And that means they were able to figure out whether they got the real SSRI or the placebo. That&#8217;s because, in most cases, the patients who got the real drug very quickly noticed they were experiencing some of the side effects. After all, if you take a pill and you start experiencing dry mouth or nausea or something like that, then you&#8217;ll probably conclude that you&#8217;re taking an active medication. And that&#8217;s exactly what happened in many of these trials. In fact, in one study, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4172306/#c25" target="_blank" rel="noopener">conducted</a> by researchers at Columbia, 89% of participants correctly guessed that they were on the SSRI. That&#8217;s an extremely high number for a clinical trial.
Now you can probably see the issue. If the studies aren&#8217;t really double-blind, then we have no way of knowing if the SSRIs actually improved people&#8217;s moods. It&#8217;s quite possible that these patients were actually feeling better because they thought they were taking a wonder drug. And then they convinced themselves that it was working, so they told the therapist they were improving. This is commonly referred to as the &#8220;placebo effect,&#8221; and the only way to defeat it — particularly when you&#8217;re trying to assess the effectiveness of psychoactive drugs — is with double-blind studies. And that didn&#8217;t happen with SSRIs.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1539-the-matt-walsh-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
This is not some crackpot theory, by the way. A few years ago, a researcher at Harvard named Irving Kirsch <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4172306/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">found:</a>
<blockquote>Analysis of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect &#8230; The relatively small differences between drug and placebo in antidepressant trials are at least in part due to &#8216;breaking blind&#8217; and discerning that one is in the drug group, because of the side effects produced by the drug.</blockquote>
Kirsch goes on to suggest that, instead of SSRIs, maybe all patients should be given a placebo. After all, based on the FDA&#8217;s data, less than 45% of SSRI trials showed a statistically significant benefit of the SSRI over a placebo. And the placebo, of course, has no side effects.
But as we all know, there&#8217;s no money in prescribing sugar pills. So instead, doctors and the pharmaceutical industry pushed SSRIs. Based on these garbage clinical trials — which fall apart under the slimmest possible scrutiny — the use of SSRIs among teenagers and adults in this country increased by almost 400% from the early 1990&#8217;s to 2006. And it kept going up. By 2014, one in ten adults was filling an SSRI prescription. From 2015 to 2021, SSRI use increased by another 35%. We&#8217;re talking about tens of millions of prescriptions here.
Meanwhile, the number of Americans suffering from depression has kept increasing. According to Gallup, in 2023, &#8220;The percentage of U.S. adults who report having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime reached 29.0%, nearly 10 percentage points higher than in 2015.&#8221; In other words, we&#8217;re more depressed than ever, and at the same time, we&#8217;re taking more antidepressants than ever.
These prescriptions have continued even after one of the most prominent medical journals on the planet admitted that actually, doctors no longer think low serotonin levels are linked to depression. In other words, if these drugs actually work, then no one can actually explain why. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Quoting</a> from the journal Molecular Psychiatry: &#8220;Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without. &#8230; This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.&#8221;
I&#8217;ll say that again. &#8220;This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.&#8221; This was a paper published in the summer of 2022, by one of the top journals in the entire field of medicine. No serious person disputes it.
And yet, to this day, if you suggest that depression isn&#8217;t related to a chemical imbalance, as I did this week, you will be dogpiled for doing so. It’s been impossible to have anything approaching an honest conversation about depression and SSRIs because many of the people on these drugs will lash out with blind rage if you even suggest that depression might have causes that go deeper than “chemical imbalances.” If you try to talk about the problem of despair with any depth or nuance at all, you are screamed out of the room by drug addicts who don’t know they’re drug addicts. The truth is, though, that none of the support for SSRIs is based in reality. This whole class of drugs has been peddled to tens of millions of people based on complete fabrications. It&#8217;s not an overstatement to say that this is one of the great medical scandals of our time.
