Every so often you have a combination of success and luck that just works for you. I squandered my rare fortune on a Wordle. Wordle 1,807 2/6 ⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:

This is the gift that keeps on giving for a nerd like me (who is thankfully not currently running experiments using antibodies carried by Thermo)

The worst part about being a caveman is people constantly yelling questions about seed oil and fermented foods when you're just trying to relax. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/cave-3 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Honestly, if the Church of my childhood followed teachings closer to that of Francis and Leo XIV, I might not have gotten disillusioned and left the faith. Instead, I had my confirmation class teach us that "legitimate rape rarely results in conception"--years before Todd Akin went viral.

Threads like this are why I keep coming back to Bluesky. Also, I have to hand it to whoever is doctoring those images at Thermo: in the age of AI, they're still using old school Photoshop tricks.

I've mentored plenty of students, trainees, and junior colleagues. From where I sit, I see far more brilliant minds than there appear to be jobs and roles where they can maximize their potential. If anything we have a talent surplus.

Someone pointed out that influencers use serotonin/dopamine/cortisol/oxytocin like they’re the four humors and now I can’t stop seeing it

Amazing stuff. petapixel.com/2026/05/08/p...

A colleague received bad news from her NIH program officer today: my colleague’s grant got a great score, but NIH still can’t pay it, and my colleague will have to closer her lab. The call ended with the program officer (not my colleague) crying. Awful on so many levels.

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

this truly is the thing that makes the united states exceptional, and right wingers hate it so much they want to destroy it

Dr. Lindsey George just gave a super important talk for AAV gene therapy. I've got another paper on the to-read list: www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

#ASGCT2026 awardee lectures: absolute fire Jude Samulski cracking a bunch of jokes around the history of AAV. Timothy Yu showcasing N=1 rare genetic disease medicine. The speaker from the "Baby KJ" team calls for humility about what the CPS1 ABE was and how to keep scientific rigor in N=1 trials.

My favorite mother’s day cartoon from the stupendous @rosemarymosco.com

Discourse about finding "the Rogan of the Left" or "the liberal answer to Fox News" rarely accounts for the reality that the entire conservative media universe is the enormously unprofitable vanity project of a few rich sociopaths. It "succeeds" because they don't care how much it costs.

There tends to be an overly heavy focus on Trump himself, when the key failure in the system is Republicans in Congress. The founders knew someone like Trump might get elected. But they never anticipated such craven allies in Congress. My latest at Wamo: washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/29/r...

Me: Mom, can we get Lysenkoism? Mom: No, we have Lysenkoism at home. At home:

Some useful public speaking tips from Freud here.

On criticizing the NIH drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/04/28/o...

“There's simple reason why chatbots get medical answers wrong. LLMs don’t know things. They predict most statistically likely next word. They do not weigh evidence, make value judgments. Their training material includes peer-reviewed papers, but also Reddit threads, wellness blogs and social media”

Seeing the first genetic medicine for hearing loss get FDA approval is a spot of much-needed good news.

If we can do more with less, we can do a good bit more with the same and a WHOLE LOT MORE with more. Government investment in science already yields a positive return per dollar. Slashing science spending is costing us those returns as well as general opportunities to for scientific advancement.

RFK Jr.: "We are losing scientists, researchers, and technology..."

Péter Magyar, who unseated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Sunday in a landslide, shared a bombshell with reporters that the outgoing leader had diverted taxpayer funds to bankroll the American Conservative Political Action Conference. trib.al/ct7GGV3

The last time I tried to engage with Jay Bhattacharya in dialogue I ended up on administrative leave. 🤷‍♀️

“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”

I never realized I had so much in common with astronauts

If I hold the power button a few seconds too long, Gemini pops up and I hiss at it.

Dame Judi Dench! 🤣☠️

I literally yelled “oh my god” loud enough to scare my dog when the reveal happened

Right now, unfolding around us on a global scale, is a rich and unambiguous lesson on the dangers of fossil fuel dependence. The most obvious solution is for the affected countries to reduce their dependence through clean energy. Are you seeing that message in media?

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, is using a broad web of surveillance tools — purchased as its budget has ballooned under this administration — to monitor, apprehend and intimidate the people it seeks to deport and the U.S. citizens critical of its policies.

Correction. Orwell never said this. He did however, warn that: "political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (That's Politics and the English Language, one of my favorite essays)

I just hope this doesn't turn into a Hearing as a Service business model.

Even Dolores Umbridge had more coherence in her arguments than the current head of the NIH.

Shoveling snow in NYC is one of the surprisingly pleasant parts of living here. All the neighbors are out and everyone is way more cheerful than you'd expect given the manual labor we're all forced into by nature.

Me: I should download this app so I can borrow audiobooks from the library Google Play: YOUR E-STORE ACCOUNT IS NOW YOUR GAMER PROFILE! HERE'S YOUR GAMER TAG! Me: Where's the skip button Google: SCROLL THROUGH ALL OF THIS NEWS ABOUT FUTURE TRACKING OF YOUR GAMING ACHIEVEMENTS Me: just why

2006 ACROBAT READER: Here's your PDF to view! Me: Great! 2016 ADOBE READER: I'll help you sign those documents! Me: That's helpful. 2026 READER DC: WE HAVE CLOUD STORAGE Me: DC: LOOK AT MY AI TOOLS DC: RESTART YOUR COMPUTER AGAIN DC: SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL Me: i just want to read a paper

Bless her heart. She's never checked out a book from a library, has she?

A Trump administration official said Moderna might have more luck with its vaccine application if it resubmitted with a little “humility” Does that sound like the “gold-standard science” RFK Jr. promised? Or a mob boss threat? www.thebulwark.com/p/this-is-wh...

BONUS RULING: Judge Thomas Johnston, a George W. Bush appoiintee in West Virginia, used a recent ruling to warn of the dangers of defying due process for immigrants because of what it could also mean for Americans. It's worth a read. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Putting students on a preordained academic/professional track before they are ten years old reads more like a YA dystopian novel than any serious policy for a free society. I didn't even pick my current professional path until graduate school.

Growing up in Texas, I've seen the "left" label stuck on science since at least the 90s. I remember HS classmates wanting to go into "molecular biology but not evolutionary" for their college majors. Chemical engineering seniors denied CO2 as a greenhouse gas even though they knew its IR spectrum.

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

After all his writing on "Manufacturing Consent," there's something darkly ironic about Chomsky glomming onto a propaganda fairy tale like this

It really was a wildly successful political project to re-define “elitism” as “listening to professors and researchers” and not “agreeing with whatever drug addled wealthy lunatic perverts say”

Abolish. ice. 💔