Scoop: NSF has been quietly blocking new funds and grants to four top universities: Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Dozens of proposals from PIs at these universities—and their collaborators—have been stuck at the Office of Award Management awaiting finalization for months.

Attn: STAT is hiring a reporter to cover a new trust-in-science beat. Note that the listing currently says it's Boston-based, but that's an error and is being corrected. The position is remote-friendly! www.statnews.com/careers/stat...

AGI + space-based solar geoengineering. 🤷‍♂️

I was ready for this to be about "renewable" natural gas, but they're planning to utilize the thermal energy from warm treated wastewater.

Not now, outer core!

I bought a single item from you on the Internet. It was a one-time transaction. Stop sending me follow-up notes. We're not going steady.

My editor just got thank you notes from some elementary school students he spoke to about journalism, and shared this one with us.... I've never felt so seen.

Cleansing your feed.

Some notes now that I’ve seen the transcript of the hearing, thanks to @lizdye.bsky.social . First: the government dismissed the felony count in an effort to convince the judge not to make them produce full transcripts, knowing they showed serious misconduct.

NEW: They Got the Best NIH Scores of Their Careers. A Year Later, They Still Don’t Have Funding. As the NIH bankrolls new research at a significantly slower-than-usual pace, I talked to scientists left in the lurch about the toll on their research and careers: www.chronicle.com/article/they...

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.

Pitches due Friday for @technologyreview.com's Impossible issue: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

For the @wired.com Big Interview this week, I interviewed California gubernatorial hopeful and billionaire Tom Steyer. It was a tough hang for many reasons, but particularly because he didn't know who he was talking to.

OK, first off, how many times does this have to happen before we all understand that generative AI cannot be relied upon in this way? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...

MIT has lost 500 international grad students relative to last year. Caused directly by the White House. Closing America's doors to the very best, most brilliant people on the planet is like dropping a bomb directly on America's capacity to innovate. On the prosperity of our children's future.

The whole dumb conversation about "woke" was a precursor to this absolutely sinister anti black institutionalized racism and so many people gave that segregationist logic credibility.

The dire ‘math problem’ of the Colorado River I asked Anne Castle how far western states’ leaders are from really addressing the crisis. Her answer: Nowhere near. www.latimes.com/environment/...

The World Health Organization’s latest global statistics report reads less like a progress update than a warning sign. Progress on some of the world’s biggest health threats is stalling, and in some cases reversing altogether. Here’s what the numbers reveal about the state of global health.

AI got better at writing scientific papers, and now the peer review system is being overwhelmed with a flood of AI-generated research that is almost impossible to detect

This is one of those deep-in-the-weeds carbon accounting issues that matter a lot: Under SBTi's new rules, a tech co. running a data center at night on natural gas in, say, Texas can now claim to be clean if they buy credits from a solar farm operating during the day two time zones away.

Hot, sweaty, exciting - and increasingly deadly. Climate change will be an unwelcome but very present player in the upcoming FIFA World Cup in North America - especially in the fan zones. New @wwattribution.bsky.social study. www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-chan...

Insurers are trying to tell Californians that it's not sustainable to sprawl out on quarter-acre lots in light wood frame houses up against wildfire-prone hills. Bernie Sanders, Jane Kim, David Dayen, and other leftists with no interest in evaluating the risks are saying: lalalala, I can't hear you!

There are approximately 2.8 million trans people in the US. That means FOURTEEN PERCENT of American trans people have moved across state lines in the past 18 months.

The article misses a key point which is that, now that the identity of these designer particles is public, it's clear they don't make much sense as an SAI material.

I'm committed to using public domain art for pitch calls, and for some reason really struggled with this one. But regardless...heads up! Pitch call for @technologyreview.com's Impossible Issue www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

NEW FROM ME: I wrote about how chatbots are surfacing real phone numbers, these PII exposures are likely to increase, and (maybe the worst news) how hard it is to actually prevent this from happening. www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/13/1... #AI #Privacy

Stardust has finally revealed its proprietary geoengineering particles are made from amorphous silica. Pre-prints here: stardustsrt.com/science It's also filed for a patent, the application for which should pop up in public records in coming days, I'm told. NYT got the scoop:

AI agents getting better at mimicking human language is not evidence that they're becoming any more conscious than any other piece of software has ever been. Stop with this nonsense already.

Yikes, the Google app has started doing aggressive AI news summaries/aggregation instead of starting with direct links to sources — stripping away the economic value from the outlets doing the work.

Reminder: It's far, far cheaper and easier to not emit the stuff in the first place than it is to pluck CO2 molecules out of the air.

NEW: i took a look at a chevron power plant designed to power a data center that is asking for a school district tax break in texas — the plant's probable client is microsoft, which made a series of promises around tax breaks in january my dive into tax breaks for data center power:

As always, I’m on the lookout for delightful, weird, or depressing tech stories. My new email is [email protected] and I’m HKelly.11 on Signal. Say hello.

Last week on the @science.org podcast, we had EIC @holdenthorp.bsky.social & historian @timothysnyder.bsky.social talking about resistance for scientists. You can listen here: www.science.org/content/podc... Or check out the video version on our new YT channel www.youtube.com/@ScienceMaga...

"Fuel treatments reduced wildfire spread and severity, avoiding an estimated $2.8 billion in damages by limiting structure loss, cutting CO2 emissions, and lowering fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure. Each dollar invested yielded $3.73 in expected benefits." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Breaking NEWS!! Federal judge rules DOGE illegally terminated NEH grants last year in a summary judgment in favor of plaintiffs AHA, ACLA, and MLA, and orders the restoration of 1400 terminated grants

Fertilizer and fuel inflation was one thing, but now ....

Instant Mad Men flashback.

this is awful news

In enhanced weathering models, more rock surface area typically means faster weathering and more carbon removal. But some models use a mistaken surface area equation that could inflate carbon removal by up to two orders of magnitude. Our latest post explains the mistake and how to move forward.

Voluntary measures were never gonna get us where we need to be on emissions. But the fact that data center growth has made it corporate-ly/socially acceptable for a big tech company with ambitious climate goals to abandon them seems like a really bad sign. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

LOOKING FOR… Recommendations on the best people with whom to connect about what’s going on in Utah with the Stratos data center project!

lol

basically my entire career right here

Who would be a particularly informed person to ask about the most promising climate tech companies in Europe these days? (Please, please don't send me PR pitches 🙏.)

Are you a journalist who has used AI in your work? Has your newsroom created a guideline or a set of standards defining how it should be used? I want to hear about it! I'm teaching a class on the subject this summer. Also, here's a horse I met yesterday while on a trail run in Marin County.

/7 The media does not grasp its role — not as reporters, but as instruments of punishment by law enforcement. Ask Wen Ho Lee or Richard Jewell. This is a collective cultural and institutional decision by the journalism profession — give us tips and we will be your tool.

Your feed is overrun with clips of podcasts, videos, and events — this is the cutthroat community of "clippers" behind it Read more from @miasato.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/report/92000...

The newsrooms reviewed nearly 60 years of legislation and identified over five dozen flood safety bills rejected by lawmakers. Must read reporting from Lexi Churchill, Emily Foxhall and Pratheek Rebala. www.propublica.org/article/texa...