What&#8217;s changing now is that, finally, someone in a position of authority is finally willing to investigate these drugs — and many other drugs like them. A few days ago, via executive order, the Trump administration established something called the &#8220;Make America Healthy Again Commission,&#8221; or &#8220;MAHA,&#8221; and it&#8217;ll be headed by RFK Jr. The purpose of the commission, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-presidents-make-america-healthy-again-commission/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according</a> to the White House, is to determine why Americans have shorter life expectancies than people living in other nations — as well as higher rates of chronic diseases like cancer and asthma. Part of this effort means assessing the, &#8220;prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.&#8221; Watch:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
HHS Secretary RFK Jr. pledges “NOTHING is gonna be off limits” in chronic disease investigation
“The childhood vaccine schedule, electromagnetic radiation, glyphosate, other pesticides, ultra processed foods, artificial food additives, SSRI and other psychiatric drugs, PFAs,… <a href="https://t.co/kWV2LHuqTG">pic.twitter.com/kWV2LHuqTG</a>
&mdash; Holden Culotta (@Holden_Culotta) <a href="https://twitter.com/Holden_Culotta/status/1891888695185375248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 18, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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As of right now, as you heard, RFK&#8217;s commission is going to be focused on gathering data. They&#8217;re not banning anything outright. They&#8217;re not punishing doctors for prescribing anything. Instead, they&#8217;re doing what the government should&#8217;ve done several decades ago. They&#8217;re looking at the existing evidence and determining whether it&#8217;s valid or not. They&#8217;re not going to simply accept &#8220;clinical trials&#8221; without looking closely at them. They&#8217;re going to see whether it makes sense to keep prescribing these drugs to so many Americans, particularly young people.
You have to wonder what kind of person would object to a fact-finding effort like this. After all, if SSRIs (and the other drugs he mentioned) actually work as advertised, then the extra scrutiny wouldn&#8217;t be a problem at all. But RFK Jr. has received a lot of push back already. Newsweek, for example, recently took aim at RFK&#8217;s claim that antidepressants can be more addictive than heroin. They cited a Stanford professor as <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/rfk-jr-antidepressants-ssris-drugs-maha-2032297" target="_blank" rel="noopener">saying</a>: &#8220;Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk. In my 35 years in the addiction field, I&#8217;ve met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids.&#8221;
So we&#8217;re meant to conclude that RFK is a conspiracy theorist for even suggesting that SSRIs can cause dependency. Just a few years ago, however, that was not a conspiracy theory at all. It was settled science. In 2018, the New York Times published an article entitled, &#8220;Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit.&#8221; Here&#8217;s some of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/health/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac-cymbalta.html?rsrc=ss&amp;unlocked_article_code=1.s04.GyfR.MCfR9TrwZ4dZ&amp;smid=nytcore-ios-share&amp;referringSource=articleShare" target="_blank" rel="noopener">relevant findings</a>: &#8220;In New Zealand, where prescriptions are at historic highs, a survey of long-term users found that withdrawal was the most common complaint, cited by three-quarters of long-term users. &#8230; In a recent survey of 250 long-term users of psychiatric drugs — most commonly antidepressants — about half who wound down their prescriptions rated the withdrawal as severe. Nearly half who tried to quit could not do so because of these symptoms. In another study of 180 longtime antidepressant users, withdrawal symptoms were reported by more than 130. Almost half said they felt addicted to antidepressants.&#8221;
Now, if you compare those numbers to the percentage of heroin users who become addicted within a month of using the drug, you&#8217;ll find that RFK actually has a point. By one <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2681168" target="_blank" rel="noopener">estimate</a>, up to 38% of new heroin users become dependent within a year. That&#8217;s a lot, obviously, but it&#8217;s less than the number of antidepressant users who reported feeling severe withdrawal symptoms.
