A publicly-sourced archive of more than 10,000 national park signs and monument placards went public as part of a massive volunteer project to save historical and educational placards from around the country that risk removal by the Trump administration. 🔗 www.404media.co/save-our-sig...

nearly all the plant-based products we tested had elevated lead levels: vegan powders had 9x as much lead as dairy and 2x as much as beef though dairy-based powders had the lowest levels, half were still too contaminated for safe daily use you may be asking: how could this be? well...

Breaking: We’ve talked to multiple individuals who have confirmed that UNC-CH is merging SILS (library and information science) and SDSS (data science and society). Announcement will be tomorrow morning. Faculty were not consulted.

I haven't done a lot of reading on the closing of Baker & Taylor but it's reminding me of when Faxon Company, a major periodicals supplier to libraries, went out of business abruptly. So much has not changed but simply gotten worse, since then. digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlts_fac_pub...

Baker & Taylor appears to be shutting down. A post on the r/libraries subreddit from an employee of B&T breaks the news and there appear to be other employees in the comments confirming the situation.

Let’s talk about ‘whoa.’ First of all, ‘woah’ is not yet considered an established spelling variant of ‘whoa.’ While ‘woah’ has grown in prevalence since the late 20th century, ‘whoa’ is still about 5 times as common as ‘woah.’

Researchers are pleased about the #NIH possibly introducing caps on #OpenAccess fees its grantees can pay from their funding but say the change is imperfect—my latest for @cenmag.bsky.social: cen.acs.org/policy/publi... @jeremymberg.bsky.social, @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca, @pamherd.bsky.social

Midtown Greenway will be closed (looks like from Bryant to 5th) 10/13-26

I was in a store, and I overheard a man in his 30s say he wanted to watch Kiss Me Kate, and I was shocked that the older woman he was talking to (probably in her 60s?) had never heard of it

Friendly reminder that Minneapolis changed its billing system for water payments and did a terrible job telling people, so your automatic payments might not be going through.

Pulled together some MPLS election 2025 resources for friends who aren't super tuned into local politics: endorsements, voter guides, etc. Thumbnail is the "rank all 3" sign via @mplsforthemany.com. Those friends maybe aren't on bsky, but feel free to share this on FB or LinkedIn(??) or whatever:

If you are like me and greatly prefer @peggyflanagan.bsky.social to win the DFL primary for Tina Smith’s senate seat, rather than Angie Craig being the DFL nominee, then join me in donating before midnight tomorrow? secure.actblue.com/donate/pf-ad...

"How did the college textbook market become so broken, forcing some students to skip meals and work overtime just to afford course materials? One culprit, advocates say, is Wall Street’s increasing control over a staple campus institution: the college bookstore."

I wrote about the Reiser brothers and their hilarious, disgusting Listers documentary for Slate: slate.com/culture/2025...

The catalogue has recorded - deep breath - a whopping *19,000* new mountains, to add to the 20,000+ mapped in previous surveys... ... and the researchers estimate that the “vast majority” still wait to be discovered: www.science.org/content/arti... 3/

The use of genAI violates the basic principles for sound research that we teach our students in intro methodology classes. That it’s been so widely accepted by so many researchers and university administrators is nothing less than a dereliction of basic duties to the profession.

Weird how this is always go to Jupiter or live in the center of the earth but not “everyone has a good union job and healthcare”, like that’s the thing that is believing in unicorns

🤷🏿‍♂️

HEY!

They're forcing us to DIY society. To individually and privately manage risks--like the risks of pharmaceuticals--that can only be effectively managed publicly and at scale. www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-f...

this fireworks jellyfish serene and floaty does not watch the news

The South has quickly emerged as a battleground between big tech and working people. Companies are pouring billions into data centers, but Southerners are fighting to block them. The outcomes could greatly affect residents’ economic security and the region’s water supply. Thread.

" ...IGI Global Scientific Publishing has officially terminated our agreement with Baker & Taylor and their Print-On-Demand subsidiary, Bookmasters, effective Wednesday, September 3, 2025. This decision was made in light of Baker & Taylor’s current inconsistency and financial instability."

Polly Holliday, the actress who was best known for playing Flo on the long-running sitcom “Alice,” and who also pursued a notable stage career for decades, died on Tuesday. She was 88.

