New post up at Inverse Square (cross posted at Balloon Juice) that offers a bit of respite on this Sunday evening. Check it out for a twofer: an appreciation of Junot Díaz <em>and<em> Rubén Blades.: tomlevenson.substack.com/p/quick-sund... (And at Balloon Juice: balloon-juice.com/2026/05/31/s...)

I’m a climate scientist. Let me fix this headline. “Nearly a century ago, scientists showed that burning fossil fuels warms the planet. Today, we know human emissions account for over 100% of the warming. Yet dark money and disinformation still work to keep Americans addicted to fossil fuels.”

I passed through the locally famous bookstore Spine and Label, during a business trip to Nigeria, and just fell in love with this book of poetry by Abdulkareem Baba-Aminu. www.amazon.com/Kill-Poet-Wo...

Listen in on scientists finding (and falling for) a new species of octopus now called Microeledone galapagensis. Read more here www.scientificamerican.com/article/tiny...

If you don’t know how ridiculously cool dinoflagellates are, this is your chance to find out!

And now Bowie’s teaching himself door handles, like he’s a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. He got the push side a year ago. Now he’s practicing the pull side: turn the handle, pull the door in with his nose, let it swing open, push it shut, repeat.

I had worried about how AI’s sycophantic behavior could be a sort of tar pit for narcissists, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder if it was also creating new narcissists by conditioning normal people to expect that kind of saccharine yes-manning. In the new future everyone gets a toady.

Always, always replace “You are…” with “That thing you did was…”. Always.

By the way, @dshb-antibodies.bsky.social is a non-profit that sells quality antibodies to many proteins at exceptionally reasonable prices, without AI generated faux-validation images. Check them out. dshb.biology.uiowa.edu

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.

The Rejoin petition jumped from 70K to 75K yesterday. It needs to hit 100K by June 8th when the petition closes in order to get a debate in Parliament. The 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote is June 23rd.

Still looking for recommendations - I'm after something nice and detailed with a lot of maps!

My favorite kind of science story! If someone would create a conference for projects that took a sharp turn due to unexpected data, I’d pay just to hear the talks.

Wonderful opportunity to hear about the latest progress in fluorescent probe technology ⬇️

Good morning!

It was cloudy in R’lyeh, you could tell the sun got up a long time before I did. I was holding some ice with scotch to the bruises ln my [forehead-ish], and in walks a dame. I can’t describe her. Really, if I tried it would probably kill you. But I couldn’t take 83 of my 132 eyes off her.

Question: to a narcissist, what is the difference between a chat bot and other people? If the chat bot only flatters you, which one would feel more legitimate?

You see an individual at war with himself, pinioned between precisely balanced needs, on the one hand, to chase the ball, and on the other, a just as terrible need to not put the ball down. Bo has a whole dance he does negotiate an agreement with himself, then the ball drops, and we go again.

Who do I know at UCSF or Berkeley that would be interested in taking a high school student to shadow for lab work? Kid is interested in bioscience, and lives fine detail work.

Brilliant, but kind of DC-centric. Marvel super-battles are like an argument at the bar after an especially eclectic philosophy conference

You will never believe what the dog who drops balls in places he can’t reach, so that he can stand around crying over it, just did.

Pizza and image analysis. Because there’s no hackin‘ without snackin‘. @damiandn.bsky.social @bethcimini.bsky.social

Ah heck, I made the best photo I took of Max (of sainted memory) my profile pic. I’ll never look that good.

Exactly one year ago today:

It should surprise no one at all who’d fall in love with a zero effort firehose of information that’s comforting, supportive, and totally unconcerned with factual truth. The Macedonians who invented fake news for click revenue gave up on the left bc no one shared it. www.wired.com/2017/02/vele...

Bowie’s paw on the large branch telegraphs his concern I might not know the rule that dragging a large branch around the yard for fifteen minutes means you officially own it.

After big dams on the upper Klamath River in far northern CA were removed in 2024, Chinook (king) salmon migrated upstream for the first time in 100+ years--and now they have hatched.

What is the interior dimension of this Waffle House, does it have a basement, can I choose where to teleport *within* the Waffle House, and does it continue being a Waffle House if I buy the property and build a fence around it?

The nonprofit that runs the successful, Pulitzer-winning Baltimore Banner is going to take over the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Of all the possible outcomes here, this is likely the best we could have hoped for. apnews.com/article/pitt...

Christ. Stay out of Target and avoid the self checkouts if you can help it.

I’m offering a lightly used set of regalia in UC Berkeley colors to a junior faculty member, preference for a mom and 1st gen scholar. DM me your details— I’ll ship for free.

Crab bucket. We can’t get out, so no one else will either.

You constantly hear Republican types say ‘imagine if…’. Well this is if. Eric Swalwell looks extremely guilty here, and if so I hope the story buries him.

Alien abductions are routine bag & tag wildlife field studies, and the answer to the Fermi paradox is that we are a nature preserve

One of my favourite photos 💕 Children at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena viewing Edgar Degas' 'Little Dancer' Photo via Red Tricycle

We’re in for a treat today. Our seminar speaker is Christine Strullu-Derrien: “Early terrestrial microorganisms revealed through advanced imaging techniques.” Exploring the insane hundreds-of-millions-of-years timescales that we rarely think about.

Things I Know Far Too Much About (that aren’t theater or movies): 1. Sharks 2. Paranormal whatever. I lterally read the library dry as a kid 3. Harappans

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/

Why does this happen? Two candidate mechanisms: 1) AI resets your reference point for how long things "should" take. Unaided work suddenly feels harder than it actually is, -- a kind of hedonic adaptation. 2) AI removes the productive struggle through which you learn what you're capable of.

Current AI systems are fundamentally *short-term* collaborators. They never say no, they always give you the answer, and they're indifferent to what that does to you over time. The best human mentors know when not to help and how to help for long-term benefit.

This is incredibly upsetting, and also weirdly close to home. I would have met him at Colorado College, I was at that SJ Gould talk, and this type of evening out disparities w better education is really impt to me. Donovsn should head an Institute. Plus Beth Jones was my department chair.

I gotta say, Daredevil writers know how to roll those chicken bones.

It was just 24 days between when Zuck went on Rogan and talked about how "never again" would he suppress info based on gov't demands (misrepresenting those demands) and when he texted top gov't employee Elon Musk to say "we're all set up to take down info you want removed." I wrote about it here.

Gary Snyder and Ken Kesey, Rachel Carson and Eugenie Clark. Hunter S Thompson and Galen Rowell, Mozi and Tocqueville. People who live in my head and I’d never dream of charging rent.

Our lab has an open postdoctoral position. Work in the lab ranges from trafficking of neuronal cargoes to developing gene editing therapeutics for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. I'm looking for the right person, project is flexible. Please apply immediately. www.roylab.org

As the first reanalysis data become available, I think I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the March 2026 heatwave will go down as the most anomalously extreme heat event ever observed at any time of year in the southwestern U.S.

As the author of an upcoming history of vaccines and their opponents, I'll be traveling a bit once it comes out, overseas as well as around these United States. It would be pretty embarrassing if I picked up a vaccine preventable disease if I did. Boosters all round! PS: preorders are resistance!

Crickets and cicadas at dusk, late spring

It's out! Happy to present ITEC, a semi supervised algorithm with an extremely low error rate that can track cells in files of any size (think Terabytes!). We used it in many organisms, including zebrafish, to study how organs form and linked it to gene expression www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... +🧪