Some personal news: I have been financially supporting a family member in a mental health crisis which has spiraled into a financial disaster. I would like to keep doing progressive activism but I can no longer pay rent for myself and my two kids. Please help if you can. Thank you very much.

New: The current “AI race” media frenzy, whether framed as productivity revolution, Chinese competition, or AGI salvation, is either largely myth-making or missing the most crucial point. So let me challenge that frenzy with a different story. 1/ open.substack.com/pub/protagon...

“It’s not that those things don’t matter: they absolutely goddamn do, & will keep on mattering, & I wouldn’t go on with the whole tedious business of teaching if I thought otherwise. It’s just that they never mattered much to the Times & they are, to appearances, mattering less and less by the day.”

My interview with Dr. Susan Monarez, former CDC Director, who was fired for doing her job, standing up for public health and science. Learn about her resilience and optimism. erictopol.substack.com/p/dr-susan-m...

Many thanks to Oloides.com for the thoughtful remarks oloides.com/the-price-of...

Ten percent of Zuckerbucks come from scams and ads for banned goods 🫠 www.reuters.com/investigatio...

people who can compartmentalize elon musk’s actions and are able to keep using his app must better at navigating social realities than i’ll ever be

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The world’s first trillionaire initiated a move that has left more than half a million people dead, most of whom are children.

“Why Bill Gates’ climate memo is being celebrated by skeptics while frustrating scientists" | Article by @ryankatzrosene.bsky.social for @us.theconversation.com: theconversation.com/why-bill-gat...

Ask Joe Rogan how he feels now about having had bullshit artist Mike Benz aka Frame Game on to just spout “something something CIA” fantasies for hours. Who’s paying Frame Game? Same people as are paying John Solomon, and War Room. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

okay, now let's hear from people who don't have millions of dollars in tech company stocks still vesting

"Ah, that’s the stuff. (...) a bunch of rich guys who have been comically out of touch with normal people for many decades, and more recently have blowtorched their brains into a smoking pile of ash on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X and in various group chats." prospect.org/2025/11/04/a...

It’s rigged in the most ridiculous ways. Musk is always openly talking about tinkering with the algorithm. Any non-fascists still posting there seem to be in denial about this fact, which should be obvious by now.

Here is something to put on your calendar:

We live in an era of democratic backsliding and autocratization. Scholars and researchers are among those in the firing line. How should they respond? We will provide hints & guidance in a webinar on 13 November for the European Geophysical Union: You can register here:

It's the end of the road for BBC Science in Action. But science itself is facing growing roadblocks. For this terminal edition of SinA I'm joined by @naomioreskes.bsky.social @drdebhoury.bsky.social @michaelemann.bsky.social & @angierasmussen.bsky.social for where now? www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"The EU received a record number of applications for its top research and innovation grants this year, including a tripling of US bids for a key fund compared with 2024." on.ft.com/4373uHt

"America appears to be, at the moment, in a sort of benevolent hostage situation. AI-related spending now contributes more to the nation’s GDP growth than all consumer spending combined, and by another calculation, those AI expenditures accounted for 92% of GDP growth during the first half of 2025."

We live in an era of democratic backsliding and autocratization. Scholars and researchers are among those in the firing line. How should they respond? We will provide some hints and guidance int his webinar on 13 November for the European Geophysical Union:

Every day it feels more and more like a zombie apocalypse over on LinkedIn, in which you start a conversation with someone who you hope is an ordinary person and then a couple of turns in discover that they have surrendered their brains to the "AI" mass delusion.

There's also a weird conventional wisdom forming that the Democratic agenda is toxically unpopular and that Republicans are delivering what voters want. This is laughably false. Trump is the most unpopular president in modern history and his entire agenda is underwater.

The anti-vaccine movement has the same talking points now as it did in the 1800’s. It’s always been a rejection of science, scientists, and progress, with a soupçon of paranoia. Below is a slide for a talk I’m preparing that illustrates the identical strategies. I have more examples, too.

Late to this fantastic piece of work by @saraheknuth.bsky.social et al, but it is pretty damn refreshing to hear someone laying out what needs to happen instead of jailing themselves within what's likely to happen What would a US federal offshore wind body look like? Explored in detail:

“Sometimes, it is hard to convey how ignorant, dishonest and malicious political actors have been on this topic.” open.substack.com/pub/protagon...

