Foundational! "The scientist doing basic research may not be at all interested in the practical applications of his work, yet the further progress of industrial development would eventually stagnate if basic scientific research were long neglected." From Science: The Endless Frontier, Bush, 1945

"Imagine this body would follow the evidence rather than the headlines and earn its authority not through rhetoric or persuasion but careful and rigorous analysis and transparent processes." But... careful and rigorous analysis and transparent process are a kind of rhetoric and persuasion.

STS people, historians of science, literally everyone who actually studies science and its role in society: "There is no such thing as apolitical science!" Every scientific society leader: "Let us return to the good old days of apolitical science! Also known as my childhood."

She was trying to cross a busy street here in Alexandria and I love her $250 bucks in supplies later, I can very much say this crab could not have found a better sucker to rescue her off the street

Hmm... we shall see. Not actually much here.

Yes! I was really heartened by @neilshubin.bsky.social’s election and was hoping it would represent a much-needed sea change. Scientific organizations are a powerful force for the public good, if they exercise that power.

The commitment to leverage member and institutional expertise to inform the public and policymakers on challenges in areas that stretch well beyond so-called administration priorities is an imperative if we are to collectively reassert American leadership in science.

In the face of ongoing pressures and critique (including here by many), the public reaffirmation of the core mission of the National Academy of Sciences is a much-needed signal from incoming NAS President Neil Shubin. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This one looks interesting. Yesterday's earthquake looks kind of similar....

🚨 As a service to global researchers working on the 24 June 2026 #Venezuela #earthquakes, SSA has created a short list of our journal papers related to the region. These papers will be freely available until 16 July 2026. #OpenAccess buff.ly/AxzKr5V ⚒️

This captures where the fault rupture ended (where the fringes pinch together, more or less). I would expect a lot more displacement in the data to the east.

The symmetry of the pattern means it's almost certainly horizontal movement here. Each fringe is 2.8 cm of line-of-sight displacement, and assuming it's horizontal motion on an E-W fault represent about 4-5 cm of E-W displacement each.

It's taken me a while, but here is my first interferogram of the Venezuela earthquakes from Sentinel-1. It's an ascending track to the west of the epicenter, and the pattern of displacements is consistent with slip on a fault that runs close to and parallel to the coast.

Not plotted here but the epicenter is located near the western limit of InSAR fringe, indicating rupture was predominantly towards the east, including Caracas. So rupture directivity, which is like a seismic Doppler effect, likely contributed to stronger ground-shaking effects and damage.

If someone wants to rank preprints based on a probabilistic language generator, that's their business. I think it's more objectionable that author photos are posted alongside an apparently hallucinated quote attributed to them.

The bigger context of the tectonic mess of northern South America--essentially everything from the Gulf of Guayaquil in Ecuador to Caracas in Venezuela is moving towards the northeast/east relative to the center of South America as part of the North Andean Sliver. from here: doi.org/10.1093/gji/...

Watching ships and tools that were standards for decades get mothballed has been super demoralizing. The WHOI long corer is also in "caretaker" mode. So the only cores we can get now (realistically) are push cores or gravity cores. 💀 Wanna do basalt? Yeah, not happening.

You can never go wrong with a donation to @wck.org. When disaster strikes, they're there.

Over the course of my 20 year career, Every other nation with major ocean research programs has dramatically expanded their research fleets. The US has net lost 17 ships, mothballed 2 DSRVs plus the Sealinks, and critically underfunded NOAA.

The automated back projection tool captures both the foreshock and mainshock in one solution and the mainshock alone in a separate one. And they don't remotely agree with each other. 🙂 Foreshock + Mainshock:

Ah-ha! The focal mechanism of the M7.2 just got updated: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/... Now it matches the M7.5.

With a number of folks from #eqsky weighing in, including @brandontbishop.bsky.social @haroldtobin.bsky.social @seismo-steve.bsky.social 🎁 link: Why the Venezuelan Earthquakes Happened, and What to Expect Next www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/s...

I want fewer publications with worse graphics made by scientists who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding

You cannot have an "equal partnership with AI"! That is not possible to do because AI cannot think, and thus cannot enter into a partnership of any kind! This is also why you should not be "leveraging" LLMs to teach!! Please just do your job regular-style, I am BEGGING you.

Everybody needs to go hear Naomi Oreskes explain how Monsanto manipulated the science to obscure health concerns about Roundup — including ghost-writing papers that became touchstones in their denialism.

