Harvard University refused to obey the Trump administration and sued the officials. Why is the whole world watching this conflict? What is being demanded of the university? What is Harvard defending? What role did DEI policy and anti-Semitism play in the attack on academic freedom? T-invariant talked to Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University.

American universities are being stripped of government funding. Some universities have announced hiring freezes this year. Others are laying off their staff. Still others – Columbia University, for example – have been left without government grants. We are also seeing interference in the substantive work of science. Why is the Trump administration turning on scientists? T-invariant talked to Tufts University endowment professor, biologist Sergei Mirkin, who has been working in the United States for 36 years.

In the coming days, the U.S. Senate is expected to confirm the new director of the National Institutes of Health. The key institution of American science has come under pressure from the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), which is headed by Elon Musk. Why the reforms initiated by Donald Trump’s people are reminiscent of the situation in Germany in the 1930s and how the DOGE plans threaten the development of science – the head of one of the laboratories of the National Institute of Health told T-invariant.

“The tail is a very useful thing and modern man could use it”. Alexander Markov and Olga Orlova discuss the evolutionary meaning of tail loss in episode 14 of the CounterEvolution podcast.

An international team of scientists analysed 1,378 stories in the world’s leading media about casualties of the war in Gaza. It turned out that 85 per cent of these publications did not distinguish between fighters and civilians, and 95 per cent used data provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas. Why are reputable publications using inaccurate information and what can Israel do to counter this? T-invariant spoke to the initiator of the study – sociologist Tatiana Gleser.

An international team of scientists analysed 1,371 reports of Gaza war casualties and found that the information circulated by the world’s leading media outlets was falsified. In episode 15 of the Invasion: Science in a Time of War podcast, we speak with the initiator of this study, sociologist Tatiana Glaser.

In episode 13 of the podcast “Invasion: Science in a Time of War”, two scientists anonymously talk about how it is possible to meet fellow travellers at the “Noon Against Putin” rally even in an Orthodox church, why professors fear denunciations from students, and how to maintain a rigorous professional level when Russian social sciences and humanities have been set back twenty years.

In episode 12 of the podcast Invasion: Science in a Time of War, two scientists talk anonymously about how hard it is to leave Russia, how internal emigration helps them keep their sanity, why they can no longer discuss the war with colleagues, the difficulty of understanding the true position of the leadership, and what they think about the turn of Russian science to the East.

At the beginning of March 2022, graduate students of the European University in Florence Emil Kamalov and Ivetta Sergeeva, political scientist Margarita Zavadskaya and sociologist Nika Kostenko launched a sociological project OutRush, during which they surveyed three waves of those who left. Who are these people, what do they do, what do they think about returning home, what do they hope for? Nika Kostenko, a researcher at Tel Aviv University, talks about the results of the T-invariant study.

The Reforum has published five tasks for the restoration of Russian science, proposed by T-invariant editor-in-chief Olga Orlova.

T-invariant opens a series of publications related to the second anniversary of the war with Ukraine. In the first investigation, we tell how the FSB of the Russian Federation launched the largest “case of scientists” in modern Russia, pursuing the signatories of an anti-war letter throughout the country.

In 2023, the FSB began subjecting dissenters to punitive psychiatry. Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Abramov left the psychiatric hospital after the examination and became familiar with the updated version of the charges. T-invariant spoke with the scientist about his life with the “extremist” label, his political views and the reasons for the security forces’ attack on the Russian supercomputer industry.