Judge rules OMB can’t retroactively nix grants based on new rules

Sounds familiar - www.wgaeast.org/wgae-scienti...

Stock market, I guess, about to learn how launch delays built into the launch business.

The Mismeasure of Learning Disability: The Contentious Career of the “IQ-Achievement” Discrepancy onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... "... not simply the failure of a flawed metric, but the deeper instability of grounding disability in the measurement of “unexpected” underachievement."

A LOT of major cities getting unhealthy air (purple + red dots) from wildfire smoke this AM including: Toronto, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and to a slightly lesser extent Philadelphia. Our eye-in-the-sky, GOES-19 is down(!) but we still have our ground monitors and TEMPO to guide us.

NEW: Artists, academics, city leaders, civil engineers, congressional lawmakers, doctors, housing experts and more are among the many critics of a White House push to subject $1T in federal grants to political review. In short, they say it would damage public services www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/u...

The purloined planet: Astronomers find a third planet around the nearby very young star Beta Pictoris… and it was hiding in plain sight for over a decade! [with amazing video of the planet's orbital motion] badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-third-pl... 🔭 🧪

This weekends #WorldCup championship between Argentina and Spain reprised the 1816 outcome of the Argentine War of Independence against Ferdinand VII.

Senate committee grills CDC director nominee Erica Schwartz by @lizszabo.bsky.social www.cidrap.umn.edu/public-healt... "We need a CDC director that will actually stand up to crazy, stupid things being said that undermine faith in immunization. Are you the person? "

apparently there's also an e. coli outbreak in frozen blueberries? www.cidrap.umn.edu/e-coli/cdc-c...

A US court case against Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit could reveal who hired hackers to target climate critics of Exxon in 2016. The indictment alleges that a lobbying firm representing Exxon, likely DCI Group, hired Forlit to hack climate activists. 👀

Springer Nature's decision last month to sell Scientific American and lay off staff—in the middle of their union election—is a tragedy for scientific journalism in the U.S.

So I’ve started Pride and Prejudice, and already I feel bad for Mrs Bennet.

The comment count as of Sunday July 11, 2026 1:05pm ET.

The situation with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) website is even worse than I thought. Not only are new registrations not being published, but most of the links to the *old* docs are broken. Except for the versions in Russian; for some reason you can get those ok.

NEJM: The Exam Room as Sanctuary — Caring for Undocumented Patients www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.... “A physician shall support access to medical care for all people.”

The falling away of the feigning of decency is one of the most dramatic changes in American elite culture in the last decade. It's ubiquitous, and explains so much of our collapse, but happily it's not universal.

Reporting on the security problems with Trump's Qatari vanity plane, despite hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded renovations, show "exactly why we need to protect journalists and whistleblowers – without them, we’d never know about this kind of waste and incompetence,” we told @cnn.com

The Chief Economist at Indeed just posted that software development job posting growth is outpacing overall job posting growth:

AIP FYI - NRC Affirms Science Behind Radiation Standards www.aip.org/fyi/nrc-affi... "there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure, and harm, specifically increased cancer risk, is assumed to be directly proportional to the amount of exposure."

One of the most interesting payloads on the recent Transporter 17 launch is BOHR, from Miami-based City Labs. It is a 1U cubesat with a tritium battery. The mildly radioactive tritium (12 yr half life) spits out energetic electrons which hit a semiconductor target. (1/n)

"I'll Be Dammed: Efficiency and Cost-Analysis of a Rehabilitated Prehispanic Dam in the Andes" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... " hydrological and hydraulic analysis and a reservoir filling log of the Prehispanic Weetacocha ‘Lake of Flowers’ Dam, which was rehabilitated in late 2024"

You may have seen an outbreak of news coverage regarding a multi-state outbreak cyclospora-related illnesses (hundreds of cases, in fact). The stories will tell you that we have no idea of the source. Why not? And what do we know? 1/10 (gift article)

Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50% arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/w...

One thing I'm learning as a newly-laid-off science journalist is there are a lot of jobs for political reporters.

"...the recently announced layoffs at Scientific American have elicited shock, dismay, and grief throughout our science writing community." www.nasw.org/July2026soli...