Human extinction from continued climate change is not going to happen. Widespread suffering will. Society gets to choose how much suffering happens depending on the cumulative emissions that happen, and how to deal with the impacts.

I never thought the Great Bluesky Food Wars would end with one of the combatants voluntarily incinerating themselves....

The St. Louis Zoo has a dedicated penguin elevator for transporting their Formal Chickens™ to behind-the-scenes areas where they can get medical checkups, enrichment activities. Kicking myself for becoming a LAB biologist when I could have been a Penguin Elevator operator. (📷: St. Louis Zoo)

fun fact: The Red Fort in Delhi uses a system of indoor channels and water as a sort of pre electricity AC because the Emperor was like fuck the sun

They put AC in 8th century palaces in India lol

New blog post: thoughts on the tendency to describe academic and alt-ac as two sides of a binary, and how this reinforces the problems with academic identities. joshuapnudell.com/2026/06/24/c...

Venezuela's national seismic network has a number of aftershocks detected around Caracas that are smaller than the global networks will pick up.

Would never have known that there's antagonism between Trump and Venezuela. Thank you Bluesky Americans for bringing it up dozens of times in the replies to my posts on the Venezuelan earthquakes, especially the one where I mentioned relief efforts might be complicated because of that antagonism. 😐

Le Venezuela sous le choc après un double séisme, le plus violent depuis 126 ans : « On a eu l’impression que la terre n’allait jamais s’arrêter de trembler »

Climate change will affect everyone, but it does not affect everyone equally. The pollution of our climate is classist, racist, sexist. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Looking at the world around us, as it crumbles, what we need is something on the practical and intellectual scale of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo programme, at the same time, and involving all of us. What are we offered? “Apprenticeships“.

And people are not even beginning to reckon with how much “the economy” will have to change for our basic survival in the coming decades. We need people trained to think carefully and innovatively. Not so they can earn more than someone else. So that we can survive as a functioning society.

Age-standardized cancer death rates fell from over 150 per 100,000 Americans in 1990 to less than 100 as of 2022. A one-third drop in just over 10 years. ourworldindata.org/grapher/canc...

This caught my attention, a 3D Earth rheology GIA model that is open source. We need this! github.com/alex-robinso...

'On average the raw lifetime earnings gap for those aged 37 in 2022 who went to university, and those who could have but did not, was £290,000. And this includes a 3.5 per cent discount rate (applying Treasury Green Book rules) that lowers the value of earnings in later life'. 1/3

Reminder, because it's coming up: We can very easily distinguish an explosive source from an earthquake source with global seismic networks. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated was equivalent to a magnitude ~5.5 Mw earthquake. Nobody's building or testing an equivalent to 6+ Mw earthquake.

So, do we think the two 4+ Mw earthquakes near Caracas aftershocks to the 7.5 Mw mainshock? That's about 220 km along the plate boundary from the point the mainshock nucleated at. Not necessarily too far off from how long we'd expect an earthquake of that size....

🔬 ✍🏽 #NowHiring: We're looking for a skilled science writer who will be tasked with translating discoveries from the Scripps Oceanography research community into compelling stories. Head to the link below to learn more, and apply by 7/7. ⤵️ https://bit.ly/3R0WDwf

Another fascinating Myanmar history thread from Edith on Mithuns. A bovine of NW Myanmar & NE India, its importance to the peoples of Chin state & more

⚒️ 🧪 A catastrophic earthquake just struck northern Venezuela. Large buildings have collapsed, and the USGS PAGER is forecasting thousands of fatalities. Our colleague in Caracas, Dr. Frank Audemard, has shared with us what the earthquake felt like and footage from the region. Here’s what we know.

Un #terremoto de 7.5 en Venezuela, dispara un segundo de 7.3 a escasos kilómetros, ambos se han localizado a 10km de profundidad causando víctimas mortales y daños importantes. Ambos mecanismos focales corresponden con una falla direccional. earthquake.usgs.gov/...#terremoto

Oilfield services provider Baker Hughes has signed an agreement with geothermal developer Mantle Reach Power ‌to deliver up to 500 megawatts of capacity in North America ⚒️⚡ www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

This works awesomely for slight misreads of the first phrase. I too would like to reach an agreement with the mantle.

#EarthquakeReport for M 7.1 #terremoto #sismo #Earthquake en #Venezuela Sadly this shallow large earthquake will be damaging and there will be casualties Tectonic setting in 2018 report earthjay.com?p=7657 earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...