I helped Travis with some moonlight calcs for this paper - our code figures out "how bright compared to moonlight is this light for each species". There is a ton of photometrics and spatial modeling here too: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

When the cold fronts come farther south, I search for the latest in polar vortex research. This time: www.npr.org/2026/01/23/n...

They try to help teens by pulling out the 10% worst of social media… while leaving the five hours a day of not sleeping or socializing, as if that stuff doesn’t matter.

Some notes on "blue light harms mitochondria" making the rounds this week - a lot of the evidence is VERY indirect like this paper that says mice in blue light gain weight. 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Facial age estimation requires a 5-7 year margin of safety in validation studies, so when the software says you're 23-25 you can be considered 18. Errors are even larger around age 13, so basically useless for distinguishing minors from adults.

We proposed a new metric (mDFD) for blue-blocking glasses. It's based on the sensitivity of melanopsin, log-transformed to resemble optical density: tvst.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

This is the big one: Kennedy is firing the entire #ACIP in a move he says is needed to restore confidence in vaccines. "It scares me to think of what’s ahead,” Mike Osterholm of CIDRAP told me. www.statnews.com/2025/06/09/r...

It's troubling that LLMs do not represent probability distributions *at all* - if you ask a question that should have a normal distribution, it will pick almost the same number every time. Maybe it's the mean, who knows - but it isn't equipped to reason about human populations this way.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

It would be cool if AIs only ran on solar because then they’d have circadian rhythm.

Astonishing technical feat here, laser projector that tracks eye movements and stimulates cone cells by kind! In just a few milliseconds of latency.

Just received word that ANSI has approved our "flicker" TM, (ANSI/IES TM-39-25), which addresses in delightful detail how flickering lights of all kinds affect people. Congrats to everyone involved with the IES Vision Science Committee.

Same concern as this post: PurpleAir (highly rated by AQMD) and IQAir are reporting 500% the AQI of the single reference sensor. This is the "reference" sensor used by everyone near the Palisades fire, and surely it should not be.

Great article on wildfire smoke, particulates, and VOCs, and how to deal with it: scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/susta...

If you’re in an area affected by fires, turning up your car’s fan helps with air quality - cabin air filters are pretty decent.

Friend called me "we've been evacuated from the fires but can't see our security cameras" - tried @tailscale.com on a pi for the first time and they had a VPN in 20 minutes later. Thanks for the free version!

There should be a privacy panel of regular people who can go deep on privacy-related defaults and explain it. If 90% of them vote yes, you can turn it on by default. e.g., this is pretty defensible IMO (but not obvious why at first glance): www.theverge.com/2024/12/29/2...

First thought today: that someone would inspect my brain someday, and they would be surprised to find it has a lower-brain bootstrap sequence that can make espresso before the rest of it is awake.

The latest on Oura, Fitbit, Apple sleep stages vs PSG! ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc...

Read our new preprint on photic sneezing.

Great review [two labs] on current knowledge about LCA (longitudinal chromatic aberration) - LCA for accommodation: if the retinal image has blue fringes where it's out of focus, you should focus closer - Does LCA it have a big role in myopia? Maybe! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Reading this study by Danielle Wallace about daily light exposure - men see 50% more (!) bright light (time outdoors) than women. Most of the difference is due to workday (men in blue-collar trades), but some is due to free time. If it's only certain worker populations, may not be true for everyone.

A trouble with pure chronological feed is the person you really like to hear from, but who posts 100 times in a row.

LED Christmas lights have tons of flicker (half-rectified=off half the time). Looking for flicker-free Christmas lights on Google makes you think flicker doesn’t exist, or it is the special mode where the lights blink. You have to search “full rectified” or “DC” to find good ones now?

#1 dictionary search in Wyoming is "chronobiology"? 🤷 www.reddit.com/r/Infographi...

This is the best social network ever

Feeling lucky so many scientists are here, helps me avoid reactive news. As they say in finance, volatility is not return. And online, outrage is not progress.