I was looking for something on Twitter/X and came across a very recent retweet from Director Bhattacharya, continuing to promote Matt Ridley's "lab leak" position with cherry-picked data, not critically examined. So I wrote to Director Bhattacharya (again). 1/4

Ok this is a truly great tweet

I almost expected like that scene from V, he opens his mouth, unhinges his jaw, and swallows snakes whole.

This entire administration is an exercise in discovering why you need government and then scrambling to assemble an arm while cutting off another leg.

Publish-or-perish has produced rushed research, unreproducible results, and careers spent optimising for the wrong things.

☠️Biggest find by OPCW since fall of the Assad regime: "dozens of undeclared chemical munitions such as aerial bombs and rockets as well as separately found chemicals and related equipment" at undeclared locations in northern coastal and central regions. www.opcw.org/sites/defaul...

I’ve seen these claims… from Jay Bhattacharya. Would love to see him answer this question.

In fair warning I usually wait for information a little harder than the thing that triggered today's concerns. see if you can spot that. but it led me to some funding data based pondering, in my partial excuse. NIH funding skips drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/05/26/n...

My new post at For Better Science: "Graphyne Chronicles, Episode 1: A Whole Field of Carbon Nonsense." A story of lies, deceit, and carbon-carbon triple bonds. And mainly about how the worst science doesn't look like fraud. forbetterscience.com/2026/05/26/g... #ChemSky #chemchat

“Academic science is not only about productivity, it is also about deep understanding, exploring creative solutions and training critical thinkers to be the next generation of researchers.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

By @arbitraryeffect.bsky.social

“the call is coming from inside the house”

Dr. Fauci came to Stanford for Medicine grand rounds and shared a few reflections I thought were worth passing on: The first was about Operation Warp Speed and the current state of the NIH. As you’ll recall the first mRNA vax was developed at record speed. Fauci atttributes that success to 4 factors

NIH funded peeps: This is insane and coming for us.

An easye guide to usinge the deepest and moost powerful magicks of google -- brilliant and amazingelye useful cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

"For a mere $10 million gift, you can help us remake the intellectual landscape by endowing a prestigious chair in an underrepresented subfield, such as geocentric astronomy, high-energy phlogiston physics, or patriotic history." Well played, @mcsweeneys.net. Well played.

Ohio State reels from multiple scandals amid wider crisis in higher education www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.

Russians destroyed the Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv during an overnight missile attack. A renewed exhibition had only recently opened there to mark the 40th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant tragedy.

In normal times, the fact that government officials at HHS blatantly lied to the public and got caught would be a scandal of unusual size. Everyone involved in this disinformation scheme against the people of the United States should be held accountable.

I have been in correspondence (about other matters) with Dr. Marine who is a cardiologist and full Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. I felt I had to call him out on this nonsense...

Firing scientists won’t make us healthy. Neither will censoring scientists. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/o...

If you want to see the hugely positive effect of the leadership of the National Academies of Science in shying away from topics that are deemed controversial based on partisan positions, here you go... 1/3

Apparently a bunch of words trigger this kind of response, including redo, delete, help, and these others I've attached. For some reason it was really focused on where I live. Also RIP pulling up definitions from Google, it was a nice feature.

Well that's an epistemic train wreck.

"I'm really angry that this scifi writer whose work was stolen to train a probability machine that depletes water tables and raises electricity prices and is accelerating the transfer of wealth and capital toward men who actively hate other humans doesn't like 'AI," what a lack of vision they have"

What do you think about my template for Mg supplement? This is a version for a product. Anything to add? #Chemsky #chemchat #SupplementsSaga #TaurateCurse

I admit this is idiosyncratic and anecdotal, but: after many years of science-heavy litigation against big corporations, I see references to the "gold standard" in science the same as references to "IQ." It's a tell that the speaker is a liar and a fraud, like these climate-deniers.

Called it.

Oh, no big deal, just hanging out with MY BUDDY PAUL. Holy cow, the Colbert wrap party was the most insane gathering of friends and heroes that I’ve ever experienced in my life. Much love to Stephen and his entire amazing crew, and wishing them the best in whatever their next adventure happens to be

It's 2036: software is not written, but generated on-the-fly for each user. Code is no longer deterministic, so bugs can't be fixed manually. Instead, "vaccines" are injected at the prompt level, and apps self-repair over time. After too many rewrites, codebases eventually die and get replaced.

Theo Baker just became one of the cool kids.

Adding pointless administrative burdens to deter legal immigration

“Units of the NIH are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States.” Grantees also told to remove papers with foreign authors from progress reports.

The push to cut funding from the National Academies of Science will involve illegally impounding funds on the claim that fringe Republican lawmakers understand what constitutes the “gold standard” for science better than the best scientists in America. www.aip.org/fyi/republic...

Several authors including the last 3, are WHITE European professors. Hope this helps to understand.

They didn’t even fix everything

I’ll stop when they do

C'mon, @mdpiopenaccess.bsky.social - after all the effort sleuths put in to hunt down the papermill products, is this the best you can do? A "correction"? If you want to be taken seriously as a publisher you need to weed out the gobbledegook. pubpeer.com/publications...

Yes, extramural awardees and yes, it extends to when no US funding is going to foreign collaborators. U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Bhattacharya’s legacy The US had a “world-class Ebola lab in Frederick, Maryland, with the NIH,” designed to develop vaccines & treatments. The lab would normally be swinging into action. “But that lab was shuttered last year, with staff laid off abruptly”😢 www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

The ads now explicitly say you have to outperform the plagiarism machines in order to deserve a job. Further down, there’s another ad that says “We find out what AI can’t do, then we teach it”. You have to be better than the system so you can teach it to replace you. Dystopian nightmare mask off

Ok, I got 5 new “products” and tested them. So now you can’t try to answer two questions: - Does #TaurateCurse broken? - How many minerals I found in these 5 bottles? (Bonus if your can name it)? Waiting for the last one, for which I promised to make a video. #Chemsky #chemchat #SupplementsSaga

More on the destruction of US science. www.chronicle.com/article/they...

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield delivered a headline-grabbing line yesterday, saying that Ebola may become a pandemic. He also said of the outbreak, “…it wasn’t recognized very quickly. I’m not sure why”. IDK Dr. Redfield, maybe the termination of USAID had something to do with it?

Congratulations to Mark Boslough (@boslough.bsky.social) on a new paper. Press release and link to the paper here: news.unm.edu/news/new-unm...

Altogether, if bonuses are paid out, Landry will earn $4.5 million from for a job that lasted less than 12 months. Florida law caps the amount of presidential salaries funded by the state at $200,000. His previous most senior administrative role was as Department Chair.

Do you ever look a people and wonder what kind of ants crawl in their brain? Never a dull moment.

Updated with Thermo Fisher findings by @johanduchene.bsky.social and @reeserichardson.bsky.social !