Rep Tom Barrett would rather take food from the hungry than give care to the sick. If he won't lift a finger to help his constituents, I will. I'm holding vigil for 30 hours leading up to the SNAP cutoff deadline, and collecting donations for the Greater Lansing Food Bank. bit.ly/cd7food

Remembering the time in grad school when a Black PhD student at the next desk over was doing computer vision research. He was testing out a facial recognition tool using his own face as a reference, but it wasn't working. So he asked a (white) colleague to try it, and of course it worked for her.

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

Data like these are exactly why I think @wewill2026.bsky.social is an excellent candidate to be the next MI-07 representative! Some people say Elissa Slotkin won our district because she's moderate. I think that's wrong. I think she won because she stood for something. Will does too.

RFK is undoing human subjects protections so he can conduct placebo trials of vaccines. That means infecting people knowingly. I wonder who will “volunteer” for these trials? If history is any guide, a lot of incarcerated and other powerless people.

tl;dr 1. Studies of genAI in the classroom show that it harms learning 2. The quality of AI-generated text is irrelevant to its most negative effects on teaching 3. The way AI has entered the classroom is as a money-making project extracting new labour, not a “tool” serving teachers’ actual needs

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Swipe up to try a new variant on Conway's Game of Life. And another. And another. This is how artificial-life researchers spread the joy after the #ALIFE2025 conference! They say it's like TikTok, but I wouldn't know.... ⚙️🧫 rulehunt.org?rulesetHex=7... #cellularautomata #gameoflife

The SONI session turned out a great—shout out to the speakers & the panelists @emilydolson.bsky.social, @risi.bsky.social, @blaiseaguera.bsky.social & Sidney Pontes-Filho for great talks & discussion on how we can rethink intelligence under the complexity lens. #ALife2025 @alife2025.bsky.social

New, brief overview of lexicase selection: lexicase.ai It considers individual training cases in different random orders, and therefore with different priorities, for each selection event. #AI #MachineLearning #ALife

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

"This compact is a “reward” in exactly the same sense that it is “rewarding” to purchase protection from the Mafia. The compact is an open, explicit threat." This is very good.

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Yingnan Gao has a major overhaul on his paper investigating how to detect selection in lineage tracing data using tree balance statistics! #evoSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We're excited to announce final program of the @alife2025.bsky.social SONI session which will host a panel discussion with @blaiseaguera.bsky.social, @risi.bsky.social, @emilydolson.bsky.social & Sidney Pontes-Filho Check out the full program: sites.google.com/view/soni-al... See you in Kyoto ⛩️

I love a good creative action! I just sent my rep a duck - send yours one too!

#Workshop Call! Does ALIFE have a "marketing problem" ? We think so - and we're trying to do something about it! Come help us, at the Societal Outreach Initiatives for Artificial Life Workshop #ALIFE2025. More details: imytk.github.io/blog/2025/al... @alife2025.bsky.social

Excited to see this effort to get a proposal for statewide ranked choice voting on the ballot in Michigan! Voting methods are a fascinating topic, and I like this website for experimenting with them: votevote.page (I believe the IRV option in the runoff methods box is equivalent to the proposal)

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

Since inauguration day I've really started noticing how one of the toxic byproducts of fascism is how the "all these people are unworthy of life" idea has become more accepted on the left- the same shit as on the right but merely the targets flipped- and we really have to push back at that.

Introducing our #ALIFE2025 Ambassadors! Our ambassadors: - are champions of the conference & the field of #ALIFE - encourage interest and participation from old & new audiences - lead outreach efforts & build new relationships - are positive advocates for the conference and the wider community!

Today I saw a family of two geese and a whole bunch of goslings cross the road in a perfect little line at a crosswalk (they even had the walk sign!) and it was the cutest thing

Court invalidates NSF 15% indirect cost cap. Strong ruling. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

You can find her on Bsky here: @emilydolson.bsky.social

This is awesome work! Also, I'm biased, but I'm loving the empirical support for holding conferences in the great lakes region :)

🚨HUGE SCIENCE WIN ALERT🚨 NIH Grants to be restored en masse!!! Thank you Judge Young for standing up for science! #StandUpforScience #SummerFightforScience

Our biggest, bestest national celebration. I expected this to be a terrifying fascist spectacle, but instead I actually feel a little sad, like the time my friend Charlie and I set up a lemonade stand when we were seven and nobody stopped all day.