This is why RFK&#8217;s commission is an important step. It&#8217;s clear we have a lot of evidence that antidepressants are causing far more harm than most people realize. But they&#8217;re not seeing the evidence because it&#8217;s being suppressed. A transparent commission can solve that problem. It can also address this objection, which was <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/kennedy-rfk-antidepressants-ssri-school-shootings/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">just published</a> by the Left-wing outlet Mother Jones.: &#8220;In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, [RFK] claimed that &#8216;tremendous circumstantial evidence&#8217; suggested people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.).&#8221;
This is another common refrain you hear from defenders of SSRIs. They say &#8220;most school shooters&#8221; were not taking SSRIs. As we&#8217;ve previously discussed, there are two major problems with this line. First of all, we don&#8217;t know what drugs a school shooter was taking unless the family discloses it. The police and hospitals won&#8217;t tell anyone, citing privacy laws. And in pretty much no case does the family definitely state that the shooter wasn&#8217;t taking any kind of medication. Secondly, a lot of &#8220;mass shootings&#8221; are really gang violence, and those incidents get lumped in with school shootings. So they flood the data set, and make it hard to determine whether SSRIs are influencing a certain kind of shooting.
Anecdotally, of course, you&#8217;ll find plenty of evidence that SSRIs might be linked to school shootings. From Columbine to Northern Illinois University to the Navy Yard to the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, to the black church in Charleston to the Old National Bank in Kentucky, the shooters were all confirmed to be on antidepressants. In response to these shootings, you might say that correlation doesn&#8217;t prove causation. After all, these shooters were taking SSRIs because they were unstable. That doesn&#8217;t necessarily prove SSRIs made their condition worse.
And that&#8217;s true. But there is additional, affirmative evidence to believe that SSRIs are in fact making these shooters&#8217; condition worse. For one thing, there&#8217;s the FDA black box label on these drugs, which indicates that they can &#8220;increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior.&#8221; And then there&#8217;s this. A few years ago, researchers writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5066537/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">found</a> that antidepressants doubled the risk of suicidality and violence, when they&#8217;re given to healthy people with no mental health disorders. From the journal: &#8220;Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.&#8221;
How is that possible? The truth is we have no idea. We have no clue why these drugs supposedly work in the first place. And we have no idea why they might turn normal people into violent maniacs. It&#8217;s obviously a very concerning finding, especially given how much doctors are over-prescribing these drugs to any patient who claims to be depressed.
Doctors would rather prescribe those drugs than tell patients the truth about their depression, and how to deal with it. I can say that, in my personal life, I have known many people who take antidepressants. And in almost every case, there are glaringly obvious things in their lives that would cause any normal person to be depressed. Depression is a totally rational response to their circumstance. Instead of making lifestyle changes or dealing with the underlying trauma, however, they are given drugs that effectively numb their brain. It’s like giving someone a painkiller to make it hurt less when they put their hand on a hot stove. The stove is still burning them. The pain from the stove is not the problem. Their hands and nervous system work just fine. It’s where they’re putting their hand, that’s the problem.
The reason the medical establishment and Democrats are panicking over RFK&#8217;s commission is simple. The moment people realize they have agency — when they realize they can take their hand off the stove — they become a lot harder to control. They also become a lot harder to monetize. For Big Pharma and corporate media outlets that sell advertising space to Big Pharma, the implications are obviously dire. Nevertheless, for Americans hoping to reverse this country&#8217;s long-standing public health decline, after a generation of junk science and fake clinical trials, it&#8217;s a change that&#8217;s long overdue.

