my festive spirit amidst our grimly stupid reality (2025)

My Xmas present to you – a recording of a talk given by Crick to a public audience in Canada about the genetic code in 1966: tinyurl.com/Crick1966 Listen to it while you are peeling the sprouts, walking the dog, or whatever. Here's the context from my biography:

Episode 39 of the current Kilauea eruption has started. Currently the live web cams are showing some great, nighttime lava fountaining! www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXKu... and www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk0t... Lately these episodes have been lasting a day or less; check it out while you can!

Alex Abramovich did a beautiful job on this profile of Willie Nelson--and then had the good wisdom and humility to defer to Dylan to capture it far better than any longform writer could (or, more to the point, convey why it can't be captured), in a single paragraph. Glimmers of light in dark times.

TL;DR my thread on the Trump v Illinois. 6 JJ S Ct majority denies a stay of the lower ct order preventing federalization of Nat Guard troops for Chicago. 5 justices say he has asserted any ground for use of regular military, wh/the statute requires for federalization. Kavanagh concurs narrowly.

Sup Ct finally rules v Trump in shadow docket case (2nd of 20?): 6JJ per curium finds no authority to federalize Nat Guard for Chicago www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p... Alito, w/Thomas, dissenting, www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p... and Gorsuch dissenting, www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

"hard" pass.

“That one we think has great potential because injecting gene therapy into the penis sounds exciting,” says Leshko. Exciting to whom?!

@jesshamzelou.bsky.social in @techreviewjp.bsky.social on (off shore, mainly in Honduras) companies offering gene therapy for lots of things. Good (critical) comments from Holly Fernandez-Lynch. I wouldn't want anyone I cared about to try these w/o good proof www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/22/1...

Agree. Strange, almost mystical piece. I read it in Sept 2023. It has roots in Clarke's earlier massive Hugo winner, Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell, but not very clear roots—the earlier book won't help you (much?) with the much shorter & more entrancing, Piranesi. It is..Fascinating? Haunting?

From @science.org Breakthrough of the Year: Solar Energy

The headline is bad but illustrating with what is clearly a human, not mouse, brain makes it even worse. It does have the word "mouse" in the first paragraph, but in its last sentence & barely—"This research utilizes advanced imaging techniques in mice to track these developmental changes over time"

I feel seen.

Probably EVERYONE entering US brings in trillions of E coli, of varied types, in their guts, may some dangerous at high concentration. Illegal imports? Reminds me of China and India prohibiting export of human DNA, w/o thinking about the DNA their diaspora has spread around the world for centuries.

Good coverage in the @economist.com about the investigation of Denisovan ancestry and possible connections to the Yunxian Homo erectus group. (paywall) www.economist.com/science-and-...

The year is 2056, and the city of San Francisco is voting for the 30th time on whether to reopen the Great Highway to cars

"The carbonara so vigorously defended by Italians is no ancestral dish: the first known recipe was printed in 1952—in Chicago. Only in the 1990s did the current “canonical” version take root" I had read it was new but that it dated to WW II & feeding US troops. www.economist.com/europe/2025/...

But I would agree most people (with one or two high profile exceptions perhaps :)) don't think the story of human evolution is going to be about a handful of special genes.

Well, gene X might still be important in some contexts, which may have been more relevant 100k years ago. This study just concerns single-base protein altering variants. There's a lot more to genetic variation even when just talking about a single gene.

All excellent points. This does, however, cast doubt on a different set of high profile studies that claim that gene X is the key to differences between modern humans and our relatives...

However these findings absolutely do not cast doubt on the centrality of genetic variation either for evolutionary change or indeed for phenotypic differences between humans today. Some commentators seem to be confused about this.

This kind of variation is a tiny fraction of total genetic variation, and while I think it has long been clear that evolutionary differences are not so straightforward, it is good to see further evidence. Caveat also that the UKB, while valuable, is a relatively limited sample of modern humans.

This headline is wrong and misleading, and the brief text below it is not much better. Whatever might constitute a full explanation of the differences between sapiens and other hominins, we remain confident that 'genes' will be central to it. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Trump's name now on facade of the Kennedy Center. Lawyer question. Assume the statute involved clearly says no names other than JFK's can be added. Does anyone have standing to sue? Concrete injury in fact, caused by def's actions, redressable in court. 2 & 3 check, but #1? Is there ANY recourse?

Hell yeah: @science.org's official Breakthrough of the Year for 2025 is ... [drumroll] ... ... the unstoppable rise & spread of renewable energy.

