Lastly, the fact that this announcement, from a historically legitimate scientific agency, was made exclusively on Twitter, on a Friday evening, is frankly, shameful.

What are the implications of this rate cut? I'm no expert but these outcomes may be impacted:

- fewer faculty hires
- department closures
- fewer students (undergrad/grad), harder for int'l students
- loss of US scientific hegemony

In FY2022, Caltech received $342,234,517 in federal funding (representing 80% of contract grant funding) 19.7% of which went to the NIH. A cut to 15% indirect costs, from 70%, means a loss of ~ $37.1M annually from NIH grants alone. Across all grants, $188M poof, gone.

As can be seen in the graphic, indirect costs vary per institution but previously were around 60-70%. This means for every dollar a professor was awarded from the NIH, the university got 60-70 cents. My prior institution,
@caltech.edu had a 70% indirect cost rate.

When a professor at a university receives a research grant, they don't just get money for experiments and equipment. A percentage of the grant goes to the university as "indirect costs" - money used to "keep the lights on", administrative overhead, facilities, and infra.

Is cause of “heavy traffic” known? Has this happened before? The thought of losing these resources is terrifying,.

Why are machine learning networks described as "neural"? The nomenclature arises because of the visual similarity between neural network architectures and connected neurons in the mammalian brain.

Important to clearly define "genomic data"- certain data types may get better performance than others. Metadata storage seems to work well for my use-case. cc @manzt.sh