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  • Some Educated Guesses About Trump’s Second Term

    Some Educated Guesses About Trump’s Second Term

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    Tim Marchman: What about you, Makena?

    Makena Kelly: I feel like I have this folk story in my head, and maybe it’s real, I need to check, but of Jimmy Carter upon entering office, he saw some UFO files and wept, and he never said anything about it again.

    Tim Marchman: I believe I’ve heard this too.

    Makena Kelly: Yeah, and I don’t know if it’s real. I just tried to do some searching. And thinking about Trump finding these things out, I don’t know if he would release them. I wouldn’t be optimistic.

    Tim Marchman: I don’t believe they’re going to release anything because he was already president and did not release the material in question. I believe that what the secret files would show if declassified is that the US engaged in a cover-up of Lee Harvey Oswald and his relationship to the Soviet Union in fears that if it were made public, it would lead to a nuclear war. And that much of the subsequent cover-up has been a cover-up of the cover-up. And I believe that the UFO files would show that extraterrestrial biological entities crashed in New Mexico in the 1940s and led the US government on a voyage of discovery about the nature of the universe, that includes aliens having created well-known religious figures throughout human history as guides to give humans instructions on how not to damage their bodies which are containers for souls that aliens are harvesting for energy. This has been the theory, at least that many UFO proponents have been putting out there since the 1980s, and I of course firmly believe it’s true, maybe Donald Trump will confirm that. Makena and David, thank you so much for being here. When we come back, it’s time for our last ever Conspiracy of the Week.

    Tim Marchman: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. This is Conspiracy of the Week, that part of the show where our guests bring their favorite conspiracy theories and I will be judging in Leah’s place. The winner this week gets to brag about it forever, so I hope both of you brought something good. Makena, let’s start with you.

    Makena Kelly: Yeah, I’m glad that you brought up aliens and the JFK assassination because I’m going to complete the trifecta with this. One of the conspiracy theories that I think has gotten its time in the sky, shall we say, this year, has been chemtrails. These are the trails that planes leave as they fly in the sky, apparently spreading all of these chemicals and ruining and poisoning us, when really it is just water vapor. Just earlier this year with the hurricane in North Carolina there were conspiracies about chemtrails taking place there. Lawmakers in Tennessee passed a bill having to do with something and regulating chemtrails, crazy stuff. But this week, oh my gosh, I lost it when I saw this. There was what appeared to be a satirical joke online about a Lufthansa pilot denying to spray chemtrails on his son while piloting a plane. He took a grandstand apparently and said, “I will not do it.” And the chemtrail, I guess we can call it the chemtrail community, was really thrilled with it. And it’s not true, it was a joke. Yeah.

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  • As the Mastermind of Far-Right ‘Active Clubs’ Goes to Prison, His Violent Movement Goes Global

    As the Mastermind of Far-Right ‘Active Clubs’ Goes to Prison, His Violent Movement Goes Global

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    American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo’s six-year “battle with the feds”—a fight that spans two dismissals, three appellate reversals, and an extradition and deportation from at least two countries—concludes today with his sentencing to federal prison for attacking ideological opponents at political rallies across California in 2017.

    Along with several members of the Rise Above Movement, a fight club-cum-street gang Rundo cofounded with fellow extremist Ben Daley in Southern California during the peak of the alt-right movement, Rundo was convicted on 2018 charges of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-Riot Act for training and planning a series of attacks on political opponents at rallies across California and Unite the Right in Virginia the year prior. While Rundo may be locked behind bars for years, the movement he created is running wild around the globe.

    In the interceding years since his initial arrest, indictment, imprisonment, and flight from the US after his case was initially dismissed in 2019, Rundo helped mastermind an international network of RAM clones known as “Active Clubs.” A transnational alliance of far-right fight clubs that closely overlap with skinhead gangs and neofascist political movements in North America, Europe, the Antipodes, and South America, the Active Club network is proliferating internationally. There are dozens of Active Clubs in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Australia, and Colombia, according to the groups’ presence on Telegram and extremism researchers.

