Ponderosa pine smells like butterscotch. Go ahead, sniff one the next time you're in the western US. Some say "vanilla", some say "oh no, my nose is covered in sap." Let's talk about birds, butterscotch, forest fires, blue wood, & boring beetles. But mostly this thread is about terpenes.

The @washingtonpost.com story on Tylenol & autism leaves out a MAJOR 2.5M sibling-controlled study of children in Denmark, which "found no evidence that acetaminophen use during pregnancy was associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Wow

Hegseth is now the Secretary of War, which is fitting I guess as RFK jr is basically the Secretary of Pestilence. We just need Famine and Death to round it out.

I had so much of that wrong

A few days ago I learned you can skip the AI summary feature in Google by adding "-AI" to your search. I love it!

this is so wonderfully weird, give her all the golds 🥇

Extremely into this YouTube channel. 13m views! youtu.be/tzLS4O7YaUg?...

This is one of the best ideas I've heard in ages.

Anyways, AIDS is going to be gone soon, this is a generic with FDA full approval.

Already did

Not that facts will get in the way of conspiracy theories, but yet another clear demonstration (in this huge study) that childhood vaccines are NOT associated with autism, ADHD, or nearly 50 other diseases is good to see.

@joshadhd.com the SFB Tool does not seem to be capturing data from our division (Virginia Cavaliers), so ADP can’t be sorted for undrafted only, draft boards under My Team give errors, etc. Not sure if it is a trivial fix, but if it is, it would be much appreciated. Otherwise, no worries. Thanks!

The American Academy of Pediatricians bluntly telling us the current CDC can't be trusted, and of course they are absolutely correct publications.aap.org/aapnews/news...

“It’s a difficult balance. On the one hand, I want Finley to catch measles. On the other, I don’t want him getting peer pressured into a life of correcting my grammar.” “On the third hand, I’m his mother and that makes me an expert in human biology.”

As federal money disappears, these young scientists are anxious about their futures — and that of public health in general. “It took years to be where we are now. and in a hundred days everything was destroyed.”

Michael Caine on Jaws 4: "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

Our updated preprint is live: A Brain Reward Circuit Inhibited by Next-Generation Weight Loss Drugs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We developed humanized mouse models to test oral small-molecule GLP-1RAs, including one likely to hit the market in early 2026.🧪

Wait…is that Donald Sutherland and Gavin MacLeod? Always with them negative waves, Moriarty.

True

The perfect bird feeder doesn't exi--

JAPAN’S OSAKA UNIVERSITY TO ACCEPT 100 US RESEARCHERS – NIKKEI

If you want to see what this means in a state-by-state breakdown by job-loss and lost-monies, this site has got you and yes, the upper Midwest in general suffers disproportionately. www.nafsa.org/policy-and-a...

The great @suzannevega.bsky.social releases “Luka” as a single this weekend in 1987. Upon hearing it, Prince (whom she never met) sent a letter. “‘Luka’ is the most compelling piece of music I’ve heard in a long time,” he wrote. “There are no words 2 tell you all the things I feel when I hear it.”

Many journals have no fees when you publish under a standard (subscription) license. Chemical Senses is one. Please consider sending your quality smell, taste, or chemesthesis research to the official journal of five scientific societies focused on chemosensory science.

Regular smell and taste testing could aid early detection of impairments that negatively impact health, safety, and quality of life, and could also reveal underlying disease. But how do we get there? This new whitepaper is out today:

Exactly

🚨 Preprint alert! 🚨 Can mice estimate the distance to an odour source? New work led by Cristina Marin and colleagues, jointly supervised by @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social at the @crick.ac.uk and myself. Spoiler alert: Yes, they can! Read the paper here: bit.ly/43A9tF9 Short 🧵 below

18 to 10

Very sorry to hear of the untimely death of Jill Sobule. She was a great songwriter, an incredibly engaging performer, a radical activist who dealt with the music industry on her own terms and a lot of fun to work with. Here's the encore we played on our 2004 tour www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwMY...

Here is the link to the Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about RFK, Jr, public health, and HHS (including NIH) www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H34...

And now for Smokey Robinson in what I have identified as the high point of American culture: his U Really Got A Hold of Me on Sesame Street. I cannot overstate: this is our finest 3 minutes.

P.S.: If you cannot get enough of this, stop by at our poster at AChemS 2025 on Thursday morning.

Olfactory neuroscientists have known for a while that their stimuli stink. A new analysis illuminates the extent of the problem. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sm...

So many Steely Dan songs…so hard to choose just one….

Absolutely insane and anti-scientific. Leaving aside the facts that people are still getting COVID, dying from COVID, and/or living with long COVID, ending this research will have us less prepared when the next novel coronavirus jumps from animals to humans.

The folks downing hazy IPAs in the airport bar at 7 am *chef’s kiss*

A reminder that artists may be best known for a particular genre or medium but still accomplished in the their broader field. Picasso was a talented painter in styles apart from Cubism, and was also a tremendous sculptor. It shouldn’t be surprising that @flavorflav.bsky.social is quite the musician.

So, I guess @washingtonpost.com has gone all in for Trump propaganda, just parroting the party line that the pain will be brief but will usher in a “Golden Age.” Not regretting canceling my subscription for this dead newspaper walking.

It took since 1887 to build up the greatest biomedical research apparatus in the world. It’ll take a few ignorant dickheads a few months to tear its heart out.

Definitely worth the read. It clearly explains why tax avoidance is so important to the ultra wealthy.

ATTENTION: TALENT AVAILABLE It appears that termination of SROs from institute review branches at NIH is underway (or worse). There are also program officers and SROs who have been terminated over the past month. IF YOU HAVE POSITIONS FOR SKILLED SCIENTIST-ADMINISTRATORS, PLEASE POST INFO HERE

Another update: Notices for *30* more study section meetings coming tomorrow (Thursday). That's 50 so far this week. I think we can safely conclude that NIH is restarting a significant portion of these meetings. Next questions: are specific study sections still on hold? If so, which ones and why?

It’s good to see more notices appearing on the federal register to announce upcoming NIH study section meetings (mostly scheduled for April).

It looks like at least some NIH study sections are getting posted to the federal register as of today: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Per a source at NIH, deputy director of extramural research Liza Bundesen has announced her resignation. That comes just weeks after the director, Michael Lauer, announced an abrupt retirement.

1. UPDATE The NIH is still blocking most ongoing scientific funding over concerns about DEI, according to NIH sources and internal NIH correspondence. The freeze has continued even after top NIH officials acknowledged that continuing to block the funding would violate a federal court order.

What a fun conversation with Daniel and Kelly! And it has the added benefit that you don’t have to watch me…you can just listen to the pod as we talk about the chemical senses.

This is happening everywhere, officially and unofficially.

RFK Jr. thinks that a clinical trial should be done for the entire childhood vaccine schedule. Here’s why that will never happen. 1. You can’t do a randomized trial of something that we already know is safe and effective. There would have to be a placebo group that didn’t get vaxxed. Unethical.