Good piece. I was there, giving a talk & on a panel. I went in deeply skeptical, came out no less skeptical, but it was fun & stimulating, even when a bit wacky. I wouldn't invest a penny in any of it & would be reluctant to put (much) public money into most of it, but I did enjoy my four hrs there.

Converting to Catholicism so I can tell my bosses using unregulated AI is against my religion and I will sue them like that cake lady who hated gay people if they make me use it

Footage from secret NATO military facilities inside garages in Bila Tserkva. www.instagram.com/reel/DYwl5Vg...

Just finished very interesting & educational book, Joshua D Mezrich, Every Living Creature: How Xenotransplantation Will Change Our Lives (MIT Press 2025). Lots of science, medical history, & people (notably Geo Church & Martine Rothblatt). Enjoyed it greatly—& it convinced me xeno WILL work. Likely

THE POPE IS QUOTING GANDALF!!!

Spoiler alert: it wasn't. 'Shinya Yamanaka didn’t want to get ahead of himself the first time he looked at induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) through a microscope. “Don’t be excited,” he told his colleague Kazutoshi Takahashi. “There’s a 99.9% chance this is a mistake,” said Yamanaka'

We already have created artificial entities that act in the world - corporations. Making sure these are aligned to our shared values is the first step towards ensuring their products will be.

Just finished very interesting & educational book, Joshua D Mezrich, Every Living Creature: How Xenotransplantation Will Change Our Lives (MIT Press 2025). Lots of science, medical history, & people (notably Geo Church & Martine Rothblatt). Enjoyed it greatly—& it convinced me xeno WILL work. Likely

Weekly #regenerative medicine reads: odd FDA PRP warning, H3.3 & CTCF in pediatric glioma, Iowa AG gets $2.5M on stem cell clinic, Colossal Biosciences PR ipscell.com/2026/05/week... #stemcells

🚨 NO EVIDENCE that any of this tech-bro longevity BS will improve your health or increase your lifespan. It ain't a revolution. It is a GRIFT. 👎 Ignore. Ignore. Ignore. Tech billionaires used performance drugs in secret. Now they’re selling a revolution. wapo.st/4dFAdrB

Meanwhile, Ukrainian boxer Usyk just dropped Verhoeven in round 11. His first words after the fight: "Ukraine is being bombed right now. My family is texting 'I love you' from a shelter."

As a science fiction writer I really fucking resent tech bros for ruining the phrase "artificial intelligence." 80 years of it being all about cool androids and interesting computers destroyed by five years of "Spicy autocorrect making everything shittier for money." NEVER FORGIVE.

A patient with type 1 diabetes has begun producing his own insulin after receiving a transplant of pancreatic cells. For the first time, islet cells have been edited so they wouldn't be rejected by the patient, removing the need for immunosuppressant drugs. www.sciencealert.com/first-of-its...

Reptiles with longer Wikipedia pages tend to be bigger. The relationship is a power law with exponent = 0.85. I guess humans really like writing about big lizards? The longest article is the Komodo Dragon.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell (of course).

Trump's vengeance attack in GOP primaries may have a similar effect, freeing Massie in the House and Cassidy in the Senate (and maybe Cornyn) to vote against him for the rest of this Congress.

CFP: Ninth Junior Faculty Forum on Law and STEM

Agree on everything except "astonishingly." Not astonishingly evil and cruel from this Administration.

From @washingtonpost.com: "After the 2024 presidential election, baby naming data site Nameberry published an analysis of the most common names in the reddest and bluest states. It found, perhaps counterintuitively, that blue states...leaned socially conservative in naming conventions.

A deep irony. Books about fascist repression are now repressed by fascists.

It almost feels like the Trump administration is intentionally breaking the FDA, writes Lab Dish columnist Paul Knoepfler. www.statnews.com/2026/05/21/f...

Oh, and more from NOTUS. "U.S. Citizen & Immigration Services announced a bombshell new policy today that people on nonimmigrant visas—like students, temporary workers & tourists — who want to apply for green cards must return to their home countries to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances.

"Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned today, citing her husband’s battle with bone cancer. Four Cabinet members — all of whom are women — have departed in the last three months." From NOTUS. None of the departures is a loss but it is...noteworthy?...that all of them are women.

Here's a link the Science article this one quotes from. www.science.org/content/arti... The only possible saving grace is that it is both confused and being kept quiet. Maybe it won't be implemented, ultimately. Tho given this Administration's stupidity & malignity, it probably will be.

