I've often wondered why so many academic scientists want large labs (i.e., numerous graduate students, postdocs, etc). Today it occurred to me that we learn how to run a lab from our own advisors and statistically, at least, tend model our labs on theirs. (1/2)

Discover the incredible flying skills that happen in a flash at your feeder, via ultra slow-mo! This sneak peak of our new video series, Backyard Birds Revealed, shows birds in slow-motion landings—turning midair, braking with their tails & using their legs as shock absorbers. hubs.la/Q03YxdDk0

Love this short opinion piece on “mechanical bypass” in analogy to “spiritual bypass”.

New piece from @celinegounder.com about how antivax disinformation tactics are making their way to the CDC via the McCullough foundation.

Y'all are doing it wrong.

#1 movie when you were ten is how your 2026 etc etc. I guess I won't run out of Nazis to stomp.

Please don't bully Mr. Summers by quoting his own words. "The students posted videos online showing Mr. Summers addressing students in a Harvard lecture hall...The complaints initially claimed that the two students in question violated the university’s anti-bullying policy." Gift link

Can we just put lead back in gasoline and call it good?

More on Kennedy's unethical study. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Aaby and Benn are doing the Guinea-Bissau HBV vaccine depravation trial, eh? Did RFK Jr. just call up the first name in the antivax yellow pages?

More about RFK Jr.'s colonialist medicine. The study team describes period before universal vaccination-at-birth in 2027 as a "unique window of opportunity". In a sense they're right. It's a unique window of opportunity for a wealthy country to experiment on citizens of the global south.

It does at least it clear that this is colonialist medicine, implementing an experiment wherein they provide treatment below the standard of care in Denmark and soon below the standard of care in Guinea-Bissau as well. IMO it’s staggeringly unethical.

my dog Buddy

Game respects game. h/t @rahaeli.bsky.social

Surely the people who file hundreds of demands that libraries they've never been to remove books that they've never read — surely those people wouldn't abuse an open syllabus law to harass professors teaching topics they don't like the sound of. Important reporting from @stephaniemlee.bsky.social

As far as I can tell, RFK Jr.'s latest antivax stunt runs counter to the WMA Declaration of Helsinki. Withholding HepB vaccination clearly does not meet any definition of clinical equipoise. Doing it anyway, overseas, is straight up colonialist medicine. Details in Dr. Jacobs's thread below.

Where Osamu Shimomura isolated Aequorea victoria in 1961, the source of green fluorescent protein. In his words, 'a beautiful protein, but it remained useless for the next 30 years'. Not useless anymore. I can attest that FHL is definitely lovely in summer!

This could be your new office.

This is actually the trippiest thing I've ever seen that was not deliberately created by M C Fucking Escher. It straight up took me over a minute to make sense of and now I can't go back. This is the white-and-gold dress on a gram a week of trenbolone.

My coauthor @cdelawalla.bsky.social asks NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya whether, as he seems to have previously asserted, the polio vaccine is worse than the disease. Needless to say, he weasels and doesn't answer the question.

Yes. When human people log on to a microblogging platform to write about singular personal experiences that they have had or are having, the things that they write down are known as *anecdotes*. Moreover, said anecdotes differ from large-scale quantitative studies. Clever observation.

People wanted dog pics. Here's Rosie (left) and Buddy (right).

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

Looking for a faculty job at one of the world's great research stations? We're looking for a marine invertebrate biologist at UW's Friday Harbor Labs. apply.interfolio.com/178804

Can't pass ACA extensions but don't worry. We're going to probe whether Lyme disease is a US bioweapon instead.

Here we go! @lmesseri.bsky.social & I wrote about epistemic risks of synthetic participants ('AI Surrogates') in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (see 🧵 here) bsky.app/profile/mjcr...

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

LLMs. They promote suicide and murder, undermine a century of educational practice, drive deskilling, harm the environment, and benefit foreign adversaries spreading disinformation. But the federal government wants to prohibit states from regulating them. You'd think they were guns.

We've long subsidized junk mail; it's only right to subsidize it more if it's got extra slop.

There's a cross-platform uniformity to how LLMs bullshit you. Today I was designing an exercise for a responisble-use of-LLMs course we are designing for NIH trainees. I asked ChatGPT to complete one of Claude Shannon's original guessing games: "There is no reverse on a __(10 letters)__"

Jesus bro sometimes you need to just shut the fuck up.

Nature would do well to publish more content like this thoughtful piece from @kevinbaker.bsky.social and fewer Buzzfeed listicles gussied up as career advice "Five productivity hacks for using AI in your scientific workflow"

"conservative"

Something beautiful for a night that feels anything but.

This is one of those times when it's ok to call your general counsel on a Sunday night.

ICE sprayed a one-year-old in the face with pepper spray. The child and parents are US citizens, but that doesn't even matter. These monsters pepper-sprayed a baby. We cannot allow ICE to continue this behavior, and they aren't going to reform themselves. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

Yet another example of what happens if we allow LLMs to become a form of epistemic grounding for society.

Remarkable how brutal the ruling against Trump on Abrego Garcia truly is: It details flagrant and malicious abuses of power all throughout. Trump and Stephen Miller were testing their ability to spread lawless state terror. But the court held the line. 1/ (new piece) newrepublic.com/article/2043...

Seattle Children's to Trump: get bent. I'm very proud of these local heroes.

Well, that was an awkward afternoon at the photo meetup. Who knew that filming in NEF/CR2 isn’t called shooting rawdog?

everyone uses AI to find out who is gay or who is hireable or whatever but why hasn't anyone ever used AI to figure out which fascist has the world's most punchable face?

Gemini remains comically terrible.

Cool, they also used a “race” classifier. First rate science in this 67 page paper.

"We built the torment nexus to warn about the ethical implications of building the torment nexus." — these assholes, every single time. ("gift" link)

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?" Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

"there is little reason to doubt what the aim [of the massive investment in AI] is: to embed knowledge in machines—knowledge that previously belonged to the people working in these domains." 🧵

RFK Jr., I know you can't conceive of caring for anyone else, let alone caring for another life more than your own. Let alone the pain of wanting to care for your child more than you've ever wanted anything in your entire existence—and your body not allowing you to. In any case, fuck you to hell.

Nothing like the joy of crows riding a southern squall.