Sweeping science cuts in 2025 halted clinical trials, erased public health data and forced researchers into impossible choices. “This year nearly broke me as a scientist,” one writes. Six researchers share their stories: buff.ly/u2MHIQo 🧪

Magritte's #Art of Conversation

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, America has been teaching China how we would respond in such circumstances.

Talking with a friend, his teenage kids and their friends tonight about career advice and life planning. About 45 minutes in, the conversation veered sharply aside to something they’ve clearly been collectively talking about before our conversation….

My #Flighty passport for 2025.

Time for a little year in review, starting with some from January 2025. Not my best photography year, so hopefully next year will be a better one... These are from a lovely frosty day in Richmond Park.

#Immigrant to America.

Back in the old days, we used to call this a purge. Firing all your senior leaders at NIH? It's a purge. Just call it what it is.

Copperton #utah

You can stream the entire film here:

Today in 1964, Rod Serling’s “Carol for Another Christmas,” one of the most unusual versions of Charles Dickens’ classic story ever shown on television, was broadcast for the first and only time on ABC, the first in a series of programs fully underwritten by Xerox to support the United Nations.

This is an outstanding essay describing some of the important roles and influences of NIH program officers (from an insider perspective). Read! elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/the-quiet-...

“The quiet power of program officers lies not in control, but in care. Care for the science, for the people who conduct it, and for the public it is meant to serve.”

Buttons are back. Knobs are back. Dumb devices are back. Own-it-forever software is back. Print is back. Personal websites and chronological feeds are back. Touching grass is back. People keep saying 2015, but it’s not far enough. The entire 2010s were a mistake. We must retvrn to… 2009.

In researching this piece, I was genuinely shocked and deeply concerned at just how many people with ties to the Brownstone Institute have been given scientific roles by this administration.

This is the "SEA SHEEP" (Costasiella kuroshimae) & it took the old axiom: "you are what you eat" VERY literally. It eats algae & rather than just digest them, it harvests the chloroplasts & becomes PHOTOSYNTHETIC. Solar slug! Also, some of its cousins can rip their own heads off.

So I think that It's a Wonderful Life is one of the great films of American cinema... top ten, certainly. It includes the best performance by the best actor that America has ever produced.

Oh, I identify with this so hard.

Yeah, deleted my post after searching for the news stories behind it. I hate this kind of click bait stuff. And I hate when I get hooked by it. And I hate that people post this stuff without attributing sources. My apologies.

It is important for me to feel proud of the institution that I work for and the people that I work with. How would it feel to know that so many people hate you and the thing that you are doing to others in their communities?

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden or Alice In Chains.

Today, last year. Hilari and I on a walk around Salt Lake City on a rainy Saturday.

Spookily prescient “Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes.” 1/2

More on the continuing purges at #NIH. Now 13 out of 27 institute directors have been gotten rid of. This is not normal. @jonathanwosen.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/12/27/n...

How I'm walking out of 2025

There is something fundamentally different about how the brains of those who support Trump are wired vs. the brains of those of us who are completely repulsed by him and his ilk. Clearly his supporters see something in him that most of the world does not. I've often asked myself what that is...

Lowrider culture was the 1st event in my journey to becoming a gearhead. Visiting my Grandparents in Corona, California, I walked down the street to a park where they had a lowrider car show. The shapes, the passion, the craftsmanship... It was all the kindling that rewired my brain for cars.

Context you rarely hear: global stocks are up about 30% over the past year. U.S. stocks? Around 18%. That means American investors underperformed the world by about 12 percentage points, even while headlines called it a “fantastic year.”

We know that birds can sense magnetic fields for navigation. But how does that work? Do they have little magnets wired up to their brains? The most likely answer is 1000X times weirder than that, and involves quantum spin. Let's talk about 'cryptochromes' & magnetic sensing.🧪

Just to simplify what we think happens: Blue light hits pigments in the retina of migratory birds that become 'little magnets' that respond to magnetic fields as light & dark patterns on their visual field. In gamer terms, it's a 'compass on their HUD', merged in with visual data.

We’re hiring! Join the Sivyer Lab at The University of Sydney as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Neurodegeneration within the Snow Vision Accelerator, a $50M initiative tackling glaucoma and optic nerve disease. iPSCs, electrophysiology, drug discovery, and gene therapy.

Astronomers made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the JWST: A runaway super-massive black hole, rocketing through space at a staggering 1,000 km/s, leaving a 200,000 light-year-long tail in its wake in which gas is accumulating and triggering star formation. 🧪 www.space.com/astronomy/bl...

Interesting… “total victory” was a Nazi concept, (German as Endsieg), a propaganda concept for ultimate triumph, heavily used late in WWII to maintain morale despite defeats. This concept permeated Nazi culture.

Another private equity horror story. I'm still waiting for an example where private equity has made a company or acquisition better for customers or the company.

Yup. I'm telling y'all, these dudes don't know anything.🤡 Frank Sinatra was a vocal anti-racist. He fought racism with his actions, his words, and his money. Actions: Refused to stay at segregated hotels. Made sure Black artists got paid fairly. Words: Literally wrote an article in Ebony Magazine

Can someone please respond to Stephen Miller with this message from Frank Sinatra?

This piece is a great illustration of how the long-term effect of Trump’s destruction of US institutions won’t be felt in a dramatic market collapse, but rather in permanently worse economic conditions, and lower prosperity. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... So long, American exceptionalism

USMC Lt. Col. Eileen Donovan @edna.bsky.social Retirement bryanwjones.com/2025/10/usmc...

December 26, 2025 bryanwjones.com/2025/12/dece...

Make a Bond movie academic Casino Royale: New Agent with 00 status is tasked with securing their first grant. Creates an international incident by gaming the lottery, then creating a new private academic center, subsequently hiring the best talent in the world to fund and chase their research.

Looking at a late 70’s ⁦‪Porsche‬⁩ 911 Targa sitting in between a “small” ⁦‪chevrolet‬⁩ Bolt and a mid-sized ⁦‪Toyota‬⁩ Corolla makes you realize how big automobiles have gotten over the years. The Porsche looks absolutely tiny between them.

Funny what happens when you betray a huge slice of the buying public. No, seriously. They eliminated DEI in their company to appease this administration and then the tariffs from this administration and worsening economic conditions for many people are pushing them to cheaper brands/chains.

In this study, those who got a good night’s sleep in the lab after learning outperformed the group that stayed awake. During NREM sleep, our brains coordinate two brainwave patterns to enhance memory consolidation and help transfer learned info from short-term memory to long-term memory. #LangSky

Happy Science Friday! Here’s what we’re covering today on the show. Listen on your local public radio station, 2-4 p.m. ET. ❄️ ⚛️ 🎸 Learn more here: buff.ly/8Em9q7x

Happy Christmas y’all.

King Herod lived another 4 years then died a miserable death from kidney failure and maggot infested genital gangrene. I have thoughts about the current wannabe king…

RFK: “Where did all this autism come from? It never existed when I was a kid!” “A Christmas Story”, a 1983 movie based on a 1971 memoir about a childhood in the 1930s: “This is my brother Ralphie. He has a ton of sensory issues and behaviors we don’t understand. Every family has a child like him.”

This GT3 Touring 6-speed on @bringatrailer.bsky.social is almost like if I specced it myself... Oh, my: bringatrailer.com/listing/2022...

Oh, cool! @mattbors.bsky.social is here on Bsky. Matt did my cartoon portrait of me a few years ago.