Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Join us Monday for a CORE Talk seminar and discussion featuring Michael Barnett's work on the link between length of hospital stay and insurance policies. Register here: www.coretalks.org

LAST CALL for Submissions for the PARC Aging Retreat! Penn AGING researchers are encouraged to submit a brief abstract to the 2026 PARC Aging Retreat "USA at 250 Years: Aging Healthily" on May 1, 2026! Details: aging.upenn.edu/events/retreat

"The skills they don’t replicate—at least not yet—are the ones that were always the hardest [...]: knowing which questions matter, developing taste for what makes a research design credible, understanding an institutional setting deeply enough to know where the data is lying to you...."

Breast cancer mortality dropped 58% from 1975 to 2019. Localized, early detected breast cancer has a 99% 5 year survival rate. Modern mammogram tech was developed by NASA for telescopes. Last year, RFK Jr. cancelled 87 research grants on breast cancer. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/u...

Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference: Things in US science are far, far worse than people know. Far worse than even other scientists know. 1/

Every Friday, I open the NIH Guide TOC to find multiple early cancellations of funding opportunities--and virtually never anything new.

There are many great AI researchers at universities, but they pay a VERY steep price to be able to stay in academia & publish openly “The top 1% of publishing industry scientists now earn $1.5 million more annually than comparable academics, a fivefold increase since 2001” www.nber.org/papers/w34964

I like this piece from @timharford.ft.com but it largely makes the case for ‘blue skies’ type research as it may become useful later. There is a different argument I think we don’t make enough: it is part of the human endeavour to understand the nature of our world www.ft.com/content/0d60...

The is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled. A truly extraordinary moment. We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. Act like it.

Nature published another pile of trash i am trying to catch up on some of my reading but this one is getting under my skin so here’s a thread highlighting why this piece is either ill-informed or intentionally ignorant of a wealth of knowledge from embodied cog sci and related fields 1/

The US Administration has embarked on a large, unprecedented program of excluding lawful, highly-skilled workers and students from the United States. I talked with the brilliant @gracesegers.bsky.social at @newrepublic.com about the broad economic ripple effects. newrepublic.com/article/2073...

Despite recent controversial decisions, the FDA has stopped holding advisory committee meetings — which bring together regulators, companies, patients, and a panel of independent advisors to publicly discuss complex regulatory matters. I dug into why: www.statnews.com/2026/03/09/f...

🎉March/April Pulse Highlight🎉 Where @lsgeriatricem.bsky.social talks about her Fulbright experience in Australia! issuu.com/saemonline/d... Pages 66-67 @saemonline.bsky.social #emergencymedicine #saem #agem #geriatricmedicine #emergencydepartment

The data also reinforce a message that should be clear: American leadership in science and medical research requires far more than getting across the line on top-line budget negotiations and will require continued vigilance to track how HHS treats applications and existing awards.

The plot is only part of the story. The data do not include lost science via terminations, freezes, stalled payments, and award delays. The collapse in awards rates will lead to job loss, gaps in research programs, and drive scientists to spend more time writing grants rather than doing science.

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others. It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

Luigi Guido speaking on The Economic Costs of Ambiguous Laws

"Structurally indifferent to truth is a good line" is a good line. Also worth noting that not all models are, just that LLMs weren't even designed to have a concept of truth. One of many ways the "AI" moniker distracts.

The critique of unmeasured confounding is often levied in a lazy/broad way. It is trivially true in any observational study. But if the critic can't think of a plausible such confounder and posit a reasonable direction/magnitude of its bias then they're not doing productive science.

Psychologists following a third-variable control strategy that may be best described as "sequential."

Join NYT's @jeneeninterlandi.bsky.social, Dr. Jonathan Mannheim, and me on Monday, March 2nd at 1pm ET, Live on Substack as we discuss the human cost of the administration's war on US science. Link to Live: open.substack.com/live-stream/... Info below: insidemedicine.substack.com/p/speaking-o...

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

The impact is already hitting science agencies hard. The NIH—the world's largest public biomedical research funder—has had to rely on leftover stopgap funds. New grant awards have slowed to a trickle — exacerbating the effects of a record-long shutdown in October. (h/t @jeremymberg.bsky.social)

That's right. Worse than Pointless www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/o...