Secretary Of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Visits “The Ingraham Angle”

Democrats Enter Panic Mode As RFK Sets Out To Make America Healthy Again

Big Pharma

Department of Health and Human Services

Depression

Matt Walsh

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Just a couple of years ago, if you can believe it, leading scientists from all over the country held a symposium in Washington along with federal officials from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. According to a senior director at the NIH, the point of the symposium was to address a &#8220;defining issue&#8221; of the current era. So the A-team was going to tackle one of the most difficult and pressing matters in the entire field of scientific and medical research.
Hearing that, you might conclude that these scientists were going to discuss, say, a cure for cancer, or a major breakthrough in gene-editing. Or if nothing else, they might talk about the development of the 50th COVID booster or something like that. Surely, at a minimum, they would discuss a topic that had some kind of relevance to the fields of &#8220;health&#8221; or &#8220;science&#8221; or &#8220;technology.&#8221; Those would all seem to be safe assumptions.
And yet — at the risk of spoiling the symposium for you, in case you were hoping to catch a re-run — that didn&#8217;t happen. In fact, that didn&#8217;t even come close to happening. Instead, here&#8217;s what they came up with, at this symposium full of leading medical and scientific experts in Washington. The first speaker in this clip is a professor at Notre Dame, and the second one is from the National Institutes of Health. Watch:
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For a second, try to ignore the fact that these people are making up fake complaints about the plight of LGBTQ people in STEM. Pretend they&#8217;re not talking like dime-a-dozen panelists on MSNBC, instead of actual scientists. That&#8217;s actually not the worst part of this footage. The worst part is that, already, you can tell that everyone at this symposium is saying the same thing. There&#8217;s no debate whatsoever. This whole event was an extended struggle session in which only one point of view was allowed. And that point of view is that, for some reason, gay people are being forced out of math classes.
It should go without saying that this is a complete bastardization of everything scientists should be doing. They&#8217;re supposed to be asking questions, using the scientific method and finding evidence to support every single one of their conclusions. This is supposed to come naturally to them. It&#8217;s their job. Instead, they spent the entire event explaining why it&#8217;s important to think the exact same way about this particular issue, even though every sane person knows that their theory makes absolutely no sense. 
For example, as the symposium goes on, one researcher with a nonprofit attempts to articulate why it&#8217;s so important to hold struggle sessions like this. And then a senior official at the National Science Foundation offers his take. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 No Divisions In Science" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IvZsIFEu5vM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Every speaker is somehow more unbelievable than the last one. The first guy&#8217;s trying desperately to explain why they&#8217;re holding this symposium at all. And the best he can come up with is, &#8220;When we don&#8217;t ask these questions, we live under the myths that these matters don&#8217;t matter.&#8221; This is the kind of word salad that you have to produce when you know that, in fact, these matters do not matter, and that all of these concerns are completely made-up.
And then the official from the National Science Foundation comes in, and pretty much makes that point as explicitly as he can. He says that, &#8220;We shouldn&#8217;t have to wait on the data,&#8221; because &#8220;we know we&#8217;ve got an issue.&#8221; So like Nike, we should &#8220;just do it.&#8221; In other words, who cares about facts and data when you have a narrative to push? All he knows is that we need DEI and affirmative action in science and medicine. He doesn&#8217;t care if there&#8217;s no reason whatsoever to justify any of this. He just knows it needs to happen.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mws-ep-1534-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
For a very long time, the National Science Foundation — along with the NIH and many other federal agencies — has operated like this. They rake in billions of dollars&#8217; worth of tax revenue with the promise of funding scientific advancements that benefit America. And then they&#8217;ve squandered it to advance a political agenda. To be clear, I&#8217;m not cherry-picking soundbites here, or taking anything out of context. This is something we can quantify. The Senate Commerce Committee just released a report documenting precisely how much money the National Science Foundation, or NSF, has wasted in recent years. Again, this is an agency of the federal government we&#8217;re talking about here.
As The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/27-of-national-science-foundation-grants-went-to-dei-projects-study-finds?topStoryPosition=undefined" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reports</a>: 
<blockquote>The Senate committee found that one in 10 grants awarded [by the National Science Foundation] between January 2021 and April 2024 had to do with oppression, social or environmental justice, gender, or race.</blockquote>
In other words, one in 10 grants have been completely fraudulent. There&#8217;s no reason we should&#8217;ve been funding any of it. But the Biden administration made sure that we did. They kickstarted a lot of this fraudulent spending. The Senate report found that in 2021 — the first year of the Biden administration — less than 1% of grants from the NSF were focused on DEI initiatives. But by 2024, after three years of the Biden administration, more than a quarter of new grants to the NSF pushed &#8220;far-left perspectives.&#8221;
The Daily Wire has a searchable <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/27-of-national-science-foundation-grants-went-to-dei-projects-study-finds?topStoryPosition=undefined" target="_blank" rel="noopener">database</a> of these grants right now on the website. You can page through around 3,000 grants from the National Science Foundation that involve DEI. For example, in 2022, NSF gave Columbia University more than $4 million so that they could study ways to &#8220;decolonize geoscience.&#8221; Meanwhile, a professor at Northwestern received a million dollars in 2023 so that he could put together &#8220;Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM,&#8221; featuring insights from Karl Marx. Over at the University of Pittsburgh, a professor received a million dollars to argue that artificial intelligence should not be neutral because that, “only serves the capitalist, racist, heteronormative, patriarchal, etc society.” Another study funded by the NSF, to the tune of $500,000, determined that the concept of &#8220;peer review&#8221; was racist: “The accepted values and practices in science can serve as roadblocks and barriers to the inclusion and advancement of minoritized scholars.&#8221;
