It looks like they screened 45 strains of bacteria to find 9 that passed their safety tests, and then only one of those had a 100-percent response. The sample size is also small: 5/5 sounds a lot less impressive than 100%. I'd expect the true response rate to be substantially lower ("winner's curse").
The bar for an acceptable side effect profile in an FDA-approved drug would also be a lot higher than "five genetically near-identical mice did not show evidence of pathology in a single study."
I'm not saying this work is bad (skimming, it seems fine for what it is, though haven't read in detail), but it's quite preliminary if we're talking about developing a medical treatment that could eventually be deployed in humans. There's a reason it ended up in a mid-tier microbiome journal.
Just so everyone reading this is clear, it’s not 70% of grant money, it’s an extra 70% on top of the direct costs (41% of the total awarded). A more typical number for a large state university would be somewhere around 55%, or around 35% of the total awarded funds.
Also, indirect costs are not going to building sports centers. Funding agencies and the government audit universities in detail to make sure that the money is being spent only on research activities, down to calculating the amount of square footage per building that is being used exclusively for research, as opposed to instruction or clinical work. They have absolutely come after people and institutions, and successfully obtained multimillion dollar settlements, for using federal money to cover unrelated expenses. If NIH indirects were found to be going towards something like building a rec center or a facility for college athletes, it would be actual fraud and a national scandal, potentially on the “congressional inquiry” level.
Compliance with policies set by Congress and the relevant funding agencies, which establish standards for things like safeguarding the private health data and safety of study participants, mandating that de-identified versions of data be made available to other labs so they can both verify and build on the research, biosecurity, preventing foreign interference, lab animal welfare, hazardous waste disposal… and ironically, making sure that money is being spent appropriately by PIs.
It does distract from the process of actually doing research, but I will point out that funding agencies take past productivity into account, so you can’t do literally nothing with the money and expect a grant to get renewed.
I would say teaching is not that relevant specifically for most tenure-track positions at big research universities. It is absolutely something you need to demonstrate some actual experience and proficiency with if you get a position at a small liberal arts college or a community college, where tuition is basically how they keep the lights on.
I’d also say that even at an R1, teaching volume at an acceptable quality is sometimes rewarded if your college within the university is very undergrad-heavy, because it can be part of how the university apportions funds to departments. So, it wouldn’t matter at a med school, but potentially a little in arts and sciences, though still in distant second to research.
There are also a small but increasing number of tenure track teaching-focused positions at big research universities. These folks typically help design and teach the biggest intro lectures and/or other very time- and labor-intensive courses. There are fewer of these positions than I’d like to see in an ideal world, but not zero.
Feel free to read “mostly” for “only” in my response, then. My point is still that even outside of Brightline (East — there’s also Brightline West, LA to Vegas) and the NEC, there are actually a lot of city clusters and corridors in America that would be an appropriate distance and population for reasonably high-ridership train travel. There are clusters of cities in Texas, the Southeast, the Midwest / Rust Belt, Colorado, Northern and Southern California, and the PNW that have all been identified as good candidates for new or substantially improved service. I disagree that this constitutes just “a few places,” as you originally said.
I don't understand why highway self-driving would help save on costs. You would still have to exit the highway to make stops, and that means you would need a driver to be on board the whole time, right?
There's a big difference between "Amtrak's current long-haul routes do not turn a profit" and "intercity rail in the US only makes sense in the Northeast Corridor." There are many metropolitan areas in America that are separated by only a few hundred miles, a very normal and natural distance for a train route. The problem is that Amtrak doesn't currently connect those cities, and/or doesn't run enough service to make those trips viable.
For example, the Cleveland and Pittsburgh metro areas are over 2 million and just over 3 hours apart by train or car. However, there is currently only one train from Cleveland to Pittsburgh a day, and it leaves at 1:54 AM. Obviously, most people will drive if that's the only alternative, but that does not say much about the general viability of inter-urban rail between those two cities.
I don't think the problem is that we can't identify routes that would get a lot of use. It's that people running public transit have been charged with balancing those high-usage routes with service that's meant to serve as a social safety net, so that people aren't left completely without any transit. These are very different goals, and because transit agencies are not typically funded well enough to do both well, they are often in tension.
Most people naturally become more agreeable over the courses of their lives (as well as less neurotic and more conscientious). Beyond that, intentional personality change also seems to be possible. For example, this is a study that used a coaching app to help people change aspects of their personality [1]; apparently, people who wanted to increase agreeableness did see pretty large effect sizes.
But the Big Five Inventory [1] does explicitly ask if subjects consider themselves to sometimes be cold, distant, rude, unkind, selfish, or inconsiderate of others, and these answers are all used to compute their (dis)agreeableness scores. Similar questions also show up in other inventories. So, without even getting into any other behaviors these traits might correlate with, the Big 5 definition of "disagreeable" extends well beyond literally just tending to disagree with others.
The bar for an acceptable side effect profile in an FDA-approved drug would also be a lot higher than "five genetically near-identical mice did not show evidence of pathology in a single study."
I'm not saying this work is bad (skimming, it seems fine for what it is, though haven't read in detail), but it's quite preliminary if we're talking about developing a medical treatment that could eventually be deployed in humans. There's a reason it ended up in a mid-tier microbiome journal.