A tornado formed during Kilauea lava fountain eruption yesterday. Lasted about a minute.

A river otter chomping on a fish at Phoenix Lake today.

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Juvenile bobcat encounter on Tennessee Valley Trail.

In Turkey, when authoritarianism took hold, satire was one of the first casualties. Political comedy shows disappeared—now, airing one could land you in jail. Dictatorships always follow the same playbook.

Renewable energy is humming along despite the setbacks: “…people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.” www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

🔬API-first feature extraction for image-based profiling workflows If you need to obtain interpretable features from your segmented microscopy images, but want to do it in a fully automated way, we know the struggle. 1/6

For many years while I was running a scientific skepticism site/podcast I repeated the mantra "vaccines were so successful, we forgot their impact due to vanishing diseases." Bringing a major pseudoscience conspiracist in charge of HHS is a sure way to remember their impact- in the most painful way.

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

More on this @latimes.com by @niamhordner.bsky.social www.latimes.com/science/stor...

Textbooks: “Enhancers are just a bunch of TFBSs” But how do they REALLY work? New paper with many contributors here @berkeleylab.lbl.gov, @anshulkundaje.bsky.social, @anusri.bsky.social A 🧵 (1/n) Free access link: rdcu.be/erD22

'Even in a city renowned for its bleeding heart, there is a breaking point, a collective exasperation with those who weaponize our compassion to fuel a crisis that claims lives young and old, drawn to our streets by cheap drugs and lax enforcement' thevoicesf.org/san-francisc...

"After court order, OpenAI is now preserving all ChatGPT user logs, including deleted chats, sensitive chats, etc."

Terminal Genome Viewer (tgv), written in Rust github.com/zeqianli/tgv

Having missed last week's $10K treasure hunt, I decided to hunt for another treasure myself this weekend: the Tiburon Mariposa Lily, which grows only in Tiburon and nowhere else in the world. ONLY in the Ring Mountain Preserve in Tiburon. So I headed there yesterday to try my luck. 1/n

16 resources for re-analyzing public expression data 🧵 👇 1. rnama.com/docs/search... RNA meta Analysis has ~26,700 studies (5,717 RNA-Seq and 20,955 Microarray)

The Methuselah tree. A majestic redwood, estimated nearly 1900 years old. Its diameter at base is about 4.25m. [Near El Corte de Madera Creek Preserve]

What to do when you encounter a mountain lion?

Resolution Trail, El Corte de Madera Preserve: the trail was named after an Australian Douglas DC9 that crashed here in 1953. Some debris still can be seen along the trail. 1/n

Was this event really the beginning of the Internet Age? A commemorative plate from Alpine Inn, a beer garden near Palo Alto.

The Rangehouse: the old US Naval Magnetic Silencing Range in the Marina. The facility was used to calibrate naval vessels' magnetic signatures to avoid detection by mines etc.

Ditto.

And in a very serendipitous, very SF moment, Daniel Lurie spotted a whale out in the Bay during the panel. “Look, greatest city in the world.” 🐋

Last historic theater in downtown Berkeley to be torn down: 'Could never ever be duplicated'

After 15 years of hiking in the Bay, I still find new and amazing trails. The weather was perfect for Old St Hillary's Wildflower Preserve yesterday. Made me feel truly blessed to live in the Bay. 🧵

She’s heeeere. 👀 R-Evolution, the 45-foot-tall, 32,000-pound steel sculpture that first debuted at Burning Man in 2015, is now calling San Francisco home for the next six months. 🎥: Eric Thurber

Hahah

The tech capitol of the world finally allows its police department to use tech, and crime rate drops. youtu.be/bk5fGu_-NcQ?...

Anyone surprised?

Sad. www.kron4.com/news/bay-are...

Poppies are blooming in God's Country.

Bipping is down, thanks to Prop E which let SFPD use drones and cameras to catch criminals. Apparently, they can do their job when they're not hamstrung by the SF Board of Supervisors and the Police Commission. www.ktvu.com/news/san-fra...

A paper in Nature presents a method for breaking down perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), environmental contaminants known as ‘forever chemicals,’ while recycling the fluoride contained within them. https://go.nature.com/3Rk1dCf #chemsky 🧪

New study on non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NGCS) shows that it probably doesn't exist. In a blinded, randomized setting, people with NGCS had the same response to placebo (gluten-free) yoghurt and muffins as to the ones with gluten. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School, was detained at Logan Airport after returning from France and sent to an ICE detention in Louisiana, The Insider reports. A big critic of Putin and the war in Ukraine, she may now be deported to Russia.

Spring finally arrived in the Bay Area after weeks of gloomy weather. Puffy grass and wildflowers covering Mt Diablo make you wish you were a cow. 1/n

one and a half rainbows.

How much time do we collectively waste preparing tax returns every year so that Intuit Turbo Tax can make money?

Facepalm. urlvanish.com/ccc571f9

transgenic ≠ transgender

DA rages at courts as suspected $16K Walgreens thief released

Big Basin Redwoods is recovering from the devastating CZU Fire in 2020 --at least the part that open to visitors. Some trees are completely charred and seemingly dead but the most have lost only their branches, and growing new ones now. Amazing. 🧵

A scientist testing Google’s new AI asks it to generate hypotheses on mechanisms underlying antibiotic resistance. After two days of processing, the AI suggests a hypothesis the scientist’s team recently developed—but hasn’t published yet. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Remarkable story of a museum guard deciphering the long-dead Urartu language from cuneiform tablets. youtu.be/XqScUII2z_4?...

Highway 1 and Devil's Slide, near Gray Whale Cove, south of Pacifica. 🧵

A thin veil of fog over Montara State Beach at sunset.

Indian warriors. Blithdale Ridge, Mill Valley. 1/3