For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and slowly witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life. @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-firs...

A tremendous example of political theology. God bless Jamelle Bouie and his work of reminding us we cannot divorce questions of governance from questions of virtue.

I like this team and I don’t feel bad rooting for them, despite how I feel about the country writ large… BUT… could we get a Beyoncé remake of Country Road or something? Just, you know, just to try it??

My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735

The "ambiguous" is key: people underestimate how brilliant Noel Gallagher is at writing lyrics that are basically meaningless doggerel and yet at the same that time suggest enough depth to let people project their strongest emotions onto them.

Windmills near Zaandam - 1871 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/7400

All told, Trump pulled in at least $2.2 billion in 2025. That compares to a minimum of $622 million for all of 2024 — before he returned to the presidency.

"we want healthcare" somehow became deep theory.

Reminded of Frederick Douglass's inclusive vision of American nationality today - more vital than ever.

This week’s episode is a special one, in honor of America’s 250th birthday: an overview of the role the Supreme Court played in the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, with our friend @kroosevelt93.bsky.social.

I'm not saying the mind-body problem is not *a thing*, only that: (1) the usual narrative has had its day, and (2) the usual narrative has little to do with empirically engaged philosophy of mind

An empirically engaged philosophy of mind course could start with (e.g.) questions about animal minds, artificial minds, psychological methods (behaviourism could come in here), computational theories of mind, how the brain actually works, the explanation of consciousness etc.

According to Madison, this means we can’t have congressional or military chaplains, give tax exemptions to churches, or officially proclaim thanksgivings or fasts! I’m not a Madison expert and hadn’t looked at this document before today; I’m surprised at how radical it is!

The result is as expected but 3 to uphold the EO and 5-4 on the constitutional question is still on the worse end of how close it was going to be, and that 5-4 is an especially insane close call.

Sotomayor’s dissent is an obituary for science, NIH, and NSF. “Seldom, if ever, has this Court worked such a profound bait and switch on a coequal branch: For more than 90 years, Congress believed, with this Court’s express approval, that it was allowed to create a workable Govern- ment…”

it goes without saying that it's racist to refer to immigrants as "invaders" who must be met with lethal force, but the 'traitors then invaders' framing here isn't just xenophobia - it's a recurring theme in some of the most violent neonazi propaganda of the late 20th century.

A spiky footnote from Roberts in the Slaughter case in which he seemingly goads liberal justices over their belief that Congress never would have established independent agencies if they weren't really independent:

More evidence for a causal role of brain rhythms in cognition. Analyzing different brainwave frequencies shows how the brain mixes multiple sources of information when forming decisions. doi.org/10.1371/jour... #neuroscience

GOOD NEWS! A personalized mRNA vaccine, known as mRNA-4157, has shown promise in keeping melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, from returning. FIVE years later, NEARLY 70% of people in the vaccine group are CANCER-FREE. The vaccine also cut a person’s risk of the cancer metastasizing by NEARLY 60%.

Flagrant, spiraling corruption doesn’t help anyone’s ‘side’. It harms every Conservative and every Liberal American, because it is a cancer inside the institutions on which our prosperity and our freedom depend.

Conjecture: There is a stronger tendency within most leftist and socialist thought to perfectionism. That is, politics is a (class, if you insist) struggle that can be *finally* won. Liberals more naturally incline to a "permanence of politics" thesis. Thoughts?

Max Wertheimer would have legitimately loved to be alive at this time in history to be a researcher in complexity studies. His gestalt theory work effectively centered around perception, but his real passion in life was discovering the laws of organization in complex systems.

In this series, I will use “architecture” in this more precise sense: regularities of organization that sit between microscopic details and macroscopic behavior, shaped by constraints rather than specified by a central blueprint. 5/

I know, the word is risky b/c it suggests design: a building has an architect and a machine has a blueprint, while living systems have neither in that sense. Yet they are not amorphous collections of parts: a cell repairs itself, an immune system coordinates molecular and cellular responses. 2/

We argue that meaning is fundamentally baked in to neural patterns from the get-go, which only have causal powers by virtue of what they mean.

The Brain is a Semantic Engine youtu.be/0dK009atOsM - a recent, 25-minute talk (with Henry Potter) at the Beyond Neurocomputationalism workshop

How does order emerge from chaos? 🧪 Prof. Pérez-Mercader journeys to the origins of life. From prebiotic #chemistry to life-like synthetic systems, his research asks fundamental questions about the nature of #information processing in chemical reactions. #GSO2026 #Chemputing

Now Vance is blaming the “deep state” for Nixon’s shame. The efforts to erase history continue. Orwellian.

I know this is not the biggest concern going these days, but it stresses me out that basically every artist/writer/critic is now expected to create their own tiny empire instead of getting paid by any existing entity to perform a job they've worked to get good at!!!!

What if political parties were broad coalitions of diverse people, interests, and views with some common goals?

REPUBLICANS: IT IS WITH ENORMOUS PRIDE THAT WE BRING YOU THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THIS LANDMARK HOUSING BILL THAT WILL LOWER YOUR COSTS AND BRING THE AMERICAN DREAM WITHIN REACH AS THE GOP DELIVERS ON OUR PROMI— TRUMP: I hereby cancel my signing ceremony for this Warren centric bill

From the archive: "Why Thoughts Are Not In The Head: Frege on Sense", by John C. Brady #Philosophy #Philsky

This is the kind of almost magic-like payoff we get from decades of basic and applied research by thousands of scientists across the globe. This is why we do it.

Red Houses at Bjornegaard in the Snow, Norway - 1895 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/10619

The algae:

Alex O'Connor (@CosmicSkeptic) interviewed me for his podcast. youtu.be/557PDNSbcGE

'The Three Muppeteers' with Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Richelieu.

The Muppets of Monte Cristo

Muppet Lord of the Rings would be incredible

The entirety of philosophy, political theory, economics, etc. just being the elaboration of Plato vs. Aristotle. Kind of annoying honestly.

I'm so annoyed that reading Plato makes me sympathetic to Aristotle

On Wednesday we dedicated @caltech.edu’s Ginsburg Center for Quantum Precision Measurement. We won’t be moving in for a few more months, but it’s going to be a beautiful facility. We're very grateful to the generous donors who made this possible. It was a great day. www.caltech.edu/about/news/g...

i laughed so much at this goddammit

Great essay by @philipcball.bsky.social looking at the messy, complex *deeply physical* nature of the genome and the processes of gene regulation... 1/n

Oh I mean I spend my life fighting for an effective social safety net that working and middle class people regularly reject in favor of a magic bean salesman.

My grandfather (lifelong communist) was one of the only people I know irl to actually have had a catch phrase, and it was "Never underestimate the stupidity of the English working class."

A new DRL book cover: Charlene Haddock-Seigfried's Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric! Read our teaching comment here: diversityreadinglist.org/pragmatism-a... #philsky

My review of Guglielmo Militello's excellent new book on biological individuality is now online in Metascience. "Functional Integration" concretely applies the organisational framework to the evolution of eukaryotic cellularity, agency and autonomy. @gugli-militello.bsky.social #philsci #philbio

great paper by @bensaunders.bsky.social and a nice example that a neurotransmitter has no intrinsec function, it is a signal whose consequences are defined by the circuit that receives it. the function emerges. doi.org/10.1038/s41...