It’s possible to hope the ayatollahs regime will fall one day and Iranians be free and be dismayed by our country bombing Iran with no probable cause , with no public debate , and no congressional authorization.

There were HUGE differences between patients who did and did not receive the AI stethoscope. Patients were 20 years older (64 vs 44), 3.5x more likely to have hypertension (53% vs 15%) and 4x more likely to have kidney disease (13% vs 3%) 🧵 11/

But per-protocol analyses are difficult. Whether a doctor chooses to use the "AI stethoscope" is not determined at random. This 'breaks' the randomisation, making the design equivalent to an observational study. 🧵 6/

First, the headline should be the result of the primary analysis (the intention to treat), which reports "Implementation of an AI stethoscope in routine primary care did not significantly increase detection of heart failure or increase community-based diagnosis" 🧵 2/

Part of the problem here is a long-standing issue of mine: The public gets a huge benefit from beat journalism—but the journalism industry does not, by and large, recognize beat journalism for its value or when it comes to awards and prizes. Those go to investigations and "one big thing" features.

Authoritarians launch coercion against the Other, then expand it to political opponents and people with resources they want to control. White Americans are used to govt respecting our rights. Good, Pretti, & 1000s of other Minnesotans learned this administration does not. bsky.app/profile/jaya...

The administration is trying to aggressively escalate its coercive power over the American people.

Undiagnosed cognitive impairment is common in older patients discharged back to home. I’m interested in seeing the follow up results on how these patients manage recovery from the injury or illness that brought them to the ED. Great work team!

In case you were wondering how good we are at detecting cognitive impairment in the ED absent a systematic approach to do so, here are clock draws from 63 patients discharged from a single ED. In @annalsofem.bsky.social : www.annemergmed.com/article/S019...

Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it. Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:

While LLMs will try to follow good research practices by default, you can pretty easily convince them to p-hack for you. In one case (out of the 4 tested), the LLM moved the result from p > 0.05 to p < 0.001. github.com/janetmalzahn...

The high costs of isolationism

This is a vivid, horribly relevant read. “She does not sleep well. And as you lift up her pajama top to check her rash one morning, you see that her breathing is labored, shadows pooling between her ribs when she sucks in air. You suffer an icy moment of realization: This is a medical crisis.”

In terms of what cures are being lost: - Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis - herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis - shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

EPA claims repeal will be "de minimis." Based on our forthcoming work on wildfire smoke (below) and a back-of-the-envelope calculation from Table 1 in the final rule, I estimate this action will kill over *200,000 Americans* over the 21st century. De minimis indeed! www.nber.org/papers/w33829

Tomorrow!

Two thoughts: 1. Fortunate to live in a world where nonlinearities are just waiting to be exploited by clever researchers. 2. That book _Cheaper by the Dozen_ had a misleading title.

I don't know for sure, but AHRQ was decimated by staff cuts and losses. I am checking on any active litigation.

A man taken into custody in Rochester Thursday by federal immigration agents and now held at the Whipple Federal Building in the Twin Cities is a recent organ transplant recipient who is without his needed anti-rejection medication, state Rep. Kim Hicks tells MPR News.

"Alcohol-related emergency department visits approximately doubled from 2003-2004 to 2021-2022, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

"The greatest flaw in clinical medicine might be our desire to banish uncertainty." In this Editor's Choice, @kamranabbasi.bsky.social reflects on the tyranny of clinical fear www.bmj.com/content/392/...

Free online CORE Talk (coretalks.org) tomorrow outlining Dr. Mashid Abir's vision for a 21st century U.S. health system optimally responsive to the needs of patients and communities. (registration link on website)

The magic wand stethoscope doesn't reliably measure up – yet. Phonographic and single-lead ECG analysis by AI did not reliably improve diagnosis of atrial fibrillation, heart failure, or valvular heart disease. #medsky #MLsky www.evidencetriage.com/p/not-a-magi...

I also do not watch the Pitt (watched half the first episode, enough to know it rings true to reality), but also encourage you to watch. Then go listen to some CORE Talks to hear what the research has to say: coretalks.org