Excellent Eleanor Olcott story in Financial Times on He Jiankui. www.ft.com/content/1399... Fascinating to see her take on him, and his future. (Conflict of Interest warning: I make a cameo appearance, inspiring an expletive deleted).

You go, Tim! ; ) Oh, and what about Viagra, Cialis, etc.?

So, to be clear, MAHA / MAGA, this includes manosphere manly-man supplements, testosterone, steroids, etc? In major effort to end gender-affirming care, Trump administration takes aim at hospitals www.statnews.com/2025/12/18/t... via @statnews

Nice discussion of measles & vaccination, including the natural experiment we're about to see of how long immunity will last for the more than 25 million Americans over 75 (not me, quite) who got measles 60+ years ago (me). W/herd immunity, not so scary; w/o it? www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

I'm a big college sports fan but this is crazy. Bill Belichick, UNC's football coach, is making at least $10m/yr. Now, that's not (much) UNC's fault, but college football's overall. Schools are paying about $250 million on head football coach buyouts (!) this year. 125 FBS schools, average $2m each.

All the centers they’re cutting add up to less than $7 million in spending. UNC athletics budget is $185.4 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

The right answer for marijuana is to legalize and regulate. Instead, we’re going to keep the ridiculous Wild West patchwork gray market we have now for THC (worse w/the new restricted definition of hemp) & both subsidize *and* underregulate CBD, assimilating it to pro-supplement woo.

I guess it is good that men more aware of their role? But SO MUCH GRIFTING BS in this manosphere adjacent space (🚩supplement marketing red flag!! 🚩). Men are convinced we’re facing a male-fertility crisis, they’ll try just about anything to boost their sperm count. www.thecut.com/article/men-...

NBC News: ‘Whooping cough cases soar as vaccination rates drop: In an NBC News data investigation of 31 states, about 70% of counties and jurisdictions fell below the target vaccination rate needed for community protection.’ www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-...

I'm in Ancestry.com for family history. I just got notice of a "new trait," my dominant foot "Dominant foot is at least 1% genetic At most 99% environmental We compared your DNA to the DNA of more than 860k people who answered the question “Wh/is your dominant foot?" Seems honest but 1%? Why care?

Congrats to @joannagrossman.bsky.social and @professormutch.bsky.social for winning the American Ass'n of Law School's Rhode Award. The award is named after my late colleague, classmate, racquet sports partner & friend. I know she'd be very happy about these selections! lens.aals.org/article/four...

Just finished Crick, by @matthewcobb.bsky.social. Wonderful book. The only downside is that it made me sorry I never knew him. I particularly appreciated Cobb's discussion of Crick's influence on neuroscience. (I listened to it; excellent narrator, too, tho a few of the US accents seemed a bit off)

The Trump regime wants to dismantle a world leading climate research center. Why? Because the US has become a petrostate where the government has been captured by fossil fuel interests. They’re calling climate science “green new scam research”, in full denial of reality. 🤯

Not just true in science. I'm never sure (well, close to sure) of what I think until I've successfully written it down. (Or written it up...a phrase with 1 meaning but 2 apparently inconsistent forms).

Glad to have had a chance to contribute to this project with a short essay: "Make Replication Data Available in a Publicly Accessible Archive"

A sober and sobering analysis of the National Security Strategy "plan" from the excellent @anneapplebaum.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"“I have to giggle,” says Jim Chanos, asked if investors have become overly optimistic about artificial intelligence. “We’ve got to the ‘data-centres-in-space’ stage of the cycle. There are very smart people writing about why that’s completely plausible.”" +++ www.economist.com/finance-and-...

Air-Borne by @carlzimmer.com was entertaining, deeply researched, but also eye-opening in revealing how dogmas can become entrenched in science without anyone going back to check how they started. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Stanford Law School Professor Jud Campbell, JD ’11, has been named the winner of Stanford Law School’s 2025 Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching. law.stanford.edu/press/stanfo...

My quote of the day In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. Stephen Jay Gould

Deeply predictable. So on-brand. Still maddening. RFK Jr & his anti-science crew plan to: 1) Lessen labelling requirement for grifters pushing bunk & unproven supplements 2) Put warning labels on highly studied, effective, safe & monitored COVID vaccines Holy mental gymnastics, Batman!

data from the CDC website on measles cases. 2025 has the most cases since 1992...I guess this is what making America healthy again means? just so....unbelievably....stupid.

Another example I hadn't known about two countries divided by a common language (probably but not definitively Shaw). I wonder how often I've misunderstood the meaning of a "homely cottage" in an English work.