Again, there are thousands of grants like this. We&#8217;re not talking about one or two examples. This was systemic fraud. And the only way to deal with systemic fraud like this is to clean house at the National Science Foundation, which is exactly what the Trump administration is now doing. 
Just because it feels appropriate, I&#8217;ll share some reporting on this development from POLITICO, which is yet another organization that&#8217;s just had its federal funding <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/04/science-funding-agency-layoffs-threat-00202426" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cut dramatically</a>: 
<blockquote>One of the United States’ leading funders of science and engineering research is planning to lay off between a quarter and a half of its staff in the next two months, a top National Science Foundation official said Tuesday. The comments by Assistant Director Susan Margulies came at an all-hands meeting of the NSF’s Engineering Directorate. &#8230; &#8216;A large-scale reduction, in response to the President’s workforce executive orders, is already happening,&#8217; a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management said.&#8217;</blockquote>
As significant as this development is, it&#8217;s important to keep in mind that NSF is just one small part of the much larger fraud that&#8217;s been taking place in the government, when it comes to research funding. The National Institutes of Health is a far bigger offender, in terms of financial waste. DOGE just found that the NIH had a contract worth more than $180 million for administrative expenses that didn&#8217;t involve healthcare in any way. That included a contract to build a Tony Fauci exhibit at the NIH museum, for example.
The Trump administration has also found that the NIH spends vast amounts of its research budget on so-called &#8220;indirect costs.&#8221; Last year, roughly $9 billion of the $35 billion that NIH spent on research ultimately went to these &#8220;indirect costs&#8221;, which is a fancy way of saying &#8220;administrative overhead&#8221; for universities and research institutions. For some institutions, these indirect costs amounted to more than 60% of their total grant funding. In other words, in a million-dollar grant to conduct cancer research, more than $600,000 might be going to non-research expenses, like office supplies and things like that. Of course, in almost every case, there&#8217;s no reason for this. There&#8217;s no reason for Harvard or Yale to rake in huge amounts of money for non-scientific purposes, when the grant is supposedly a scientific grant. It&#8217;s a pure grift in every sense. So now the Trump administration is ending this practice. They&#8217;re capping these administrative payouts to around 15% of the total grant.
What you may not know is that this isn&#8217;t the first time Donald Trump has tried to do this. As the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/nih-trump-lawsuit-medical-research.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reports</a>: 
<blockquote>In 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, a similar proposal would have reduced the overhead payments to 10 percent of the award amount. &#8230; The effort faltered. Congress then acted to &#8216;ward off&#8217; a future effort and passed a budget bill that prohibited changing the fees from the levels that had been negotiated between federal officials and each research institution.</blockquote>
In other words, Trump tried to cut waste at the NIH during his first administration but Congress shut him down. They actually passed an appropriations bill that prevented him from cutting the administrative funding. And now, citing that appropriations law, a new lawsuit is trying to stop Trump from cutting the NIH funding again.
And so far, the plan is working. The other day, a federal judge <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191529" target="_blank" rel="noopener">halted</a> the NIH cuts with a preliminary injunction. This has been happening constantly, as you may have noticed. Individual federal judges have also blocked the Treasury secretary&#8217;s access to internal files, prevented DOGE&#8217;s buyout offer for federal workers from going through, and attempted to block the closure of USAID. It&#8217;s clear that this will be a theme of the second Trump presidency, as it was in the first one. Judges are going to do everything they can to overturn what voters want, which is for the executive branch to determine how the executive branch operates.
But already there are signs — most notably from J.D. Vance — that the administration recognizes that these judges are breaking the law, and that their rulings may not be respected. In particular, <a href="https://x.com/JDVance/status/1888607143030391287" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Vance wrote</a>: 
<blockquote>If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that&#8217;s also illegal. Judges aren&#8217;t allowed to control the executive&#8217;s legitimate power.</blockquote>
This is an approach that obviously shouldn&#8217;t be necessary. If we had judges who respected the separation of powers, there wouldn&#8217;t be an issue. But increasingly, unelected judges are telling the executive branch how to spend money and who to employ. That&#8217;s not just unconstitutional, it&#8217;s also unsustainable. There is zero popular political support for continuing these expenditures to corrupt agencies like NSF and the NIH.
That&#8217;s because — between these revelations at the NSF, everything that happened with COVID, and the embrace of gender theory — mainstream science has completely discredited itself. Now when the public celebrates as scientists lose their funding and their jobs, they’ll blame us for being anti-science. But our problem with them is precisely the opposite.  The people we have been paying huge sums of money to — we&#8217;re talking about billions of dollars — have been spending it on political propaganda and social engineering. They&#8217;ve been doing it for decades, on the assumption that no one would ever notice or do anything about it. But now, very abruptly, that has changed. Everyone can see that many of the so-called scientists in the federal government were the ones who were actually &#8220;anti-science.&#8221; And now that they&#8217;re losing their jobs and their infinite supply of taxpayer money, the work of serious people — of actual scientists — can finally begin.