1. Chatbots do not know a person's medical history 2. Hallucinations happen 3. Chatbots boost false confidence and atrophy critical thinking skills 4. Users risk exposing their personal health data on the internet #medlibs www.pbs.org/newshour/hea...

Lost in the Texas A&M news is that the entire crusade is the product of a former labradoodle breeder turned State Rep whose stunts and grandstanding are so insufferably transparent that even his Republican colleagues despise him. Meet Brian Harrison, winner of Texas Monthly’s 2025 Cockroach award:

Germany’s famous study showed over 80% insect declines in farmland over 27 years. “Those findings were often blamed on pesticides and habitat loss. Sockman’s work shows something different. Insects are collapsing even in a meadow with little human pressure. Climate itself may be enough.”

The thing about investing in public transit is that it *scales* — the more people use it, the better it gets. For everyone. Whereas the more cars there are, the *worse* everything about driving gets. Traffic. Parking. [Ever noticed that in just about every car ad it’s alone on the road? Yeah.]

As we enter fall, it's so important that we tell everyone to leave those leaves! Mads Torres designed a poster to help us. Lightning bugs are one of the most charismatic insects we've got. Actions we take to protect them protects many insects! Get some to hang in your neighborhood! Squidfacts.net

Today is one of my favorite days in North Amherst, when someone has to slowly walk around my friends’ yard, carefully collecting all the baby snapping turtles so the crows don’t eat them.

When people say "We used to drink raw milk from our own cow and it was fine," That's... usually not the case! In families w their own cow, the mom usually boiled it before using. We just forgot bc that's a boring chore that mom did. And who pays attention to that? youtu.be/vKDPast9WFk

Apparently Primo's AI Assistant can "turn off" censorship, or how it's being described as some sort of glitch, but just tried a number of contentious terms and only "1srae1 and g3nocide" has results now (when it didn't before), but lynching, jan 6, covid 19, and tuskagee *do not*

THEY VOTED TO RESTORE THE IMLS FUNDING. This isn't the end. It's nowhere near the end. But the House and Senate subcommittees voted to restore the IMLS in their budget markups. Full House budget markup is tomorrow.

The U.S. Secretary of Energy does not know that electricity is energy. I'm glad we've gotten rid of DEI programs and are now giving America the leadership it deserves.

"Move fast and break things" but the things are kids and the people allowing tech bros to break them are educators.

If any #UMN current faculty, staff, students, alums want to tell the President that the Border Patrol can go recruit their future soldiers at another institution, please do so! career.umn.edu/events/2025/... [email protected] [email protected]

I want to encourage those of you who procrastinate like I do about using my FSA/HSA funds and then end up leaving money on the table to consider the FSA Store as a way to spend down funds & order Plan B etc... to donate to community groups, etc.

If you have not been, now is a really good time to start tracing your multi-size patterns instead of cutting them out. This is a resource we'll never have again.

Amidst all the bad news, this is great: Libraries across the country host cookbook clubs, offer classes in demo kitchens, loan spices + kitchen equipment, include food pantries, host farmer's markets, offer English language learning through cooking, host nutrition literacy programs, etc.

The first sign of fall in the Corcoran neighborhood appeared today

Shared with me by a friend: New Zealand libraries are beginning to suspend international ILL to/from the United States due to the Trump administration tariffs. 📚

Trump take LEGO www.404media.co/lego-stops-s...

Huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum) and wild blueberries (V. deliciosum) along the trail to Snow Lake last week. 🌿 buff.ly/WXJ8cVl Taxonomy is tricky: Both of these species have "blueberry" and "huckleberry" among their recognized common names. buff.ly/JjMJyso buff.ly/sx93p4G

Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.

If you are worried about misinformed U.S. federal guidance on vaccines and preventative health measures right now, here’s a list of well sourced and science backed alternative sources of information. A thread that you can bookmark for future reference and pass on to others 🧵

“The NIH has been pushing for more openness in the ecosystem into which it pours nearly $48B annually.” So Springer + Elsevier, being the bad actors they are, are now mandating and ⬆️ their open access fees (svrl thousand $!). “They’re responsible to shareholders, and not to the research community.”