    Seemingly harmless from the outside, Active Clubs are small groups of young men who go on hikes, train in combat sports, weight-lift, and build camaraderie—all part of the Rise Above Movement’s original program. But the darkness is in the details: The groups’ membership often overlaps with other extremist organizations like Patriot Front, criminal skinhead groups like the Hammerskins, and other violent extremists in foreign nations. Some US-based Active Clubs are branching out into political intimidation and violence, like the Rise Above Movement before them.

    “I definitely do believe that in the future there needs to be a mass movement, a mass organization, but when it comes for that, do you really want a bunch of guys coming strictly from the online world to come join a mass movement without having any experience or skills?” Rundo said in a video posted online shortly before his March 2023 arrest in Bucharest, Romania. “Active clubs are a great local way to start guys off as they come from the online world into the real world, to learn actual skills.”

    Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who has long researched Rundo and his associates, says the Active Club model stands out for its low barrier to entry, emphasis on positive community building to draw new blood from outside of extremist circles, and a ready-made international network. “The model has really made it easier to facilitate those transnational connections,” Gais says. “If you’re not an organization, then you can network with whoever you want.”

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  • US and China sign new science pact — but with severe restrictions

    US and China sign new science pact — but with severe restrictions

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    U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of a summit in 2024.

    US President Joe Biden (left) shakes hands with China’s President Xi Jinping (right) at an economic summit in November.Credit: Leah Millis/AFP via Getty

    The United States and China have signed a brand-new, five-year agreement that dictates how the nations will cooperate on science and technology research. The pact is narrower in scope than its predecessor, covering only collaboration on basic science projects between departments and agencies of the two governments and excluding work on ‘critical and emerging technologies’ potentially important to national security, such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors. Unlike its predecessor, the pact does not include any information about collaboration among Chinese and US universities and private companies.

    Why the US border remains ‘a place of terror’ for Chinese researchers

    Experts in US–China relations welcome the agreement, saying that it will enable scientists to pursue projects with confidence.

    “I am relieved to see this pact renewal,” says Duan Yibing, a science-policy researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who hopes the pact will do what it’s designed to: promote collaboration in basic research between the two countries.

    “It appears they scrubbed everything and started from scratch,” says Caroline Wagner, a specialist in science, technology and international affairs at The Ohio State University in Columbus. The narrow focus “seems appropriate” given China’s new status as a scientific and economic power. “The United States has recognized its relationship with China is now more symmetrical” than when the original agreement was signed 45 years ago, she says.

    The agreement, “demonstrates a pragmatic, if constrained, approach to maintaining scientific collaboration amid geopolitical rivalry”, says Marina Zhang, an innovation researcher who focuses on China at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.

    A modernized agreement

    The original pact was forged in 1979 to thaw diplomatic relations between China and the United States. It is normally renewed every five years, but it expired on 27 August last year amid rising tensions. Although the two nations recognized that new terms were needed in the agreement, they were unable to finalize the details before the deadline. Instead, they extended the old pact and kept negotiating.

    US and China inch towards renewing science-cooperation pact — despite tensions

    Researchers and other specialists warned that without the agreement, which is symbolic and doesn’t provide any funding, research cooperation and programmes between the two governments could flounder.

    A US Department of State official said at a briefing on 12 December that the government recognized that failure to have an agreement would have a chilling effect on areas of science and technology that are important to the United States. The new agreement is “modernized, with built-in protections”, the official said.

    The state department will now vet all research projects to ensure that they don’t pose national security concerns before they are approved. Proposals will also be reviewed by other US agencies led by the White House.

    Aside from specifying that critical and emerging technologies are off the table for collaboration, the pact does not further limit which scientific areas are fair game. But a US state department official suggested permissible projects might include research on the weather, oceanography and geology, as well as collecting influenza and air-quality data.

    China Initiative’s shadow looms large for US scientists

    The revamped pact addresses concerns from the United States that China did not always meet its obligation to share data under the previous agreement. The United States has been frustrated, for instance, that China has not been more transparent about data collected by a virology laboratory in Wuhan, where the first COVID-19 cases were detected. Some think that a virus could have leaked from that lab to trigger the pandemic.

    The agreement now includes wording that commits both the United States and China to sharing data, and being open and transparent. It also lays out a dispute-resolution mechanism by which both nations can iron out difficulties encountered in projects. If either side does not uphold its commitments, a termination clause allows the nations to end the agreement.