The Brazilian clue Or: another L for lab leak believers Philipp Markolin #virology https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/the-brazilian-clue

Was faster than I thought! Here it is: arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

And I slept right through this milestone. And then slept through my alarm this morning as well. Still, yay!

Many will say, "why post on the cesspit of FB?" and that's a good q. Here's why: FB is where people who care about climate are still most connected to family, friends, old college roommates, and more. So when I provide factual info for them to share, it reaches some people it wouldn't elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s HHS is slashing research because it doesn’t fit the administration’s right-wing ideology. And MAHA Action, which exists to back Kennedy, is helping sell what is in effect a broadside against American science. MAHA Action is a pro-censorship group—and an anti-science group.

First and foremost, AJI is an investigative reporting operation. That’s the primary role. Exposing anti-science and its funders. Contrary to the suggestion by MAHA Action, lots of volunteer work goes into keeping us afloat. Help us continue our work! www.accountabilityjournalism.org/donate

Very kind 🙏 But I just tried to give the many remarkable scientists working on providing answers for the world another venue to tell their story.

A new bat coronavirus discovered in Brazil confirms what we already knew: nature handles furin cleavage sites just fine. Lab leakers, don’t worry, you've got the track record to pivot seamlessly to a career in creative fiction writing. Quick update on the news: open.substack.com/pub/protagon...

A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

That's a hook alright ⬇️ "In the depths of the longest government shutdown in American history, with tens of millions of people about to go hungry and millions more on the brink of losing their health insurance, philanthropists are stepping up. But not like that." open.substack.com/pub/anandwri...

A poll from the journal Nature found that 75% of researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country. That includes a man who’s been dubbed the "Mozart of Math." (This PBS story on the scientific brain drain is heartbreaking & ominous for medicine, imo.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLvO...

Three examples in one 24-hour period of people threatening to use the power of the state against those holding them to account. www.pbump.net/o/these-are-...

As expected, unfortunately. If ever you needed a reason for never using GISAID ever again (as a data producer or data user - we're both), look no further. Time to move on to more trusted and transparent solutions.

Symptoms of *Lab Leak Fever* – Endless Twitter arguments about China – Sudden distrust in scientists – Binge-watching plandemic documentaries for “research” – Forwarding 12-tweet threads to friends as if they’re peer-reviewed – Thinking you could solve virology with Google and vibes Get the cure:

"Dennoch ordnet Meier die Arbeit der NZZ irgendwo zwischen Ideologie, Aktivismus und Propaganda ein – die Artikel seien oft sehr einseitig produziert, Fakten würden tendenziös dargestellt oder weggelassen." Yep. @nzz.ch ist kein Qualitätsjournalismus mehr

This was wrong. They didn't compare SARS2 to its closest relatives in those specific genomic regions. I did. Result: For ALL 11 contested sites, a perfect 6-nucleotide match exists in one or more closely related bat coronaviruses. Every "modification" was present in nature.

Debunking bullshit takes an order of magnitude more work that creating it. While all experts who looked closer at the "synthetic origin" bruhaha immediately realised how scientifically unsound it was, it just takes so much work for so little reward to refute it. Zach did anyway, and oh boy.. ⬇️

The most interesting result for me was learning that it would not have been possible to so definitively disprove the same hypothesis had the SARS-CoV-2 genome been as divergent from what's been published as the pangolin genomes. How to debunk the cherry picking part?

www.protagonist-science.com/p/lab-leak-f... people who are interested in learning more can read this to see why none of my results are all that surprising. FYI @acritschristoph.bsky.social & @natashaloder.bsky.social (I think Piper not here?) there's an update on this.

This isn't an isolated case. It's part of a pattern. The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis requires omitting contradictory data such as RpYN06. Worse, authors knew about this contradictory data a month and a half *before* they even published their preprint.

Conclusion: All 11 "synthetic looking" sites are found in nature. The "anomalous" spacing isn't even rare. The "synthetic fingerprint" appears in natural viruses . The restriction map of SARS-CoV-2 is fully consistent with natural evolution from its bat virus relatives. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833

I applied their own criteria to two natural pangolin coronaviruses (MjGuangdong & MjGuangxi) Result: BOTH natural pangolin viruses have their own "synthetic fingerprints" that meet the Bruttel et al. criteria. It's not a fingerprint. It's a meaningless pattern.