Decades in, still NO evidence this kind of genetic "personalization" and data monitoring has any benefit for healthy individuals. SAME pitch. Still hype. 23andMe offers to connect users’ DNA data with medical records www.statnews.com/2026/05/19/2... by @matthewherper.bsky.social via @statnews.com

Congratulations to the 2026 cohort of Knight-Hennessy Scholars! The 87 students (18 law students) in the newest cohort have citizenship in 31 countries and will pursue degrees in 45 graduate programs across all seven of Stanford’s graduate schools.

Former DOJ officials Liz Oyer, Greg Rosen, and Stacey Young discuss duty, independence, and ethics—and the questions government lawyers face: when to stay, when to leave, and when to speak out. Listen to the latest episode of Stanford Legal:

Yes, expect hype. But there is an important accomplishment here, if well short of a giant moa in size.

"Mr Trump proposed increasing America’s refugee cap from 7,500 to 17,500 in order to admit 10,000 additional white South Africans...Refugees from most other countries remain in effect barred from entering America." THE world's most oppressed people? Only surprised that this stays, post Trump/Musk.

When a federal agency tasked with protecting all Americans decides to mandate a specific religious worldview, it ceases to protect democracy and begins to threaten it.

every time “birth rates” come up in the discourse eventually someone remembers its because teenagers arent really getting pregnant anymore and then we all go “oh yea” until we forget again a few weeks later and start all over again

Kids, amirite (via @wlos-13.bsky.social on Instagram)

"a PRS is not an internal predisposition waiting to be realized; it is a risk estimate derived from a model constructed from population-level DNA associations without clearly defined biological mechanisms."

That’s what happens when you destroy the greatest research infrastructure in the world & promote pseudoscience. An unfun fact: The US now has no confirmed CDC director, no FDA commissioner, no Surgeon General. Our NIH director is a laptop MD. China is spending more on R&D than we are. 🧪

"In the morning, I want them up there on the south ridge working on those condensers [aka moisture vaporators]." Uncle Owen. Cool, though the implications of wide adoption could be striking. Water taken out of the air here doesn't precipitate (or provide humidity) down wind. Law & politics?

A great phrase describing how predatory wellness industry claims are made: “unfalsifiable wellness language” We’re back in the patent medicines era of over a century ago, the era that brought us snake oil.

ICYMI: debate over future of #CRISPR baby applications in people. Cathy Tie v. Glenn Cohen heritable human gene editing ipscell.com/2026/05/pers...

If you know one thing about Achilles and Patroclus, you know this.

Apparently some more gutter dwellers are weighing in with anger about Achilles being bisexual in the Nolan Odyssey or something and look I'm no scholar of Greek history but I have Seen Some Things on ancient Greek pottery in museums that make me think it's not a stretch.

Interesting local news: Santa Clara University, w/Sutter Health, is opening a new medical school, the 1st new one in the Bay Area in > 100 yrs (UCSF?). www.scu.edu/news-and-eve... Kaiser opened a med school in SoCal a few yrs ago. Is it a trend? (BTW, I hadn't realized Gov Newsome was an SCU grad)

I think the best way to enjoy this list, which contains lots of predictable choices (made as it was by committee), is to find a book you like, click to see who voted for it, and then look at the voters' other top 10 choices. You might find something else you like that you haven't read.

Sounds rather earnest put that way, but books don't have to be gorgeously written or exquisitely characterized to tap into something deep. (They can even be fun to read!) I've watched with amusement Ballard go from genre to canon as the literary world realised this.

In The Modern Myths I argue that there's a "mythic mode" of writing that is not "literary" in the conventional sense but of no less artistic and cultural value. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

FDA in crisis. Commissioner Makary is out, CBER acting director is out (after Prasad left a few weeks ago), CDER director Hoeg is leaving... What the heck? www.statnews.com/2026/05/15/f...

The acting director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug center, Tracy Beth Høeg, is leaving the agency. www.statnews.com/2026/05/15/f...

Kilauea again. Fairly low (so far) fountaining. Looks best currently in webcam #1. www.youtube.com/@usgs/streams It started about 25 minutes ago.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth said that the school’s research enterprise has shrunk 10 percent from a year ago and warned of a persistent drop in graduate admissions as the university grapples with federal funding challenges and policy changes. www.statnews.com/2026/05/14/m...

With great sadness, I must announce that the time of the meme has come again.

About 40,000 dollars. Per capital household income in Russia supposedly is about 10,500 dollars. With all extra money, the model could buy new teeth.

Turns out breaking things is quite easy. And that's something this Administration IS good at.