Congratulations to PhD candidate @peixinhua.bsky.social, who passed her dissertation proposal defense today! With advisor @chrisskurka.bsky.social and committee members Heather Shoenberger, Shannon Cruz (CAS), and @olivermb.bsky.social.

PhD candidate Eunchae Jang, grad alum MengQi Liao & faculty @chrisskurka.bsky.social & Homero Gil de Zúñiga author "Mitigating the News-Finds-Me Perception: Evaluating the intended (and unintended) effects of educational warnings on political learning" in NM&S. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉 An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊 Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #DataViz

I’m excited to share a new special issue of Psychology of Popular Media focused on ethnic/racial stereotypes. Submit pre-registered reports! Study will be conducted after in-principle acceptance. Deadline: 4.24.26 Call: www.apa.org/pubs/journal... Looking forward to your proposals. Spread the word!

As we head into another wildfire season: "We find that the observed increase in extreme fire weather bears a clear externally forced signal, detectable at 99% confidence above natural variability and attributable to human-induced climate change." www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

Does “mass communication” still exist — and if so, what should it mean today? In this Forum for @jmcquarterly.bsky.social, we reflect on that question: "The Necessary Evolution of Mass Communication Research in a Fragmenting Media Landscape." Open-access: doi.org/10.1177/1077...

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

As I say here, there is no scientific justification to revoke the engagement finding. In fact, over the last 15+ yrs, the evidence of how climate change affects our health has only grown. Higher risk of allergies, dementia, fertility, heart disease, and death: that’s what’s on the line. @nature.org

this is a level of complicity that had not occurred to me

Likely-historic photo by NBC News of all the Epstein victims asked to raise their hands if they've not yet been asked to meet with the DOJ as Bondi testifies in foreground

Holy moly this chart: Cumulative US measles cases

I am a climate scientist and this is correct. As the planet warms, storms like the one today are getting stronger… and as the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the mid latitudes, it increases the risk of the “freezer door” swinging open. Technical explanation here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Mortality rates: Mifepristone: 0.65/100,000 Penicillin 2/100K Viagra 4/100K Pregnancy in the US: 22/100,000 (some states see rates >60/100K) More people have died in ICE detention centers already in 2026 than will die from mifepristone all year. These politicians are extremely dangerous to women.

As the world burns, let's get one thing straight. A video podcast is just a TV show.

Such an unreal, death cult headline

Classy!

After a white county in South Carolina rejected a data center, developers have sets their sights on a Black community for a proposed data center complex the size of 1,200 football fields

Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts. Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses.

Super low hanging safety fruit. US regulators have had a decade plus to get manufacturers to make safe door handles and still they haven’t. www.autoblog.com/news/china-i...

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective? In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

CONGRATS to PhD candidate Wilhelmina Antwi, who defended her dissertation proposal today. With co-advisors Lee Ahern and Juliet Pinto, and committee members @chrisskurka.bsky.social, @matthewpmcallister.bsky.social, and Sinfree Makoni (PSU's Director of African Studies).

The RFK, jr effect.

📰 Quantitative research on science communication requires suitable data. When it comes to academic press releases, that data is scarce. In a new paper, we introduce a dataset of more than 500,000 press releases published on @eurekalert.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

The annual @pewresearch.org list of striking research findings from the past year is out. #1 on the list: After more than 50 years of rapid growth, the immigrant population in the United States is now in decline. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

CONGRATULATIONS to PhD candidate Peixin Hua, who passed her comprehensive exams today! ABD! With advisor @chrisskurka.bsky.social and committee members Heather Shoenberger, @olivermb.bsky.social, and Shannon Cruz (CAS).

Trumpist rule consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be a president and executive branch whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside its opponents and victims whom the law binds but does not protect.

You've got one week left to submit your application for our Health/Sci Comm Assistant Professor position here in @bellisariograded.bsky.social, so please share with anyone who might be interested!

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

We've finally got some hard numbers on AI's energy demand from a major tech company: Google says a median prompt to Gemini uses 0.24 watt-hours of electricity. 🧵 @technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

The Trump administration has announced that the US will rewrite past climate reports, in a clear attempt to erase scientific history and undermine the consensus on human-caused climate change.

@chrisskurka.bsky.social, @clctroy.bsky.social, Yin Yang, & @jessgallmyrick.bsky.social are among the coauthors of "'It Is in the Air': Seeking & Scanning for Information About Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Among Young-Adult Men Who Have Sex w/ Men in the US." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We have a JOP article about how swifties ~randomly denied tickets to the eras tour due to website allocation errors changed their views on related policies www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

🚨 We are hiring at Penn State! My college (@bellisariograded.bsky.social‬) is hiring an Assistant Professor in Health/Science Communication (emphasis on social scientific approaches). I'm leading the search, so feel free to reach out with any questions. psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

For anyone on the Communication job market this year S. Rutherford McEwan has put together an excellent spreadsheet for 2025-2026 openings. Highly recommend checking it out (whether you're applying or hiring): docs.getgrist.com/rHppfvPrMDQd... #commsky #academicsky #communication

Want to join us @univie.ac.at? Our department @ipk-univie.bsky.social is hiring a tenure-track professor in interactive communication, with a special focus on human-AI communication. 📆 Apply until September 17! 👀 More information here: jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Tenure-T... #AcademicSky #CommSky

Next up at our Political Divisions event at the Penn State Consortium on Moral Decision-Making was @chrisskurka.bsky.social, talking about passive "news finds me" approaches to media consumption & how they relate to democracy-relevant outcomes. How we relate to media matters youtu.be/GaY-mfwBWbI?...

🧵Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website! Today I’m launching www.trumpactiontracker.info - a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far). 1/14

The truth sandwich is baloney! New paper out. We show that the “truth sandwich” correction format (in which false information is bookended by factual information) does not enhance corrections. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Terrible Friday news dump.The wealth of expertise. The decades of scientific progress. The emerging and urgent challenges we were focused on tackling. It is all so short-sided and cruel. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

We're hiring! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30219 The Cornell Department of Communication is hiring an Assistant Professor in Science, Environment, and Risk Communication! Applications received by September 15, 2025, will be given full consideration.

Now out @hcr-journal.bsky.social: we find evidence of overconfidence, but decomposition analyses show assoc. b/w OC & behavioral correlates are accounted for by deficits in actual discernment ability rather than lack of metacognitive insight academic.oup.com/hcr/advance-...

This is very, very bad. A new state law will likely force the closure of hundreds of low-enrollment programs at Indiana University. The cutoff is 15 graduates/year for undergrad majors, 7 for Masters programs, and 3 for PhD programs, averaged over 3 years. wfiunews.wordpress.com/2025/06/24/h...

A big congratulations to Dr. Megan Norman on successfully defending her dissertation today! With advisor @jessgallmyrick.bsky.social and committee members @chrisskurka.bsky.social, S. Shyam Sundar, and Stephanie Madden.

Congratulations to Dr. Jiaqi (Agnes) Bao, who passed her dissertation defense today! With chair/advisor @jessgallmyrick.bsky.social and committee members @chrisskurka.bsky.social, Fuyuan Shen, and S. Shyam Sundar.

Major update to #SCIMaP visualization of impacts of cuts to federally supported health research. Map now includes information on future economic losses (impact of proposed reduction of NIH IDC to 15%) and current economic losses (impact of terminated NIH grants). scienceimpacts.org