Senate committee on appropriations markup meeting is starting now. They'll be discussing a lot of stuff, but in particular, science agencies like NSF & NASA.

Yesterday Sen. Moran indicated funding would be 33.9 billion, preserving FY '24 numbers.
www.appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/ful...

Two programs aimed at supporting students from non-R1 institutions are currently on hold: DOE FAIR and RENEW. Adding this to the list of canceled NSF summer programs and it’s going to be a tough year for undergraduate research. 🧪

Controversial take: many private foundations already limit overhead to 15%, and universities accept those terms. That opens them up to the question of why the government should pay such higher rates. While the way they’re going about this is objectively wrong, the underlying issue is legitimate.

Re: executive orders in recent days. We have gotten agency-wide memos with similar language to the funding freeze memo, but so far due to lack of specific guidance it is business as usual at most of the national labs.

Non science post - if the wicked musical has any place in your heart the movie will be an absolute joy

Had a photo shoot in the lab for some tour graphics and got this gem - my lab is developing a laser scanner for position dependent irradiation tests of superconducting devices (Photo credit Jacqueline Orrell/SLAC National Laboratory) 🧪❄️

Starting a series of posts where I share thoughts about work to better understand thermalization in superconductors through quasiparticle poisoning measurements. My group has been enjoying this paper from the Devoret group: arxiv.org/html/2302.12... 🧪