RIP Wally Funk (1939-2026), one of the Mercury 13 (which inspired For All Mankind) Also: "In July 2021. Funk became the oldest woman to travel to space at the age of 82. During the 11-minute flight, Funk experienced a few moments of weightlessness and marveled at the darkness of space."

A book I wrote the foreword for is shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize! Go read HIDDEN GUESTS! It's amazing. Congrats to Lise Barnéoud!

The peach tree we planted in our front yard is finally bearing fruit that isn't tiny and hard.

Women from minority backgrounds in the UK are less likely to receive epidurals than white women www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Nonfiction authors need your love! So do independent bookstores. Am*zon does not. Enjoy the Anti-Prime Day sale on @bookshop.org with my many recommendation lists of nonfiction related to science and women. bookshop.org/shop/oliviac...

What!? No!

Americans have become unusually fixated on the peacefulness of protests. I would never condone or endorse hurting people, but we seem to have forgotten that historically, protests were violent and very effective.

Goooooood evening and happy Sunday! The out of pocket cost of the birth of my son, after “good” insurance, after meeting my deductible (despite a wicked pregnancy, everyone was healthy) was OVER TEN THOUSAND US DOLLARS. And then I went back to work still bleeding. So I don’t think it’s the phones.

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

"I did what any rational journalism-averse person would do. I blamed everything on woke. On cancel. On not listening enough to diverse voices, like fascists. I forged ahead to build a new media empire, one built on complete editorial independence and millions of dollars from venture capitalists"

Just bought! And a nice excuse to finally download the Bookshop app.

Total steal on my ebook. Snag at Bookshop or on Kindle. #history #nonfiction #authorsofinstagram #womenshistorymonth

Total steal on my ebook. Snag at Bookshop or on Kindle. #history #nonfiction #authorsofinstagram #womenshistorymonth

Musk functionally ran the US government for 6 months last year and managed to: increase spending, slash services, kill 100,000s, and help nurture both Ebola & Screwworms. Yet somehow no one mentions this when they talk about the company he is going to take public this week.

Realizing that before I commit to providing a blurb, I'll now need an assertion that AI was not used in the writing of the book.

I mean, this is how our society as a whole has always operated. Women are taught to tie themselves in knots altering their behavior in hopes of preventing their own assault and abuse; men are rarely told to stop being abusive.

I wrote about the hugging female skeletons defector.com/and-they-wer...

The way we're killing the planet means we kinda have to reduce the future population, no?

Join the Center for Canon Expansion and Change for the public talk, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman" by Andrew Janiak (Duke). Tues 2 June, 1800-2030, at Open Book, Minneapolis, MN. Register via QR code in image or link: buff.ly/BscH3vV buff.ly/7rsXZoI

Vital thread for historians, other researchers who use digitized historical archives, and teachers. AI is altering docs via transcript and summary, and it’s radically changing them in dangerous ways:

"Can you explain this gap in your resume?" Me:

me, buying a book written by someone who I've never met but we sometimes like each other's posts on Bluesky: my friend wrote this

Thank you to @sciam.bsky.social for letting me dig into the protein enhancement fad. 1. If you are an elite athlete, OR elderly/frail, maybe you do need extra protein. 2. That's not you. You're not an elite athlete. 3. If it is you: consider yogurt. www.scientificamerican.com/article/prot...

Still laughing about this.

As I said here. Students are not the menace. Profiteers and opportunists are. bsky.app/profile/sonj...

Researcher, author, thinker friends: it's the annual 50% off sale at @princetonupress.bsky.social -- now's the time to hit go on your cart. Here's what I decided to snap up. Tons of cool science, history, and philosophy books to be had.

With her new book Arachnomania, Maria Tatar offers up an anthem to the humble creatures that haunt our imaginations, reminding us of just how much we are the kindred spirits of the arachnids we should think of as “some spiders.” 🕷️ Out May 19 (14 July UK pub): press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Pregnancy is the most dangerous time in your life for, like, every reason you can think of.

Less than 800 NSF grants awarded over the first half of the fiscal year for the entire country. Previous years were already over 2-3k awards by now. It is not particularly overdramatic to say we are seeing the death of federally funded science research in the United States.

“Oversimplification is a major hallmark of pseudoscience. Where real scientists see complexity & uncertainty, pseudoscientists claim unnatural simplicity w/ unearned confidence.”🧪

In the late 1960s, 17% of NASA's staff were women; mostly secretaries. When schoolteacher Judy Sullivan applied for a job, the woman who interviewed her warned, “They’ll give you every reason in the world why they can’t have a woman over there. They’ll even tell you there are no female bathrooms.”

Teens need a 3rd place! Their parents don't need counseling

Great thread. I will submit two other pieces of evidence, the first this series of photos compiled by @kendrawrites.com about what our beautiful country looked like before the EPA cleaned it up: www.popsci.com/america-befo... 1/2

Vaccines are humanity’s greatest scientific achievement.

Steal work and pass it off as your own, with a program named after a woman whose work was stolen by men and passed off as their own!

😱 😱

Sam Altman thinks data centers are safe for nearby residential areas, so there should be no concerns. Build them like medieval castle walls around his house. Don't even bother with a door for him.

This is what authors have been dealing with. Constant barrage of AI slop scams. "Be on our (fake) radio show." "Be featured at our (fake) book club." For a cost. And this is just a few weeks worth of emails; I already deleted some.

“Yes, we have these great jobs, and we live in these great neighborhoods. But privilege comes with its own price.” Khiara Bridges took on Josh Hawley. Now she’s taking on the maternal healthcare system.

Hello, I made you a feed of your cats watching the Artemis II splashdown bsky.app/profile/did:...

News used to be better

DO open the replies. Books are important even as it feels deeply weird to be selling them right now.

Where TF is the UN? Who is gonna stop this man?

Never Forget

Essay: Darwin, the great scientist, and Dickinson, the great poet, witnessed the separation of science from art, but they did not accept it for themselves. They resisted disenchantment. Darwin never lost his sense of wonder or his aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of the natural world.

Thanks for doing this! Rise of the Zombie Bugs brings together my love of pop culture zombies and the science of actual zombification—by viruses, worms, wasps and flies. Actual zombies are more common than you think, and you're probably closer to one right now than you may expect 🧟‍♀️

PREACH

Everything is political. What you buy, how you dress, the way you raise your children, what you read or watch, where you go and how you get there. The fact that sometimes you might be unaware of the political implications of your actions doesn’t mean they aren’t there.