    Many of the concerns about the old pact came from the United States, given China’s rise in power. So in these negotiations, China has been “the passive side”, Duan says.

    An uncertain future

    Because of the timing of the new pact’s signing, one uncertainty hanging over it is whether the incoming administration of president-elect Donald Trump, who will take office in about a month, will uphold it. Researchers who spoke to Nature say they don’t expect the Trump administration to declare the agreement weak and reverse it, given that it already represents a compromise. Also, the agreement was last renewed in 2018 during Trump’s first presidency, Duan points out. Still, he adds, “we have to see what he will do”.

    Denis Simon, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a foreign-policy think tank in Washington DC, says that the new agreement provides “clear guardrails and a path to negotiate disputes”.

    Wagner adds that, because they have been excluded from the agreement, universities and private companies will need additional guidance from the two governments on the kinds of cooperation permitted.

    Overall, “it’s good news we still have an agreement”, Simon says. “It has been modified to reflect US concerns, but it’s better than no agreement.”

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  • How Elon Musk’s partnership with Trump could shape science in the US — and beyond

    How Elon Musk’s partnership with Trump could shape science in the US — and beyond

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    U.S. President-elect Donald Trump walks with Elon Musk to attend a viewing of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Texas, U.S.

    Billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk (left) has become a confidante for US president-elect Donald Trump (right).Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty

    Billionaire Elon Musk earned his reputation as an innovator at the forefront of science and technology, revolutionizing electric vehicles and space travel. But in the past several months, he has emerged as a major political figure in the United States, pouring more than US$250 million into Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and using his social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) to question vaccine safety and climate science.

    What Trump’s election win could mean for AI, climate and health

    Now the entrepreneur is joining forces with president-elect Trump on a mission to downsize the US government — including potentially slashing the budgets and workforces of science agencies, which Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX relied on for government contracts to grow and thrive. It has left many in the research community raising questions about his political influence and what it means for science in the United States and beyond.

    Although details about the US advisory body that Musk will help to lead, named the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), are scant, the billionaire, along with his co-chair, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, laid out some of their intentions in a guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal last month. “Unelected bureaucrats” — a category that includes tens of thousands of scientists and other specialists — represent an “existential threat to our republic” owing to the unnecessary regulations on industry that they have helped to implement, the duo wrote. The pair then promised “mass headcount reductions across the federal bureaucracy”.

    Musk has not responded to repeated requests for comment from Nature.

    DOGE will undoubtedly face headwinds in achieving its cuts, policy observers who spoke to Nature say. Few, however, doubt that Musk will have far-reaching influence on science in the United States and beyond.

    Shrinking the government

    Conflicts of interest abound for Musk as a government adviser. The world’s richest man, Musk heads companies rooted in science, including private aerospace firm SpaceX, electric-vehicle company Tesla and brain-implant firm Neuralink. He has complained that US innovation is being held back by a “mountain of choking regulations” — government rules on everything from labour practices to data privacy that have repeatedly ensnared his own companies. In February 2022, for instance, Tesla agreed to pay a $275,000 fine after inspectors at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that one of its manufacturing plants in Fremont, California, violated air-pollution regulations.

    Musk’s deregulatory vision aligns with that of president-elect Trump. For instance, many expect Trump to roll back or weaken rules designed to curb pollution, protect public health and limit climate change when he takes office, much as he did during his first term in 2017–21. Whether government regulation actually hinders economic and technological innovation is a complex question, however.

    Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's proposed new Department of Government Efficiency.

    Musk (left) transports his son as he and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (right) visit Capitol Hill to meet with members of the US Congress on 5 December.Credit: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

    Some research supports the idea that it can discourage growth or make it harder for big firms to acquire too much power by snapping up technology from start-up firms1,2. Many venture capitalists in places such as Silicon Valley, California, have focused on the latter restriction, and hope that the incoming Trump administration will relax rules governing mergers and acquisitions.

    There are areas in which streamlining regulations makes sense, says Robert Atkinson, an economist and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington DC. Environmental regulations, for instance, might protect public health by requiring firms to study the environmental impacts of their activities and limiting pollution, but they can also slow deployment of crucial clean-energy projects and infrastructure.

