State of Decay

We talk about a big travel month (including Stephanie winning the George Sheldrick Award for Structural Science), federal funding in light of the upcoming turnover of US political representation, pre-prints, and the use of AI with agentic workflows for science and LLMs for writing. News Links: Derek Lowe's Blog: The Assault On Science Funding Continues Senate votes to block rule giving White House more control over research Estimating global article processing charges paid to 14publishers for open access between 2019 and 2025 Preprints/Blogs: Atomic modeling of radiation damage in cryoelectron microscopy datasets Dynamic view of an allosteric intermediate in a positively cooperative dimer Incidental conformational switching in an allosteric enzyme Anthropic Protein Design Prompts The Rise of Large Language Models and the Direction and Impact of US Federal Research Funding