lots of details here—about how different state entities are (and aren’t) willing to talk about enforcement, how trans & nonbinary state employees could themselves be criminalized under the bans while also being expected to enforce the bans, and examples of “malicious noncompliance”

ACOG has filed an amicus brief in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, et al. v. President United States of America, et al. in support of women’s access to contraception, arguing that conscience objections should not prevent access to essential health care. Read the brief: https://bit.ly/4u7wIlc

The Indiana House and Senate have both passed a bill to completely eliminate requirements for businesses to document the employment of child workers. If this bill becomes law it would enable employers to hide child labor violations, according to @epi.org.

Medical Residency Application Rates Fell in States That Restricted Abortion www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

The judge will rule on the preliminary injunction in the case filed by the AAP and APHA against RFK Jr. before the next ACIP meeting, which is scheduled for March 18-19. It would be an enormous victory for public health and the people of the United States and if the judge stops RFK Jr.’s ACIP.

A disturbing and hypocritical ruling on so many levels. Especially the due process holding. The court JUST said there’s no deeply rooted right for women to control their own bodies. But there is a deeply rooted right for parents to know if their kids question their gender at school? Come on.

But since we are there, having some uses for accessibility does not make it accessibility tech because accessibility includes thoughtful, transparent affordances for safety, wellbeing, privacy, and autonomy.

Because to repeat my point, “adhd influencers are sliding into promotion Claude to ‘fix disordered brains by uploading all of your data archives” into the platform.” Now that is the point. It is a true statement. Anything else you infer is probably about you and not me or what I said.

7/ Vaccines have worked so well that many parents have never seen measles firsthand. That success makes it easy to forget how devastating this virus can be. Fortunately, two doses of the MMR vaccine are ~97% effective at preventing hospitalization & many of the negative consequences of the infection

6/ And even after recovery, measles can erase immune memory. It can weaken the immune system for months or even years, making survivors more vulnerable to other infections because their body has forgotten how to fight them.

4/ Measles can also infect the brain directly. About 1 in 1,000 children develop acute brain swelling called primary measles encephalitis, and another 1 in 1,000 develop a different form of brain swelling caused by the immune system known as acute disseminated encephalomyelitis or ADEM.

3/ About 1 in 20 children who get measles (most of whom are unvaccinated) develop pneumonia, which is the most common cause of death. When the lungs can’t get enough oxygen into the bloodstream, the brain suffers. That oxygen deprivation can cause lasting cognitive damage.

Oksana saw her children suffer at Dilley for roughly 4.5 months. She said they found worms in their food. Her 4-year-old asked if they were in jail because they were bad people. But Oksana said the release process was one of the worst experiences yet.

Writing is thinking.

I worry about reducing complex, thought-driven processes like "research" or "evaluating sources" or "coding data" to a series of discrete tasks to be outsourced, when there's so much that goes on cognitively both between and after the steps of those processes.

A new study reports a broad, rising trend of inadequate sleep among high school students, to 77% in 2023. With puberty, teens' sleep-wake cycles shift and they fall asleep and wake later. Other research suggests that later bell times mean students sleep more and report fewer depressive symptoms.

In this panel, the PJM market monitor states plainly that data centers are almost exclusively to blame for high and rising wholesale electricity costs in the Midatlantic. It's not EVs, heat pumps, or industrial electrification. Data centers. Panel discusses how to make Big Tech pay their fair share.

One of the main reasons I don't use AI is that you have to fact-check every single thing it gives you and by the time I do that, I could have just done the research myself.

This feels like a helpful primer for understanding AI in general. It makes programmers more efficient on the front end because they can generate more code. But it makes them less efficient afterwards because it vastly increases the amount of time they spend tweaking and fixing bugs.

And for those outside the wage system altogether, it's even worse. If you're disabled and rely on SSI, payments are currently capped at $994 a month nationwide. *Nowhere* in the country is that enough to afford even a modest one-bedroom apartment.

The numbers are staggering: Rent is now unaffordable for a record *half* of U.S. renters. Some 30 million jobs pay less than $15 an hour. The average wage needed to afford a one-bedroom apartment has climbed to $28.17 — nearly four times the federal minimum wage, which hasn't gone up in 16 years.

Nearly eight years ago, when I began reporting on the "working homeless," it was treated as an edge case, a tragedy at the margins. That fiction has collapsed. Housing insecurity is now an ever-widening sinkhole, swallowing not only the poor and working class but entire swaths of the middle class.