    The real question lies in how regulations are crafted, says Scott Stern, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Clear and stable regulation arguably provides the right incentives for innovation,” he says. For instance, clear rules governing drug development protect both public health and intellectual property, fostering private investment.

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  • TikTok’s Future in the US Is Unclear. We Check Back in With the Billionaire Who Wants to Save It

    TikTok’s Future in the US Is Unclear. We Check Back in With the Billionaire Who Wants to Save It

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    TikTok is officially on the chopping block, friends.

    Last Friday, a federal appeals court upheld a law that could result in the app being banned from operating within the United States next month. Even if President Joe Biden decides to extend that deadline an additional 90 days, TikTok is still on a pretty tight timeline to find a way out of this mess.

    Earlier this year, I spoke with Frank McCourt for this newsletter about his bid to buy TikTok. After last week’s events, I figured it was a good time to check back in with him. Plus, I got some insight on how creators are preparing for a post-TikTok future.

    Let’s talk about it.

    This is an edition of the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

    There are three options left for TikTok at this point. The company could win an appeal, forget about all of this, and go back to business as normal (eventually). Come next year, the app could be banned. Or, someone with a lot of money could buy TikTok’s US business off of ByteDance. Wednesday afternoon, my colleague Zeyi Yang and I spoke to Frank McCourt, the billionaire former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers who wants to do just that.

    McCourt’s motivation isn’t just to save TikTok but to bolster a personal project of his. Through his Project Liberty initiative, he has made what he’s called a “people’s bid,” bringing together a variety of investors and groups that share in his vision of a more open web. To achieve this, he’d apply Project Liberty’s Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, or DSNP, to TikTok. The protocol would allow for users to export over their friends and followers to a new TikTok. And after Friday’s court decision, McCourt is more confident than ever that his team will soon be running and possibly rebuilding the app.

    In our conversation, McCourt argued that a sale would make everyone happy, including ByteDance, users, and the US government. McCourt has offered $20 billion for the app’s brand, its user base, and the existing content in order to scale his vision of an interoperable, more privacy-friendly internet that competes with companies like Meta and Google. He doesn’t “need or want” the algorithm running TikTok’s For You page, he says.

    When asked if Project Liberty could maintain TikTok’s existing userbase without the beloved algorithm, McCourt said, “People don’t know what they don’t have until you show them.”

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  • Science can be our trusty shield in a time of deepening crises

    Science can be our trusty shield in a time of deepening crises

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    New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

    This year, both the UK and US had major elections where the governing party lost in a big way. At moments like this, we usually focus on what these kinds of shifts will mean, if anything, for everyday life. Less at the forefront of people’s minds is the impact on scientific research. There is a tendency to think of this endeavour as separate.

    But the truth is, it isn’t. There is a very obvious reason why we can’t think of the politics of those in power as separate from what happens in the world of science. Our government agencies are among those tasked with researching and…

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  • US Meat, Milk Prices Should Spike if Donald Trump Carries Out Mass Deportation Schemes

    US Meat, Milk Prices Should Spike if Donald Trump Carries Out Mass Deportation Schemes

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    In recent earnings calls, shareholders in some publicly traded meat companies have asked whether the Trump administration’s deportation plans—among other issues—may pose a challenge to their industry. “We’ve been there before. It did not impact our business,” said Tim Klein, CEO of National Beef, which is owned by the Brazilian food company Marfrig, in response to a question from a shareholder. In response to a similar question in a Tyson Foods earnings call, CEO Donnie King said, “There’s a lot that we don’t know at this point, but I would remind you that we’ve successfully operated this business for over 90 years, no matter the party in control.”

    It’s not clear whether the Trump regime would target meatpacking facilities operated by the biggest firms in the industry, given the favorable treatment these companies received at times during the first Trump presidency. During the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump issued an executive order that allowed plants to keep operating, even as meatpackers were some of the hardest hit by infections. The US House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis later found that Tyson’s legal department drafted a text of the proposed order.

    “These large meatpacking companies prevented additional protections from being put in place to protect workers, in part by engaging in a concerted effort with Trump administration political officials to insulate themselves from oversight, to force workers to remain in dangerous conditions, and to shield themselves from liability for any resulting worker illness or death,” the committee concluded in the report released in December 2022.