President Trump Meets With Jordan’s King Abdullah

Trump Goes To War Against Fake Science

American Universities

College

Gender

LGBTQ

Mathematics

President Trump

The National Science Foundation spent more than $2 billion funding &#8220;science&#8221; projects that were often more about activism and critical race theory than science, the Senate Commerce Committee found.
The committee found that one in 10 grants awarded between January 2021 and April 2024 had to do with oppression, social or environmental justice, gender, or race. The figure was dramatically higher in grants issued more recently, as what counted as &#8220;science&#8221; transformed dramatically under the Biden administration.
&#8220;While only 0.29% of all grants with start-dates in 2021 centered on DEI initiatives, by 2024, more than a quarter (27%) of new grants pushed far-left perspectives,&#8221; the Commerce Committee said in a <a href="https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092-4246-91A5-58EEF99750BC" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> released Monday.
“Over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has been taking a sledgehammer to the radical left’s woke nonsense. DEI initiatives have poisoned research efforts, eroded confidence in the scientific community, and fueled division among Americans,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the committee&#8217;s chairman, told The Daily Wire in a statement. &#8220;Congress must end the politicization of NSF funding and restore integrity to scientific research.”
Scientists have warned that anticipated cuts under the Trump administration could harm life-saving research. However, few of them complained when, in recent years, soft-science and activist academics began siphoning off money that could have otherwise gone to things like cancer research.
Cruz said that wasn&#8217;t the only way DEI activism masquerading as research was harming real scientists, saying it also reduced the public&#8217;s confidence in the field as a whole. More than a quarter of the American public has no or not much confidence in scientists, double what it was a few years ago, he said. Low-quality &#8220;research,&#8221; where academics start with an ideological conclusion and work backwards to justify it, is also dangerous because it could lead to a faulty understanding of the world, he said.
Some papers from left-wing academics have said that the scientific method, the written word, and hard work are all racist, making it all the more surprising that mainstream scientists have failed to condemn it.
The NSF spent half a million dollars  on a project called &#8220;Reviewer Zero,&#8221; which says that peer-reviewing papers — a crucial step in assuring quality — is racist because peer reviewers disproportionately find that minorities&#8217; research is not accurate.
&#8220;The accepted values and practices in science can serve as roadblocks and barriers to the inclusion and advancement of minoritized scholars,&#8221; its study said. &#8220;The overrepresentation of people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies shapes the way research is done.&#8221;
In 2022, NSF gave a $4.4 million grant to Columbia University to &#8220;decolonize geoscience.&#8221; Another million dollars went to a project that says that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/500000-national-science-foundation-grant-produced-paper-saying-science-is-racist" target="_blank" rel="noopener">physics is racist.</a> In exchange for the hefty government funding, two scholars — a “chronically ill and disabled, physics-Ph.D.-holding, thin wealthy white woman” and a black man — watched videos of four science lessons, and spoke to two students and the teacher over Zoom. Their conclusion rested on a single several-minute video of an undergrad group project, in which a Middle Eastern student did most of the work while a white and Hispanic student cracked jokes. It concluded that the Middle Eastern student exemplified “whiteness” by being “centered” (receiving attention since he was the one actually doing the work) while the others were “marginalized.”
Cruz said radical left-wing ideology that deems anything mainstream or successful to be oppressive or colonizing has contributed to unrest on college campuses, including outbreaks of blatant anti-Semitism.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-zealand-scrapped-all-social-science-funding-trump-could-too" target="_blank" rel="noopener">New Zealand Scrapped All ‘Social Science’ Funding. Trump Could Too.</a>
NSF began prioritizing ideological grants in response to a Biden administration executive order that said it DEI should be in every area of government. A Biden task force said &#8220;[a]ctivities counter to DEIA values are disruptive to the conduct of science.&#8221; Left-wing colleges then took that mandate even further, interpreting it in ways that may have flagrantly violated civil rights laws.
Shirin Vossoughi, an associate professor at Northwestern University, is co-principal investigator for a $1 million NSF grant, awarded in 2023, for &#8220;Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.&#8221; Vossoughi cited Karl Marx to justify teaching children anti-Israel concepts after Hamas attacked Israel.
Millions in federal funds were spent politicizing artificial intelligence in ways that could have profound effects on society. NSF awarded more than a million dollars to the University of Pittsburgh&#8217;s Angela Stewart, who wrote that artificial intelligence should not be neutral, because that &#8220;only serves the capitalist, racist, heteronormative, patriarchal, etc society.&#8221;
Cruz&#8217;s committee gathered more than 3,000 grants matching DEI keywords, which The Daily Wire has made searchable and browsable below:
<iframe loading="lazy" src="https://dailywireinteractives.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/nsf/cruz-nsf.html" width="100%" height="1000px" frameborder="0">﻿</iframe>