🚨BREAKING: 300+ NIH employees call out the harm of censorship & politicized science in scathing email to Bhattacharya, demanding an end to political interference, a lift on funding freezes, & rehiring of fired staff whose work saves lives. This is historic - insiders are blowing the whistle. 🧵(1/5)

[ANNOUNCEMENT] 🔔 Call for Art Pieces 🔔 #ALIFE 2025 invites artists, designers, and makers from all backgrounds to contribute to the Community Artworks & Demos showcase, which sits at the creative forefront of artificial life. Full details: 2025.alife.org/submit#CALL-... Deadline: 31st July.

I appreciate the offers from other scientists to help Harvard (students, labs, etc) through this attack, but what would be most helpful is for you to use your position to contact your elected representatives and make it clear this fight isn't just Harvard, it will affect you, and their districts too

I love the concept of domesticated transposable elements. I like that my genome has its little viral pets to feed nucleic acids and take out for transcriptional walkies. 🧬

We’ve lost a giant. He was always very kind and encouraging to me as a young #kelp forest ecologist. Go listen to @futureecologies.bsky.social’s kelp series for a wonderful episode where he tells the stories behind his classic work. www.futureecologies.net/kelpworlds May his memory be a blessing.

I would like my vaccines, thank you very much. Go comment.

As a part of the @standupforscience.bsky.social Summer Fight for Science campaign, we want to host 1000 teach ins across the US between now and Sept 30th. Yeah, it’s a big, hairy, audacious goal. I know. Here is a running list of ideas, please scoop and do! 🧵🪡

🚨🚨 Alarming NSF policy update By accepting an NSF award, an institution now must say it's: 1. Not engaging in boycotts of Israel (yes really) 2. Not advancing or promoting DEI in violation of anti-discrimination laws Announced via a footnote today: nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/gc1-ma...

🚨URGENT RESPONSE CALL🚨 🌪️23 LIVES WERE LOST OVERNIGHT AS TORNADOS HIT KY. KY has one of several regions in the US without 24/7 National Weather Service coverage, due to DOGE cuts. W/out overnight monitoring, ppl don't receive weather warnings. THIS is how science cuts cost lives. shorturl.at/JgTjU

NEW: The Trump administration’s slashing of budgets and staff have Great Lakes scientists concerned that they have lost the ability to protect the public from toxic algal blooms, which can kill animals and sicken people. By @annaleighclark.bsky.social

This. Love yourself enough to believe in learning and teaching yourself something and growing as a person. Do I remember a single term paper I wrote? No. Am I a writer now because of them? Yes.

SaveNSF is a coalition of concerned scientists and allies who are working to save funding for scientific grants through the NSF. The mission is to support and advocate for the continuation of vital research and innovation. Join: www.savensf.com

I at first thought 1/10 was the rating of the week and honestly hard to disagree

I must once again repeat: CONTACT 👏🏽 YOUR 👏🏽 OFFICE 👏🏽 OF 👏🏽 SPONSORED 👏🏽 PROJECTS 👏🏽 TO 👏🏽 FIND 👏🏽 OUT 👏🏽 HOW 👏🏽 TO 👏🏽 INITIATE 👏🏽 AN 👏🏽APPEAL 👏🏽

Do people in the same household share strains when they have the same species? How many cells transmit when a strain is shared? Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable? We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper. 🧵[1/10]

1. In a landmark ruling, a federal judge has blocked the passport ban for transgender Americans... government ban likely violates equal protection, and is made with animus. Though the ruling only applies to plaintiffs, it is expected expand in coming weeks. Subscribe to support my journalism.

If you're an NSF grantee who receives notice of cancellation per today's announcement, please get in touch here or via Signal mzahneis.09.

Happy to see MSU following Harvard's lead in web design! msu.edu/researchforyou

🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read. He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:

It’s essential to revive this earlier point: NSF is REQUIRED BY LAW to evaluate all proposals for broader impacts. DOGE will likely ask/make NSF break the law. And it’s key for members of Congress and the public to know that. More NSF-specific legal context: www.aaup.org/sites/defaul...