AGAIN? Can we perhaps just dig up all UK car parks? Imagine how many dead royals we'll find ;) www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...

The message here about disincentiving research is a good one. Also think it should be applied to TODAY, not just if proposed OMB rules go into effect. Many people were harmed (even when they won in court) and the “wins” aren’t proportional to the harms. Great reporting by @aniloza.bsky.social

“What U.S. Restrictions on Satellite Imagery Mean for Iran Reporting: U.S. satellite image limitations have hampered journalists covering the Iran war. But other sources are offering workarounds, making it harder for militaries to conceal their actions.” www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/i...

We're headed towards the largest loss of health insurance coverage in US history. Along with millions losing Medicaid, Obamacare private plans are entering a death spiral--reduced federal subsidies pushed people out, and with falling enrollment, prices rise even higher www.wsj.com/health/healt...

J Interesting paper on arxiv today arxiv.org/abs/2607.04216 by Forbes et al (including my friends @astrokiwi.bsky.social and @chrislintott.bsky.social ) about interstellar comets that originally came from here but got perurbed back to us again

UK sanctions Russians developing chemical weapons used to kill Alexei Navalny and Dawn Sturgess www.gov.uk/government/n...

I've worked with Jen on several stories and she's professional, a real pro; plus smart, plus talented, plus a good eye; plus altogether nice to work with. Hire her ASAP before somebody else gets her.

FYI: Science Policy News -- Republican budget chair criticizes OMB grantmaking reforms - www.aip.org/newsletter/0... "requested that OMB remove the 'pre-issuance' review that would allow political appointees the final say on grants"

BREAKING: Eleventh Circuit, on a 2-1 vote, upholds injunction blocking Florida from enforcing its 2022 Stop WOKE Act in the university context. The majority opinion is from Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

America’s employers must stop acting helpless in the face of health care industry profiteering, Chris Deacon says. www.statnews.com/2026/07/07/e...

📅 Join @sciline.org for a free course: "Understanding the Media: A Starter Guide for Scientists" | July 15, 2-3 pm ET This 1-hr course teaches scientists the basics: the news landscape, what makes a story newsworthy & how to talk to reporters. Register: https://bit.ly/4y16hj2

Social media makes the anti science, anti vax crowd seem much larger than it is. Surveys show it’s actually a very small share of the public greatly outnumbered by science believers. My new column: on.kff.org/4wthpni

I know there is, um, other stuff happening right now, but HHS under RFK Jr. has postponed yet another meeting of the US Preventive Services Task Force, while also failing to provide public access to nominees' application materials as promised in a Federal Register notice

Historians Reject White House’s Criticism of Smithsonian Museum www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/a...

NASA just sent an email saying that "due to the heat our equipment is not working as expected" and they are cancelling the coverage of Isaacman et al flying over the National Mall. Hopefully C-SPAN will have it.

100 years ago.

Particle physics faces its next great decision—and its next frontier The scientific case is clear for Europe’s Future Circular Collider, a colossal successor to the Large Hadron Collider. www.scientificamerican.com/article/euro... My last editing piece for Scientific American

My thoughts on the paper about 'Hobbit' capabilities

"A mother who blamed vaccines for the deaths of her toddler twins and joined the anti-vax group’s lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics has been charged with murdering her children." - www.importantcontext.news/p/plaintiff-...

Monticello spent decades working to tell a more full and honest story about Jefferson and slavery. Then the right wing trolls came for them, and the institutional response was…not great. prospect.org/2026/07/02/w...

Happy 4th of July, for my first piece for @commonwealmagazine.org, I looked into whether or not the pandemic contributed to the nation’s rightwing lurch. Does Terror Management Theory, the idea that a repressed fear of death can have political consequences, help explain our current moment?

A strange article in Nature, which appears to lay the blame for falling trust in science at the feet of ... scientists. Without a mention of the years-long assault on expertise by the media and politicians.

It’s so characteristic of the talented and compassionate @laurenjyoung.bsky.social that even in the midst of her loss she’s thinking about and helping secure the future of science journalism. If you have an opportunity to bring Lauren into your newsroom, don’t miss it!