Senator Ted Cruz

27% Of National Science Foundation Grants Went To DEI Projects, Study Finds

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Joe Biden

Ted Cruz

The Science Museum in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/london">London</a> is getting dragged on social media due to a tour they have which promotes the idea that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/lego">Lego</a> blocks can be anti-<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/lgbt">LGBT</a> by reinforcing “heteronormative” relationships.
The London attraction is running a self-guided tour called “Seeing Things Queerly,” per <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14368303/Science-Museum-Lego-anti-LGBT.html">The Daily Mail</a>. This tour is said to explore “stories of queer communities, experiences and identities” in the museum&#8217;s collection. 
The tour was created by a “gender and sexuality network” at the museum, the outlet noted, which includes staff and volunteers who promote  visibility and inclusion for the LGBT community. The guide was published on the museum&#8217;s blog more than two years ago, but just now went viral after The Telegraph published an article today about the tour and its claims.
One of their complaints has to do with Lego bricks being “described in a gendered way.”
“The top of the brick with sticking out pins is male, the bottom of the brick with holes to receive the pins is female, and the process of the two sides being put together is called mating,” the blog says. 
“This is an example of applying heteronormative language to topics unrelated to gender, sex and reproduction. It illustrates how heteronormativity (the idea that heterosexuality and the male/female gender binary are the norm and everything that falls outside is unusual) shapes the way we speak about science, technology, and the world in general.”
Elon Musk tweeted his reply, sending a clown face emoji in response to the Telegraph’s article. 
Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro also mocked the notion, writing on X, “Wait until the Science Museum finds out that human beings have male and female parts that are made to mate with each other.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Wait until the Science Museum finds out that human beings have male and female parts that are made to mate with each other <a href="https://t.co/XU2HPmxdPC">https://t.co/XU2HPmxdPC</a>
&mdash; Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) <a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1887516341814349854?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 6, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
“The funny thing is that removing the male or female parts from Lego bricks means nothing works and everything collapses,” another person <a href="https://x.com/manofmitten/status/1887521519657529388">observed</a>.
Another replied, “Seatbelts are also bigoted.”
“Just wait until they hear about nuts and bolts,” another commenter chimed in.
A Science Museum spokesperson gave Daily Mail a statement on the controversy, saying, “This blog post was published online in 2022 to highlight a small number of objects on display at the museum that relate to LGBTQ+ individuals, experiences and communities.”

Lego blocks

London Museum Mocked For Suggesting Lego Bricks Can Be ‘Anti-LGBT’

London Museum Mocked For Suggesting Lego Bricks Can Be 'Anti-LGBT'