Citing reporting by @propublica.org and others, nearly 4,000 doctors, nurses and health professionals sent a letter to DHS Sec Kristi Noem calling for the immediate release of all children currently in immigration detention. Full letter: tinyurl.com/yz2amueb 1/

I've repeatedly said this in the past: the end goal of all AI is surveillance, specifically to influence and control

HBV elimination is uniquely fragile because you only get one chance to prevent perinatally acquired infection i.e. the day of birth. This is just the latest example of how the aggressive anti-vaccine rhetoric promoted by RFK.Jr led HHS is eroding public health gains. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

If sustained, we should expect: - ↑ perinatal HBV transmission - ↑ pediatric chronic HBV cohorts emerging in ~5–10 yrs - reversal of U.S. HBV elimination trajectory, widening disparities (declines typically concentrate in vulnerable systems)

When national vaccine messaging becomes inconsistent, the first measurable signal appears in newborn vaccination programs historically the most stable coverage domain. This declines in uptake for effective and proven vaccines is a warning indicator.

Parents increasingly question: “Why vaccinate if mom is HBsAg negative?” That argument ignores several important points: 1. Imperfect prenatal testing, 2. Documentation gaps, postnatal exposures, 3. The fundamental population-prevention logic of universal birth dosing.

Over four decades, tree richness across the Andes and Amazon has shifted unevenly. Some regions are losing species while others, like the northern Andes, are gaining. Researchers say precipitation and forest fragmentation drive the trend, and limiting deforestation could help protect diversity.

December 2025 through February 2026 was the 2nd warmest winter on record for the Contiguous U.S. according to Prism climate data. The widespread record to near record warmth in the west easily outweighed the cool temps in the east. 🔥🔥🔥

The study found that beef has driven about 120M acres of forest destruction globally between 2001 and 2022, mostly in the tropics. This is an area larger than California. Oil palm was in a distant second place between 20-30M acres, followed by soybeans, corn, rice, cassava...and others.

EMS crews were called to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas at least 11 times since September for children in medical distress, records show.

For International Polar Bear Day, here's a still from a video my friend Sasha took on our 2021 expedition to Franz Josef Land.

Once again: vaccines are popular, actually.

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

On this day in 2012, George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin while he was walking home from a store. Zimmerman claimed he looked "suspicious" because he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt.

“We don’t have a government that’s properly staffed,” she said. “All of these things [federal workers do] are really part of making life a little fairer, a little safer for the public. We’ve lost that.” www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/26/n...

"The utility has pointed to the region’s historically cold winter as a cause of rising heating demand and costs...But in an email to The 51st, Pepco’s own data show that their D.C. customers actually used more energy in January 2025 than January 2026."

Being a trans journalist is going to work and having to cover how your life is now illegal in your state but also at the same time make sure someone else writes the story so no one can accuse you of being biased and a "trans activist" and then they do the story and you still get accused of it.

“‘The persecution is the point,’ said Rep. Abi Boatman, a Wichita Democrat and the only transgender member of the Legislature, who received the [Kansas Dept of Revenue] notice on Wednesday.” To underscore that: a Kansas state legislator is among those whose driver’s license will be voided. (🎁 link:)

Social Security benefits play a vital role in reducing poverty in every state & lift more people above the poverty line than any other program. Without Social Security, 23.5 million more adults and children would live in poverty, according to our updated analysis. www.cbpp.org/research/soc...

This wonderful white paper is worth a read if you care about teaching writing and research in any discipline. Up with AI-free zones!

On March 3 in DC, join us for the Johns Hopkins H5N1 Influenza Preparedness & Response Forum! H5N1 is already threatening livestock and poultry, but if it gains sustained human-to-human transmission, challenges will escalate quickly. We have to plan, now. www.eventbrite.com/e/johns-hopk...

REMINDER: This Thursday, we are helping journalists protect themselves through our digital security training with @freedom.press! Register here: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

One of the most tangibly lifesaving efforts of @standupforscience.bsky.social to date was to send an on-the-ground investigator to Guinea Bissau to understand the context of the unethical &CDC funded Hep B infant vaccines study. We presented to a packed room of horrified House and Senate folks.

There is no sense in which a chatbot can "help" with your schoolwork by making it easier; if it is easier, it is less useful for actual learning (effortful practice is HOW WE LEARN) and therefore the chatbot has not helped, but has only hindered.

NEW: The USPS changed its rules on how it postmarks ballots. This may affect elections at every stage at which there's a mail deadline. An underplayed one: VOTER REGISTRATION. Many voters who send in their registration forms by mail could be postmarked late, missing out without realizing it.

"A gap in US accounting rules allows Big Tech companies to conceal tens of billions of dollars of potential liabilities for their AI data centres, the credit rating agency Moody’s warned... liabilities might not show up anywhere" in the accounting

7/ Second, that many are part scientist, part activist. You CAN do both. You can work on your science and still carve out a couple hours a week to give back to the science community by standing up for it. What we cannot all do, if we want to save science in the longterm, is keep our heads down.