Daniel and Kelly are joined by the amazing Dr. @catbohannon.bsky.social, who answers questions about whether we can shorten gestation, superhuman feats of strength, and whether viruses are ever good for us. www.iheart.com/podcast/105-...

Remembering Dawkins wrote that VS Ramachandran was “a latterday Marco Polo, journeying the Silk Road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind." About a world-famous South Asian scientist. That was the best thing he could think to say. About Ramachandran. That.

Casey Means is a wellness influencer & unqualified opportunist who will face the Senate on Thursday. She should be called out on her conflicts, pseudoscience, & extremism, along with her weird scammer brother. She should not be confirmed. rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/a-means-to...

Keep Jamaica in your thoughts today, people.

The Trump administration is also refusing to use the SNAP contingency reserves, set aside for this exact purpose.

Yup yup! I wrote a bit on this Eve, page 382. See also footnotes on 399 and 402-403 for implications for human gendered power coalitions.

Could have been half the length, I admit, but a lot of good work in this review. “A grin without a cat” indeed. What a fall for Krauss and the skeptics movement in general, a sick end.

This from Iris Murdoch, via Elif Shafak: “ Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.”

When I was Turkey in 2013, they didn’t report the protests on state tv. So every night, families banged pots & pans outside their windows. Every night, a clanging siren. This is how we knew. Bari can’t kill what’s true.

Solidarity!! Last week, Indiana University fired the director of student media & halted print on the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. Yesterday, Purdue’s student paper printed the banned edition & drove two hours to deliver it. Incredible www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/l...

Woah maybe add gorillas to the maybe-menopause list?!

Season 3 of Women’s Health Interrupted is here! 🎙️ Ep 1: Dr. Cat Bohannon on how science sidelined female bodies Ep 2: Rachel Bartholomew on how femtech innovation turns research into reality Now streaming on Spotify & Apple Podcasts 👇 https://ow.ly/b8PJ50XbIoG #WomensHealthInterrupted #Femtech

"a narrow focus on gross fertility measures provides a potentially misleading picture of demographic change. Our analysis of 236 countries from 1950-2023 reveals that when mortality is incorporated through net reproduction measures, our understanding of global fertility changes dramatically"

Sometimes I think about the whale mothers who were slaughtered for their blubber and baleen and how bits of their bodies were used to make corsets that squeezed the lungs of human moms wheezing in lamplight

Interesting! Today in media, our authoritarian slide has been rebranded T’s “revenge agenda” and then people were asked how they felt about it, like that’s a normal poll-taking thing to ask in a normal “let’s take the pulse on the street” scenario.

In better news…

The sadism is exhausting. Still, we *can* win this back, people! But let’s not pretend the moral injuries of this moment will go away anytime soon.

Dense read but important, so I’ll translate a quick teaser for my non-academic followers: moms matter, and it matters who they are and where they live! So to better help kids everywhere, meet moms where they’re at when you give them advice.

Things I love about my job: reducing suffering. Also answering that email about the evolution of orgasms. Rats & a #4 camelhair paintbrush, iykyk

That’s @edyong209.bsky.social saying it the right way, as always.

October! A turkey sammich costs $25, a whole lotta kids and grammas are gonna get really sick this flu season without vaccines, and they’re trying to get good people to leave the military willingly because they might get in the way of the crazy racist crusaders… cool. Also, pumpkin spice lattes.

The Army and Navy veterans in my family would beg to differ, Pete, but *everyone* in the DoD hates you anyway so… I guess why not act like a coked out Finance Bro in front of the entire nation’s top brass?

The Justice Department is people. Congress is people. The Armed Forces, people. Our country’s noblest institutions are *people.* So yes, it matters when one or a dozen break the law. It matters when one or a thousand stand up. All of this is made of people making choices.

Hegseth to Geneva Conventions: drop dead

Punching up with the best, Queens, I feel you…

Point of order: all human births are “natural.” Medical interventions in fertility are a fundamental part of the deep history of our species. Stop mom-shaming women who want and need medicine for being, um, human. Cheers!

Standing up for science is one way to push back against political attacks on the university sector 👇 Experts in biology and anthropology have put together this statement to counter misinformation about race. Please consider signing and sharing

It's literally a transcript of the press conference. 10/10. No notes.

Things that are cool: research into how maternal infections shape fetal development (hey Zika). Not cool: scaring pregnant women with fevers for no damn reason (RFK Jr. is no friend to moms. Or science. Or… bears?)

IT'S OFFICIAL: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York State, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New York City have formed the Northeast Public Health Collaborative. The collaborative will issue their own vaccine recommendations and coordinate public health efforts.

TRUTH = DISSENT

"it’s material deprivation, not social diversity, that threatens to tear the social fabric. Perhaps it’s harder to have trust when you’re competing for resources. Whatever the cause, the solution seems to lie less in measures to limit immigration than in investment to tackle poverty and inequality"

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. 🔗 www.404media.co/doj-deletes-...

Watching all these centrist pundits stress the “civility” of Charlie Kirk’s style without addressing the ugliness of his substance is giving me a renewed appreciation of how the civil, polite White Citizens’ Councils conned the same crowd into thinking they were distinct from the cruder Klan.

RFK Jr. and the Trump administration are preparing to do exactly what many of us feared they would. Next week, they are planning to present data that have been misused or manipulated to make it *appear* that COVID19 vaccines caused the deaths of 25 children.

Biology Department xkcd.com/3140/

If I were editing a column about Charlie Kirk’s political genius, I would tell the writer he needed to quote Kirk’s actual political beliefs. If the writer responded that doing so would weaken or distract from his argument, it’d be a pretty good sign that the column was not ready for prime time.

The reporters and editor should be fired.

If you’ve got more money than you could ever spend in a lifetime, you could use it to make the lives of millions of others better. Or you could hoard it and spend it on vanity projects that only serve your own interests.

We interrupt this coverage of a shooting with another mass shooting at a school. www.cnn.com/2025/09/10/u...

If I have any credibility with you from 20 years of reporting on rightwing & fascist movements, please listen when I beg you not to celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot. Leave aside morality: this isn’t a match in dry grass, it’s a torch. We do not want what this could ignite & we would not win.

So... I did some analysis of grants that did receive noncompetitive renewals. In particular, I looked a those award where the title of the grant changed. Warning: The results are just what I expected, but oooph... 1/4

WA DOH's chief science officer: "We signed a statewide standing order that could act like a prescription — which instead of being signed by a doctor, is signed by a state health officer — to make it easier for people to get access to COVID-19 vaccines." All states should do this!

RFK Jr. went on Fox News today and claimed that Dr. Daskalakis, who resigned from the CDC in protest of RFK Jr.’s destruction of public health, refused to send CDC money to Texas in the midst of a measles outbreak. I do not believe RFK Jr. for a nanosecond.

This is censorship from an authoritarian regime that wants to project the illusion that they face no internal opposition or dissent. No other way to describe it.

Florida man working hard to solve affordability crisis by killing as many old people and babies as possible…

Race Isn’t Biological — So Why Do So Many Still Think It Is? @kevinlala.bsky.social and @kztwyman.bsky.social blog about their recent paper in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...

Please note, the addled tin pot dictator many people *willingly chose* does not admit mistakes. So long as this is framed as his mistake, it is immediately impossible to have him do anything but lend wild, vocal support to RFK Jr. And his voters the same. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

Mass shooters since 2018 who were transgender — 4. Mass shooters since 2018 who were not transgender — 4,193. Hope that helps.