Comprehensive report from Oversight Democrats, led by @robertgarcia.house.gov, on how the Trump administration is undermining the health of Americans. It covers all of HHS, but I will highlight parts relevant to NIH. oversightdemocrats.house.gov/imo/media/do...

Sports Commentary xkcd.com/3262/

Baingan Bharta, Tarka Dal, Naan

Heavy-handed censorship by the regime, banning particular talks at scientific conferences based on their topic. They are just getting started. Proposed OMB rules would push this kind of fine-grained political control into all aspects of US funded research. hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

A bunch of my colleagues & members of community have put together a podcast series on Indigenous Genomics in Australia. The first two episodes are now available, with the next few episodes soon to be released. Defs worth a listen if you're interested. indigenousgenomics.com.au/resources/co...

This use comports (if you squint hard) with the AMA’s recommendations for patients using AI. www.ama-assn.org/system/files...

Fascinating perceptual story! So grateful I get to see colors that can’t be displayed on a screen all the time at Kua Bay.

This is an excellent perspective, opens new doors to study consciousness empirically.

Really important data! Kids are being hurt, and it’s not clear who is going to stop this. I think it reaches the level of something pediatricians need to know about.

Cal Newport -- @author-calnewport.bsky.social -- is so right. Gift link. Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs to Stop www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/o...

When I head to Washington, I will be the first woman in Congress with a science PhD. That matters. At a time when science is under attack, Congress needs more leaders who understand the value of evidence-based decision-making.

I had no idea the mcmansionhell.com person wrote more “serious" art criticism. Like the blog, really compelling (and funny)! flaminghydra.com/toward-an-un...

Last chance to apply to work on this exciting project, part of a larger collaboration with UCL. Closing date Jun 17th.

The regime is doing everything they can to hasten the transfer of global scientific leadership to China

The @nejm.org comes out swinging against OMB's new proposed rule putting all federal grant making including science under political control. www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

To mark Trump's 80th birthday, BYD, the Chinese EV maker, is making Trump "Salesman of the Year." cepr.net/publications...

This article articulates something important. Our would-be billionaire overlords are not like Hitler and Mussolini ideologically, despite the shared racism and misogyny. Their ambitions are way worse, and bode ill for the future of humanity.

Read the whole thread...

Today the Senate GOP hijacked a bipartisan wildfire bill gutting the Roadless Rule, a law protecting 45 million acres of national forest from roads and logging. Sen. Mike Lee slipped the amendment in. If it passes, it permanently nullifies the Rule and bans USFS from ever protecting the lands again.

“Dimicillin” isn’t real. We made it up. Yet many LLMs still call it an antibiotic. Across 9 models and 653 drugs, we find that drug-name affixes alone can drive pharmacological reasoning. Models often rely on morphology over facts. We trace this shortcut from behavior to mechanism. 🧵

I see people here complaining about paywalls, & this is your friendly reminder that your library card may give you access to Libby, a digital resource for ebooks & audiobooks AND ALSO FOR newspapers & magazines. Libraries desperately want you to get a free library card & use their services! 📚💙

READ: My Public Comment on Proposed OMB Rule: Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/my-public-...

My country breaks my heart. Over and over again. www.cbc.ca/news/science...

Sadly this morning, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved Sen. Mike Lee’s amendment to eliminate the 2001 Roadless Rule, which protects roughly 45 million acres of national forest land.

New: the FCC is trying to ban burner phones by forcing all telecoms to store ID information on all new and renewing customers. That includes a government issued ID number. Massive privacy-impacting change “We never thought that would happen here,” the ACLU says www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to...

More evidence of Chinese scientific ascendence: Major institutions are now taking evidence of misconduct far more seriously than even just a few years ago.

This paper was entertaining, and even mildly reassuring. Major effect of GenAI on cybercrime? Not effective new hacking tools or reduced barriers to entry among noobs, but that tech layoffs drive more skilled coders to crime. arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29545

Medical training faces a new calibration gap as AI enters the clinic. A trial of 111 medical students showed that fluent, misleading LLM explanations degraded diagnostic accuracy from 21.9% to 9.2%. "Shadow AI" can act as a substitute for reasoning rather than a scaffold. #MedSky

The awesome @sarahtaber.bsky.social had a thread about him last year. He’s even worse than you think... bsky.app/profile/sara...

The number of Black NIH-funded Fellows has plummeted by a staggering 40% from 2024 to 2025; for Hispanic trainees the number has fallen by 33%. These figures are nothing short of horrifying. The Trump administration is stealing the future of science.

I find it amazing that a Chinese consumer electronics / cell phone company (Xiaomi) has repeatedly taken extremely high performance tech and made practical consumer products out of it. See also www.motortrend.com/reviews/firs...

Melancholia I (Albrect Dürer, 1514). Isn't she fabulous?! "His Melancholia is neither a miser nor a mental case, but a thinking being in perplexity. She does not hold on to an object which does not exist, but a problem which cannot be solved." Struggling with a project this week? She's your muse.

What a heartbreaking collection of photographs. 💔 😢 www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

Got to hike Kiholo with a bunch of trail archeologists for #NationalTrailsDay So beautiful, informative, and interesting!

And Loney Gordan. A story that should be better known! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loney_G...

I love how our children make us grow as adults

Staying at the JW Marriott at 14th and F today, I remember being that 22 year old kid, on her lunch break, buying a salad and a MAD magazine and walking by this very hotel entrance to go sit in the sunshine in Freedom Plaza and wonder how she was going to have a voice. And now I have that voice.

Exciting data analytics position at the Seattle Public Library! The position mentions "developing reproducible analysis, reporting tools, dashboards, data workflows, and policy/process recommendations." $108k-132k annually www.governmentjobs.com/careers/seat...

Venus, Jupiter, and I think maybe Mercury.

The Fred Rogers Production has started uploading every episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood for free. www.youtube.com/@misterroger...

Don't forget to watch for Jupiter and Venus together after sunset! On June 9 they'll be very close but even now it's good. Look west after sunset. If it's clear you can't miss them lowish to the horizon. Venus is very bright.

Realizing that one set of proponents of "open science" mean that anybody should be able to read scientific papers without paying corporate publishers, while another set think it means that anybody who wants to should be able to publish their ideas in scientific venues with no gatekeeping. 🧪

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link

Spanish lunch, yum!

Endorse! The conservation volunteering I do has become one of the joys of my life, and I have met a BUNCH of interesting new people.

Yes, absolutely this 👇. "Good qualities” in a human are good in all humans. Robin Dembroff’s Real Men on Top explains in detail what ‪@amandamarcotte.bsky.social is talking about. Also why patriarchy is more than sexism and is bad for (most) men. A great read! www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...

WOW: “Several diabetes experts were escorted out of an influential medical conference… The incident took place Friday morning at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in New Orleans, shortly before Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, was scheduled to speak.”

Professor Joe Felsenstein FRS is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. After initially working on population genetics theory of recombination, of migration, and of speciation, his main focus has been on phylogenetic inference. #RSFellows https://royalsociety.org/people/joseph-felsenstein-38106/

University of Chicago issues guidance for commenting on the proposed regulations around federal grants, includes a link to elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-ne...

Eric Horvitz (Microsoft CSO) on an underappreciated AI risk: "We must also understand how [AI systems] shape human goals and judgment, and ensure that people retain the capacity and motivation to question, audit, and guide them.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...