    The supply of labor is tight in meatpacking plants and the farming industry as a whole, says Cesar Escalante, a professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Agriculture & Environmental Sciences. The industry is in need of more workers, says Escalante, who argues that the US should expand the H-2A seasonal agricultural worker visa scheme to include more livestock workers. Smaller farms are more likely to be affected by a lack of workers, says Escalante, while larger farms may switch to mechanization.

    If meatpacking workers are deported en masse, then that could translate into a rise in prices for consumers. A report from Texas A&M Agrilife Research estimates that eliminating immigrant labor on US dairy farms would nearly double retail milk prices. It’s not clear what the impact of Trump’s deportation plan would be on meat or food prices more generally, because so much about the plan remains unknown. “We don’t know yet how this is all going to pan out,” Hubbard says.

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  • Meet the Conspiracy Filmmaker Who Claims to Have Red-Pilled Tulsi Gabbard

    Meet the Conspiracy Filmmaker Who Claims to Have Red-Pilled Tulsi Gabbard

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    Trump may seek to change that, however, based on suggestions contained in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump presidency. In the chapter on the intelligence community, the document suggests that the ODNI should be the only agency drafting the daily intelligence briefing for Trump and should have full oversight of the entire intelligence community’s budget.

    Since Gabbard was announced as the ODNI nominee, many Democratic lawmakers have criticized the decision, pointing out Gabbard’s lack of experience in the intelligence community and her questionable views on Russia and Syria.

    Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a member of the House Intelligence Committee from Virginia, wrote on X she was “appalled at the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard,” adding: “Not only is she ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin.”

    Gabbard has a long history of embracing controversial viewpoints on foreign policy as well as being connected to conspiracy theories.

    Gabbard has been linked for years with an extremist offshoot of Hare Krishna, called the Science of Identity Foundation. The group, which some former members have described as a cult, is led by Chris Butler, who is worshipped by some of his followers as a deity and whom Gabbard has described as her “guru.”

    She gained a level of national notoriety in 2017 when she met in person with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad during what her office called a “fact-finding” mission to the Middle East. She later raised doubts about the US intelligence agencies’ assessment that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons against civilians, and called US airstrikes against Syrian targets in response to the chemical attacks “reckless and short-sighted.”

    Upon leaving the Democratic Party in 2022, she criticized it using phrasing reminiscent of the coded language used by followers of QAnon, labeling her former party an “elitist cabal of warmongers” driven by “cowardly wokeness.”

    In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard made comments that some interpreted as justifying Putin’s decision, claiming that if the US “had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns” in relation to Ukraine seeking to join NATO, the war could have been avoided.

    She also made comments that were used to fuel the Russian-backed conspiracy theory that US-funded biolabs in Ukraine would be used to launch biological weapons. When Trump announced that Gabbard was his pick for DNI, Russian state TV presenters celebrated the news.

    In 2022 Gabbard also campaigned for Kari Lake in her failed gubernatorial race in Arizona. Lake was at that point one of the most vocal proponents of election denial conspiracy theories about Trump’s election loss in 2020 and would spend years claiming, without evidence, that her own loss in 2022 was caused by election fraud.

    Gabbard did not respond to repeated requests for comment about her links to Willis, but in an interview last April, she did mention the fact that she was visiting the border and making a documentary—though she did not mention Willis’ involvement.

    “I just got back last night from a few days on the border in California. It’s a part of the border in our country that just hasn’t gotten much attention,” Gabbard told the Kelsi Sheren Perspective podcast. “I’m putting together a short documentary. I went there and brought my husband, who’s a cinematographer, and a few cameras specifically, because most people in America don’t know what’s happening.”

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  • More Humanitarian Organizations Will Harness AI’s Potential

    More Humanitarian Organizations Will Harness AI’s Potential

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    For many of the people served by the humanitarian sector, 2024 has been the worst of times. The most recent UN estimates of those forced to flee violence and disaster is a record of 120 million, a figure that has doubled in the past decade. The broader figure of those in humanitarian need, 300 million people, has been swelled by increasingly violent conflict and growing impacts of the climate crisis. Progress in meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals has also been either stagnating or declining in more than half of the fragile countries. A child born in those countries has a tenfold greater chance of being in poverty than one born in a stable state.

