Congrats to all the new assistant professors who got STEM jobs at R1 universities! Surprise, one-third of your work is now teaching writing to grad students who mostly avoided humanities and social science classes in undergrad. #AcademicSky

Van Hollen ‘kicking the tires’ on a 2028 presidential run

Good news! Ministers have finally given green light to new #NaturalHistory GCSE. We’ve campaigned so long for this! Big hats off to tireless advocate Mary Colwell 🙌 Now our young people will have a chance to get to know & love the natural world, to feel awe & wonder, & gain skills to protect it 🌷🌳🦡

"We're shipping so much more code with AI!" "Good, stable code?" "Oh heavens no. No no no. not at all. We couldn't possibly"

New research finds that NYC's congestion pricing program has reduced collisions. "The introduction of the Congestion Relief Zone is associated with fewer overall crashes." doi.org/10.1093/aje/...

meanwhile, the house transportation and infrastructure committee is moving the Build America 250 Act—a bill that would increase highway funding and decrease public transit funding for the next 5-6 years.

what do you call mass detainment camps that kill the people who stay in them

This will truly become a nightmare at scale and we already went through this with Uber and Lyft. The great promise was that ridesharing would reduce the need for personal car ownership. In reality, it led to increased traffic congestion due to all the deadheading.

Still thinking about how Trump EPA's economic analysis for its final rule delaying the phasedown of super polluting refrigerants monetized potential savings but *not* potential costs. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The European Union is tightening the regulatory backdoor through which US automakers have been quietly importing around 7k large SUVs and pickup trucks/year. “The revised rules, expected to launch in 2027, are designed to close loopholes that Brussels says allow unsafe vehicles onto European roads.”

On the scale of their criminality, this is a minor offense, but it points to the Republican regime's desire to destroy independent sources of information so they can be the sole arbiter of truth. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/c...

Death toll from Israel's attacks on Lebanon since March has reached 3,433, with 10,395 injured, says Health Ministry.

What the actual f$&k. Trump is dismantling the OOI. A shining achievement of oceanography. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/c...

Solid graphic

What if taxing the rich works?

I’m a climate scientist. Let me fix this headline. “Nearly a century ago, scientists showed that burning fossil fuels warms the planet. Today, we know human emissions account for over 100% of the warming. Yet dark money and disinformation still work to keep Americans addicted to fossil fuels.”

tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.

Reminder that the Trump regime is still blowing up suspected “drug boats” — killing 197 people since September. But no judge or jury has found these boats were trafficking drugs. We're taking Trump's word for it. This is murder. We must not lose sight of this lawlessness.

Once again: German universities were the envy of the world before the Nazis rose to power and took an ideological wrecking ball to the entire enterprise. If you want to know how long it took for German universities to recover… they haven’t.

47/ However, it’s not enough to stop the proposal. The board votes to move forward the proposed changes with 3 board members dissenting. Let’s be clear: Gavin Newsom’s air regulators voted to cut billions from housing, transit, and climate and hand it to Big Oil. This is a betrayal.

It’s bizarre being a policy-oriented researcher in an environment where evidence and public opinion are basically irrelevant to what happens. We’re not informing policy any more, friends; we have to make politics.

Project 2025 promised a right-wing revolution in American government. Democrats’ Project 2029 promises to ... take on the “annoyance economy” and cut down on surprise fees and impossible cancellations. From me: www.ms.now/opinion/proj...

A city taxing large retailers 1% to fund community solar, free AC for low-income households, and clean energy job training. Turns out when communities design the policy, they build things that actually help people. vist.ly/55wve via Monica Samayoa at WGLT

NEW — I wrote about my visit to Delaney Hall, the ICE facility in Newark, NJ where detainees are on a hunger and labor strike in protest of rotten food, unpaid work, and unjust detainment, and where protesters outside have spent the last week drawing ICE's ire while keeping strikers' demands alive.

What's really astonishing is not the far right authoritarian party doing this, but the near-total lack of <loud public collective action> by university chancellors & presidents to oppose this existential crisis. Almost impossible to overstate how total a failure of leadership this is.

Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-...

Reminder that Amazon... -Helps fuel ICE's deportation machine -Donated $1M to Trump's inauguration -Scrapped plans to display tariff costs after pressure from Trump -Shelled out $75M for the Melania movie And now wants to reboot The Apprentice — with Don Jr as host. Still shopping on Amazon?

If the fossil fuel industry had to pay all of its true costs it wouldn't be profitable.

Breaking: Trump has fired the membership of the National Science Board, which is oversees NSF. I have confirmed separately with multiple now-former members of NSB.

Cost to Build a Natural Gas-Fired Power Plant Surges by 66% in two years, BNEF Says. The average project expense for a US gas power plant with combined-cycle turbines, the more efficient CCGT type, rose to $2,157 per kilowatt last year from less than $1,500 in 2023. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Approximately 0% of Americans know that the US produces 50% more oil than Saudi Arabia. ig.ft.com/global-energ...

We have discovered, yet again, that pedestrianization *raises* traffic to stores & *boosts* sales. All the fear-mongering was baseless! I'm sure this time the lesson will stick & the *next* group of merchants around the *next* proposed pedestrian street won't raise a bunch of nonsense objections!

Breaking News: Gov. Janet Mills of Maine vetoed legislation that would have blocked new data centers in the state until November 2027. It would have been the first state moratorium on data centers as the A.I. industry booms.

It's just one week away. "No Kings" hopes for a major escalation of its anti-authoritarianism movement with a May 1 general strike, urging "no work, no school, no shopping" Online buzz has been light, but some major unions are on board. Can it work? My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/may-...

Removing plastic from our food chain yields quick results, researchers say: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-23/plastic-packaging-body-chemicals-study/106594194

It will be the law of the jungle. Market analysts are already predicting that rich countries will outbid poor countries for scarce oil and gas supplies. This means energy famine for the Global South. Link: www.ft.com/content/6ca1...

Pakistan's solar buildout is truly incredible 2020: 4 TWh, 3% of the mix 2024: 20 TWh, 11% 2025: 37 TWh, 19% Nearly all distributed solar generation. Solar is modular, scalable and affordable and the fastest way to energy independence for many countries.

A nice reminder from Ember, using British data. Wind and solar are complementary. Our system works best when you have both, each calling on their own strengths in terms of generation patterns. If either struggles to grow like it should, we end up with a more expensive, slower fossil phase-out

Breaking: Big Wind www.eenews.net/articles/lar...

Electric buses cost much less to operate, are quiet, and generate no tailpipe emissions. Fleming County Schools in Kentucky purchased 24 electric buses using funding provided by the Biden administration's Transportation Bill. 🧪🔌💡☀️💨💧🔋 a 🧵 spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisvill...

So this is California's air regulator basically giving up on cap-and-invest until the 2030s, at least. ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/defaul...

A worker died at an Amazon warehouse in Oregon last week. For more than an hour, workers were instructed to continue working as the man lay dead. One worker wanted to help, but a manager told them to “Just turn around and not look. Let’s get back to work," according to @thewesternedge.bsky.social.