Scientists need money so they’re yelling on Twitter

Today, scientists on Twitter discovered an important technique that could very well give them an edge in the competitive funding climate: CAPS LOCK. It’s the secret sauce that makes WHATEVER YOU’RE SAYING SO MUCH MORE CONVINCING.

See, doing science takes money — to pay postdocs and graduate students, for equipment and reagents, even to present and publish results. So in the US, at least, academic researchers are constantly churning out applications for a finite pool of money. And grants are becoming increasingly competitive, which can make scientists a little loopy from all the pressure. That’s why some of them have started tweeting their requests for funding in all caps, with the hashtag #ALLCAPSPROPOSAL.

Our highly scientific and extremely rigorous investigation on Twitter that started and ended about 30 minutes ago suggests that Julie Blommaert, a graduate student at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, started the hashtag when she forgot to turn off caps lock while writing a proposal.

Thus, #ALLCAPSPROPOSAL was born. And, it kind of became a thing:

ALL THE BRAINTHINGS:

Also, LASERS:

Some got a little, um, dark:

Please, please let this be a real proposal:

For what it’s worth, any institution funding this research should also probably also throw in a few bucks for extensive, professional-quality videos of raccoons solving puzzles. And I’m calling dibs for The Verge on the footage of those brilliant little trash pandas and their Rubik’s cubes. DIBS.