    The unprecedented numbers show the need for a new humanitarian surge: a technological one, harnessing the power of the digital and AI. For years we’ve (rightly) debated the risks and benefits of AI and waited for the promise of “AI for Good” to arrive. In 2025, across the aid, development, and humanitarian sector, that moment may finally be at hand.

    When properly leveraged, AI can open up new frontiers in humanitarian action—in scale, speed, reach, personalization, and cost savings. My organization, International Rescue Committee (IRC), and our in-house research and innovation lab, Airbel, are exploring applications of AI in our humanitarian programming. We’re seeing solutions emerging in three critical areas—information, education, and climate—each bolstered by promising public-private partnerships and collaboration.

    For instance, for refugees forced to flee from conflict, the first priority is timely, accurate, and context-specific information about who to trust, and where to find services and safety. The global information project, Signpost, supported by Google.org—Google’s charitable arm—in partnership with IRC, Cisco Foundation, Zendesk, and Tech for Refugees, delivers critical information to millions of displaced people through digital channels and social media, disempowering smugglers who thrive on mis- or disinformation, and saving lives along migration routes. As this work evolves, Signpost is creating an “AI prototyping lab” to de-risk and evaluate the effectiveness of Generative AI for the entire humanitarian sector.

    Humanitarians are also exploring the potential of Generative AI to enhance and personalize education for children affected by crises—of whom there are 224 million worldwide. A huge challenge involves testing and strengthening the potential of ChatGPT in local languages. AI models, for instance, can’t understand African languages. Lelapa AI, an African “AI research and product lab,” is working to change that, developing new languages to bring AI to Africa, while OpenAI has begun to offer low and reduced cost access to ChatGPT for nonprofits.

    OpenAI is also supporting the development of AprendAI, a global, AI-driven educational chatbot platform that delivers personalized digital learning experiences at scale via messaging platforms for crisis-affected children, teachers, and parents, all while testing and strengthening the potential of ChatGPT in local languages.

    Finally, we are seeing the power of artificial intelligence scaled to protect communities facing the harsh impacts of extreme weather. In partnership with NGOs, governments and the UN, Google has launched an AI-powered “Flood Hub,” which is currently able to forecast flooding in 80 countries. Google.org, together with IRC and the NGO GiveDirectly, is leveraging machine learning in Northeast Nigeria to establish forecasting systems that trigger early warnings and cash transfers ahead of devastating climate hazards.

    Israeli scholar and historian Yuval Noah Harari described artificial intelligence as the most dangerous technology we have ever created—and potentially the most beneficial. In 2025, those benefits must accrue to the poorest in the world.

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  • This PhD student helped to win a major pay hike for Canadian researchers

    This PhD student helped to win a major pay hike for Canadian researchers

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    On 16 April 2024, Kaitlin Kharas was one of a select few people ushered into an office across the street from the Canadian Parliament and given a sneak peek at the latest budget.

    It was, perhaps, an unusual source of excitement for a PhD student. But Kharas had waited a long time to see the contents of those stuffy, bureaucratic pages: the biggest pay rise in 20 years for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers across Canada. The budget included huge boosts to both the number and value of government scholarships. “There was absolute excitement and giddiness when I saw those numbers,” she says.

    It was the culmination of a years-long campaign; Kharas had been leading the project for the past six months.

    The Support Our Science (SOS) campaign began in 2022. From the start, organizers knew it needed to be led by graduate students speaking in their own voice, says Marc Johnson, a biologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who helped to launch the campaign.

    SOS’s first executive director was Sarah Laframboise, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa. When she stepped down in November 2023, Johnson and the board chose Kharas, who was doing a PhD in paediatric brain cancer at the University of Toronto, as her replacement. “Kaitlin had distinguished herself as professional, well spoken and up to date on the issues,” says Johnson. “She and Sarah have been our face and voice, and the people who put our vision into action.”

    The campaign involved rallies, meetings with cabinet ministers and e-mail campaigns. In the months leading up to the budget, the campaign held a press conference and encouraged supporters to write to the prime minister and finance minister. But Kharas says one of the most effective events was the nationwide walkout in May 2023. After the government failed to increase scholarship amounts in the 2023 budget, some 10,000 researchers at 46 institutions across the country stopped working in protest.

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