A 6-year-old boy is missing after ICE arrested him and his dad in NYC last week and shipped them off to separate facilities. www.thecity.nyc/2025/12/02/i... @thecity.nyc @gwynnefitz.bsky.social

Jay Bhattacharya and Matthew Memoli aren't bringing "gold standard science" to the #NIH, they are gutting research slowly but surely. When this time is over, they should be hauled before Congress, and shunned for the rest of their lives. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Opinion | The state of Louisiana owes $172 million to three men who coached or will coach the LSU football team. Here's my scolding op-ed about a blue state's investment in a middle school math tutoring program.

New in Science, Macaques tap to the beat. Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!

My alma mater, Northwestern, has decided to grovel to a desperate loser, at vulnerable people’s expense

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

(1/X) Quick thing on the shutdown....yes Dems shouldn't have caved when they did but they won the shutdown politically: they killed in the elections and are soaring in the generic ballot. There's a lesson.The ABC's of dealing with narcissists. Always Be Confronting Do I have your attention now?

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories. In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

New paper from @tashaunalb.bsky.social, Roger Strong, and me! We find that the ability to split attention between non-contiguous locations develops quite late - between 6 and 8 years of age! Now out in APP. #visionscience #psychscisky #devpsych link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :) Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun This was my lab's first foray into event cognition gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊

Breaking character: I am open to the idea the media's coverage of Biden's age and mental acuity was fair or perhaps not even tough enough. But the fact that it was so much tougher than the coverage of Trump's (more severe) mental decline is damning and I can't see how anyone could argue otherwise.

The Trump administration cancelled the clinical trial for my cancer treatment and now I'll be dead in six months. But I'll die happy knowing that the kids at Oberlin won't be given trigger warnings anymore.

Halted NIH Clinical Trials List Reveals Slashed Treatments for Cancer, COVID and Minority Health www.scientificamerican.com/article/halt... Sickle cell disease, sleep disorders and lung cancer & much more A dive into the list of NIH's 383 shelved clinical trials, obtained by Scientific American

"Bill Gates' climate comments are a distraction" | My new commentary for @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Love this new technology from Cellular Tracking Technology for tracking Monarch butterflies. Great NYTimes story. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/s...

Happy to share my new paper published in @nathumbehav.nature.com: A critical look at statistical power in computational modeling studies, particularly those based on model selection. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

BREAKING: In AAUP et al v. Trump (wall-to-wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of TItle VI to reshape the University of California system), the faculty and staff of the UC system WON!!! We were granted our preliminary injunction! @aaup.org

Quanta contributing writer @maxlevy.bsky.social has received a Kavli Gold Award from @aaas.org and @kavlifoundation.org for “The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology,” a detailed account of how small organisms use static electricity to their advantage. www.quantamagazine.org/quantanews/q...

Hearing a rumor that NIH/HHS may now plan to retaliate against other Bethesda Declaration signers. I am one, but it’s not about me: we have been speaking out because of the ongoing damage to US medical research, cancer and Alzheimer’s research. As @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social put well: 1/

I really like the cogsci thinking and music in this paper. Happy that it's finally out! Thanks @omriraccah.bsky.social and Michael Seltenreich for leading this project. Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Nothing to see here, just an infamous sex trafficker planning to blackmail a future president

Donald Trump has sued the BBC for one billion dollars. The network should wait 40 days and then pay him the entire amount without a trial. by John Fetterman, Dick Durbin, and Tim Kaine

We have had enough winning. by Senate Democrats

Please join @spiantado.bsky.social at @caltech.edu today for an in-person ScienceHomecoming event with The Caltech Y www.caltechy.org/programs/sas...

"Lairmore had testified that the sandwich 'exploded all over' his chest and claimed he could smell mustard and onions. But a photo showed that the sandwich was still in its wrapper on the ground after it hit Lairmore in his bulletproof vest."

How it started. How it’s going.

The President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, PPFP, has been a jewel in the crown for faculty development and recruitment at the University of California for years and the results have been an expanded faculty with almost 100% tenure rates — unprecedented success.

This wins.

Join this free workshop on Nov 12 with Steven T. Piantadosi of Science Homecoming and learn the how-to's and beneficial impacts of communicating the importance of scientific research to your local community through opinion pieces. Register today. Link in comments.

Come to the workshop at BUCLD @bucld.bsky.social, and bring a pen ✍🏻 www.bu.edu/bucld/

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

The Python Software Foundation won a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation. Turned it down because required to affirm that we "will not... operate any programs that advance or promote DEI" simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...

Oh interesting, Abian proved some things about set theory, let's see what else he was into...

Cost to fund SNAP and keep 42 million people from starving: $100 billion Cost of lost revenue due to tax cuts for the richest Americans in the top 1%: $100 billion One is decried as "welfare." One is not. Why?

To quote my friend @drkatemarvel.bsky.social, climate change won't make humanity extinct but we can do better than "not extinct". Raise your standards people!

TIL about this static1.squarespace.com/static/520cf...

It's not about what this country can or can’t afford. It’s about priorities. [Cartoon by Jesse Duquette]

It’s too bad only farmers are people and not librarians or artists or healthcare workers or researchers.

A Brief History of Halloween Isn’t Fun Anymore 🧵

The UC Regents finally released the “settlement agreement” the Trump administration proposed in August. It’s a doozy. UC alumni, faculty, staff, students, parents, donors—and all citizens of California: Now is the time to let the UC Regents know you do not want them to sign this bad deal.

I'm giving a talk on "How Social Media Misleads Us about Public Opinion" to The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine in DC Watch it online or in person: www.nationalacademies.org/event/45948_11-2025_beware-the-funhouse-mirror-how-social-media-misleads-us-about-public-opinion

Please understand that the only reason this has been released is because of the UCLA faculty association who filed a request and challenged the refusal in court. If you are a UC faculty member, join your FA!

(7/X) You know the old quote about why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is. Why do "free speech" people try to appeal to cranky reactionary old men? Because that's where the money is.

(1/X) