Nicolás Maduro Charged With Felony Oil Possession

Yay! Dr. Tanya Atwater finally getting public credit for her (very big) role in the plate tectonics revolution.

Think you need large volumes for microbial experiments? Our recent publication introduces HiMEx, a simple, scalable method for microbial ecology. academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a... 🦠 it provides an easy, efficient approach to capturing viral diversity, opening new opportunities for virome analysis.

Book review 📚 These women helped to shape quantum mechanics — it’s time to recognize them go.nature.com/3Ls2yYu

Proud to announce SimPhyNI, a new tool for bacterial GWAS with higher precision and scalability than existing tools. Try it out and let us know what you think!!

A perfect encapsulation of the “male loneliness crisis”

Happy New Years All! I am so excited to share the very first preprint from my lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... - from @lydiaruggles.bsky.social's thesis-also my first student 😊. tldr: Only bacteria collected during a Pyrodinium bloom rescued Pyro from B12 limitation #microbialsky #microsky 🦠🧪🧬🌊

Looking for reading recommendations. I mostly read fantasy. I need protagonists that don’t make stupid choices, and aren’t the chosen one. I like all of T Kingfisher’s fantasy, and Bujold’s _Curse of Chalion_ etc., and Robert Jackson Bennett’s Ana & Din books, and all of Martha Wells…

It’s 1990, I’m 1 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state It’s 2004, I’m 15 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state It’s 2026, I’m 37 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state

for what it's worth it can be both true that the US has always been like this AND we're absolutely reaching astounding all new heights of straight up violent stupidity the likes of which completely blow away how already very disastrous we've always been. it can be unsurprising and surprisingly worse

Laura Tingle with a bit of Australian understatement: “It’s not really legal to nick someone else’s head of state.”

You let the devil in, he brought his pirate friends, they brought a hunger for blood and flesh and bone and skin

I think we need to be able to balance the reactions "this is another expression of 250 years of American imperialism" and "what do you MEAN we kidnapped the president of Venezuela and renditioned him to the US and are now claiming to run the country" Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

It’s not about drugs. If it was, Trump wouldn’t have pardoned one of the largest narco traffickers in the world last month. It’s about oil and regime change. And they need a trial now to pretend that it isn’t. Especially to distract from his sinking under Epstein and skyrocketing healthcare costs.

"revision requests can expand beyond what is feasible...we've been told reviews are unnecessarily harsh... reviews can seem formidable but usually represent constructive critiques" Interesting reflections and introspection from editors of Development 1/n journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

"hard to measure social and economic impacts of making papers and data free...little strong evidence of long-lasting and widespread effects [but] indicators remain to be fully developed" www.science.org/content/arti...

"I don’t know why my fellowship was terminated. I suspect that it has something to do with studying a species that doesn’t fit the binary of what we expect to see in nature, with completely different males and females." @carlzimmer.com profiles my wonderful coauthor @jjinsing.bsky.social Gift link.

Brenna is a great colleague of mine. Sad to read.

I just started this book by @stephanieburgis.bsky.social and got to the library section and am now hooked. See you tomorrow.

good piece with an incidental insanely brutal takedown of klein

"the most humiliating display of literate obliviousness in the face of the total collapse of meaning...was Ezra Klein’s bizarre eulogy to Charlie Kirk. The now-infamous column ('Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way') can best be understood as an expression of class solidarity."

And so on the last day of 2025, UC Davis overran its institutional Google Drive storage. And there was much lamentation, for no one could edit any documents.

Nothing prepares you for how rapidly you accelerate between these three states #chemchat

An essential development over the past decade-plus is that the ignorant went from feeling chastened when their ignorance was revealed to banding together and deciding that, actually, they were right. They might disagree at times, but they agreed that ignorance itself was an indicator of trust.

One of the failure points we see continuously is that to a lot of people, reasonable sounding text feels miraculous enough to seem like a stand in for “intelligence”, so they re define intelligence to suit their awe of LLM output.

Hans Bethe, the scientist who worked in both the Manhattan Project & USA H-bomb programs, wrote in 1983 a 40 page history called "The Story of Los Alamos." It seems not to be publicly available online except where I have made it so, free for all: osf.io/thjpk #NukeSKY 1/n

I'm in!

Looking into industry bioinformatics / comp bio / data science careers. If you have any leads, message me! CV is in bio. Currently a postdoc data scientist at @mdanderson.bsky.social, have published work in both wet + dry lab multi-omics of non-model organisms & humans. 🧪🧬🖥️

This is the logical and inevitable conclusion of the last decade of elite media "free speech" discourse.

This is perfect. The DOJ's embarrassing snafu with disappearing redactions was the fault of Elon Musk. Musk cancelled government subscriptions to Adobe programs that would have made the redactions permanent. What a pack of fools.

"I can't believe a third-party did it better than Bsky" is the wrong take bc that's the whole point of Bsky and ATProto. More of this. Build better than what's been built.

I wish this were true. I really do. But it's not. In March of this year, 52% of white Americans approved of Trump's approach to "handling immigration." In December of this year, 53% of white Americans approved of Trump's approach to "handling immigration." Trump's base still loves the cruelty.

The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Social science research can help us to understand why doubt and disinformation find a landing strip in some communities. Community-level research and interventions will not alone overcome the political economy of disinformation and doubt fueling these trends. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/o...

Must say, while interviews with established PIs with deep cuts to their funding are important, the principal and longest term effects are on the trainees. An entire generation wiped of confidence.

There's an audio recording of him, not an aide, asking for votes to swing a state in a Presidential election and that wasn't enough to get him locked up or even keep him from the White House

It’s really strange the vice president of the United States is a white supremacist, who says white supremacist slogans, who publicly praises and follows the work of white supremacists, and it’s simply not mentioned or discussed in political media

Great student reporting on why the Harvard Salient, revived to combat what leaders saw as a decline in “contrarian” thought, was abruptly closed earlier this year. (Hint: It was racism). www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Quanta is a fantastic publication

Quanta does some of the best science journalism on math that, as far as I can tell, no one else really does. Truly just trying to make modern advances easier to understand for those without a PhD.

I have a bachelors and masters in math and Quanta's math coverage is phenomenal

Haven't posted this on here yet

A first for both of us, @alicemeadows.bsky.social! 🎉 In it, I talk about how ORCID is making it possible to share other types of research outputs relevant to the arts and humanities scholars (like musical compositions, imagery and film, and teaching materials.) info.orcid.org/new-work-typ...

Also, the fact that City Journal doesn't present this "conversation" critically at all — not a hint of criticism, let alone shock, in showing young conservatives who voice a love of Hitler and a host of racist and authoritarian views — tells you everything.

one of our biggest problems is we spent decades coddling straight white male conservatives. we took their dumb as fuck ideas seriously, even though history, logic and science showed theyre completely unworkable. and now we're stuck with a bunch of dumbasses who have been coddled for too long

There are no shortcuts to affordability. stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/there-are-... My new piece argues that the challenge for policymakers now is to support stable, sustainable growth. No quick fixes or gimmicks. We need “some years” of good policy.