I do appreciate that NYT called a physicist at Emory to ensure that he also had Atlanta credentials in order to ask about Waffle House teleportation

"You call hamburgers 'steamed hams'?" "Yes, it's a regional dialect." "Uh-huh. What region?" "Uh, upstate New York." "Really? Well, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use the phrase 'steamed hams'." "Oh, not in Utica, no, it's an Albany expression." "I see."

We consulted with the writers of The Pitt on this storyline. The scripts don’t always get all the insurance and health policy details right, but I can vouch for the fact that they definitely work hard to understand the nuances. It has to work as a compelling story, too. @robinr.bsky.social

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding go.nature.com/4bZ9k0W

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

We are thrilled to announce the finalists for the 32nd Annual #NIHCMAwards in Health Care Journalism and Policy Research! Join us in congratulating these journalists and researchers and learn more about their work here: bit.ly/NIHCM2026Awa... #NIHCMAwardsJournalism #NIHCMAwardsPolicyResearch

this is pretty fascinating, have to digest more to understand the meaning of the inequality scale

Now available: my hospital cost report (HCRIS) code downloads and processes SNF cost reports, too. I've only tested it a little, so take with a grain of salt and let me know how it works for you! For now, it's a separate branch in the repository here: github.com/asacarny/hos...

Only 23% of government workers believe they “can report a suspected violation of a law, rule, or regulation without experiencing retaliation.” That's way down form the share the prior year (72%) who said they could report suspected illegal activity without fear www.thebulwark.com/p/two-more-g...

Pet peeve: un-self-aware academic junket culture. We spend $2000 to attend conferences where 75% of speakers rail against American inequality, while we splurge on $75 dinners, stay in $300/night hotel rooms, and take a $50 uber ride to avoid a 3-stop subway ride that would cost $2.50.

so much of the time when one of these guys says "i would do ANYTHING for my family" they mean "i fantasize about using violence to defend my family" and not "i'm willing to do some cooking and cleaning and spend time with my partner and kids doing things that interest them"

CERN took some antiprotons on a field trip! apnews.com/article/cern... (HT @matociquala.bsky.social)

This is a great list of techniques for getting real information out of a Google search and avoiding AI slop and paid results. (One thing not included is that if you add "-ai" to a search, you block the AI summary) cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

Antibiotics and the gut microbiome - “Clindamycin, fluoroquinolones and flucloxacillin accounted for most of the associations with the abundance of individual species,” with impact seen 4-8 years after use… www.nature.com/articles/s41... #IDSky

He was a skater frog

I just want to make sure everyone knows Mayo Clinic has a therapy miniature horse named Blue Sky

excellent round up of off target vaccine benefits!

How far can you get in 60 minutes? European cities offer vastly larger areas reachable by public transit than US cities of comparable population size. Source: lconwell.github.io/lucasconwell...

BREAKING NEWS: Baby sea otter achieves record breaking levels of cuteness.

WTF, @economist.com? This piece lists some of the great things GLP-1s might do -there's tantalizing but obviously preliminary evidence! But it's dug in on bad things that *might* happen long-term. Never mentions that folks have taken them for 20 years for diabetes, and safety record is excellent.

this is just devastating 😭

This is awful. Related, I hope universities move quickly to decouple career progression from R01s or expand what constituted an "R01e" Always felt that was a silly model and it's basically unworkable of this continues.

Why am I like this?

science is amazing. my favorite part of this job is how accidentally drowning bees can turn out to be a major discovery because no one noticed something basic before.

Our work in NEJM www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Oh, wow

A year long investigation into the Hyperloop found … “The truth was far simpler, far dumber, and far more prescient: Musk and his lieutenants truly had no idea what they were doing.” washingtonian.com/2026/02/12/h...

this is very grim

During a Sept White House briefing, President Trump raised concerns about #Tylenol use during pregnancy. A sharp change nationwide in how doctors prescribed that medication followed. “The results show just how much political leaders can steer health behavior," Professor @mlbarnett.bsky.social#Tylenolsays.

From @jeremyfaust.bsky.social “Doctors and scientists quickly said the data didn't support the president's claim, but emergency room orders for Tylenol, or acetaminophen, for pregnant patients went down 10% in the months that followed”

What happened after the weird Sept 2025 White House press conference on autism? 📉 Tylenol use in the ED dropped >10% among pregnant patients 📈 leucovorin rx jumped 93% among kids 5-17 immediately afterwards new @thelancet.com today with @jeremyfaust.bsky.social www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

What happened after the weird Sept 2025 White House press conference on autism? 📉 Tylenol use in the ED dropped >10% among pregnant patients 📈 leucovorin rx jumped 93% among kids 5-17 immediately afterwards new @thelancet.com today with @jeremyfaust.bsky.social www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

This RAND report puts the RHTP's inability to offset upcoming Medicaid cuts in grim perspective www.rand.org/pubs/researc...

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country. The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: www.pewresearch.org/...

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.

If you're buying plane tickets to ASHEcon '26, make sure you stay for our session (last of the conference) of 3 RDs studying heuristics, stigma, & guidelines. With @aschwartz.bsky.social, @vinisingh.bsky.social, @dzeltzer.bsky.social, and @mlbarnett.bsky.social! ashecon.confex.com/ashecon/2026...

NEW: I and colleagues reviewed 15,000 documents to illuminate how Jeffrey Epstein used VIP doctors to control and manipulate young women* — and how the doctors helped him, treating his needs as more important than the patients'. Gift link. *see next post in thread

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

Interesting paper on effect of smart phone usage of traffic fatalities. They exploit major album release dates and a RDD design and find that traffic fatalities increase by 10 persons on the day of release of major albums. So, rock music IS dangerous! www.nber.org/papers/w34866

wow

Sure, WSJ. Shame on me for worrying about patient access to care and taxpayer spending over for profit companies. As long as the system works for the wealthy it must be fine with you. Enjoying the comments on the piece, though. Trouble With MedPAC - WSJ share.google/M9VyVAt9V255...

meanwhile, at the MA State House, my colleagues and I made the case for why primary care physicians need to unionize www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/10/b...

I'm at the power plant I'm at the fish disco I'm at the combination power plant fish disco www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Immigrants save Americans' lives: "...a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the US would result in 5,000 fewer deaths nationwide. We identify reduced use of nursing homes as a key mechanism driving this result." www.nber.org/papers/w34791

Major news outlets: Please consider prominently reporting what this all-star team of researchers has found. www.nber.org/papers/w34791

the Epstein files are really devastating because they remind me of how many girls and women miss out on professional opportunities, mentorship and careers because of how many powerful, rich and influential men only view girls and women — and interactions with them — through the lens of sex

Doctors nationwide are seeing patients avoid care amid ICE crackdowns, sometimes with dire consequences. Health providers are now employing pandemic-era tactics to keep care accessible. How immigration policy is changing American health care: www.statnews.com/2026/02/03/i...