LGBT

London

Social Issues

Twitter

New Zealand&#8217;s science agency ceased funding all &#8220;social science&#8221; and humanities projects, focusing only on &#8220;core scientific research that helps lift our economic growth and contributes to science with a purpose.&#8221;
The move could serve as a model for the Trump administration&#8217;s reform of the National Institutes of Health. One of government&#8217;s oddities is that smart researchers studying things like cancer prevention genuinely toil for low wages at the NIH, even as the agency funds sociology studies with no conceivable tangible output.
NIH scientists have complained that their grants to travel to conferences have been cut off under the Trump administration, without highlighting that much of their budget has been sucked up by dubious studies that have nothing to do with hard sciences like biology and physics, and instead focus on topics like &#8220;Cuentos de la Vida: Exploring Cultural Heritage through Storytelling&#8221; (<a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/lZ4VkpIi80SBW8vClY5wjw/project-details/8001638" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$326,661</a>).
Judith Collins, New Zealand&#8217;s Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology, <a href="https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/marsden-fund-refocused-science-purpose" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announced</a> in December that government-funded science should have practical applications that could grow the economy, saying, &#8220;It is important that we support new ideas which lead to developing new technologies and products, boosting economic growth, and enhancing New Zealand&#8217;s quality of life.&#8221;
Last week, Collins <a href="https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/reforms-boost-science-sector-and-economy">announced</a> &#8220;the largest reset of the New Zealand science system in more than 30 years with reforms which will boost the economy and benefit the sector.&#8221; She said the county&#8217;s seven national research institutes would be transformed to focus on &#8220;bio-economy, earth sciences, and health and forensic sciences,&#8221; as well as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology.
“The reforms will maximize the value of the $1.2 billion in government funding that goes into the science sector each year, creating a more dynamic science, innovation and technology system that can respond to priorities and keep pace with technological advances,” she said.
The science agency will produce valuable IP and products that will lead to lucrative careers for scientists in the private sector, she said. A Prime Minister&#8217;s council will ensure &#8220;the taxpayer funding that goes to the sector is spent in the best way possible to grow the economy, because innovation and technology are the future.&#8221;
Social science, or &#8220;soft science,&#8221; includes fields such as psychology and sociology, and often involves exploring left-wing opinions while casting it as a study via the insertion of dubious numbers. The field was disgraced by the so-called &#8220;replication crisis,&#8221; which found that when other scholars reconstructed the studies, they got different results — meaning that they did not find any real law of nature at all, may have falsified their data, and that quality control in the field is extremely low.
Trump has banned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the federal government, including in NIH grants, and many soft-science &#8220;research&#8221; projects involve DEI. But even those that don&#8217;t often have seemingly little utility and function largely as a jobs program for left-wing academics. It would be quicker and more economical to simply stop America&#8217;s science agency from funding projects that aren&#8217;t real science.
Studies have found that social scientists are overwhelmingly liberal, to a far greater degree than biologists, engineers, and health scientists. NIH studies in the soft sciences often read more like left-wing policy papers, such as &#8220;Policy as a Structural Barrier and Facilitator of Latinx Youth Mental Health,&#8221; which cost <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/T-4FqcVfFUOpsTxp9tEx5g/project-details/11015821" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$118,196</a>. After getting taxpayers to fund the studies, left-wing groups then cite them to advance policy, because they disguise opinion as supposedly authoritative &#8220;science.&#8221;
Anyone who looks at NIH&#8217;s grants database will readily see soft science papers, such as:
<ul>
<li>&#8220;Good Bowls: Empowering Communities to Achieve Good Food Access and Health Equity&#8221; <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/T-4FqcVfFUOpsTxp9tEx5g/project-details/10227325" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($162,272)</a></li>
<li>Mobile Internet-based Application to Promote Positive Parenting: Parent-Net <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/6HpBpxmMt0Spb4O78OoXLA/project-details/8906318" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($224,222)</a></li>
<li>Using Twitter to Enhance the Social Support of Hispanic and Black Dementia Caregivers <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/iWkgKaHSFkCC9pTYdEX36A/project-details/10682397" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($559,233)</a></li>
<li>Using Immersive Virtual Reality and Media Literacy to Enhance Adolescents&#8217; Coping Skills in the Face of Traumatic Online Experiences <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/uTX8Oo5CiEag7uwZT2Qhhw/project-details/10695791" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($1,073,590)</a></li>
<li>How Scientists Remember a Major Discovery: History and Memory of DNA structure <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/sGlAo81Rlk-dLUfYwtpQWQ/project-details/7673977" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($50,000)</a></li>
<li>Assessing the effects of hurricane Maria on Opioid Agonist Treatment access among PWID in rural Puerto Rico <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/sGlAo81Rlk-dLUfYwtpQWQ/project-details/9645272" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($259,263)</a></li>
<li>Effects of Social Context, Culture and Minority Status on Depression and Anxiety <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/sGlAo81Rlk-dLUfYwtpQWQ/project-details/8387859" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($613,724)</a></li>
<li>Partner Violence: Roles of Work, Job Stress &amp; Drinking <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/sGlAo81Rlk-dLUfYwtpQWQ/project-details/7599698" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($347,403)</a></li>
<li>The Morality of Caregiving for Demented Older Women <a href="https://reporter.nih.gov/search/sGlAo81Rlk-dLUfYwtpQWQ/project-details/7282981" target="_blank" rel="noopener">($67,727)</a></li>
</ul>
This is part of a Daily Wire series exploring major government programs that could be reformed under the Trump administration.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-can-food-stamps-buy-junk-food-how-doge-could-save-billions-and-maha">Why Can Food Stamps Buy Junk Food? How DOGE Could Save Billions And MAHA</a>

Dr. Fauci Testifies In House On COVID Origins

New Zealand Scrapped All ‘Social Science’ Funding. Trump Could Too.

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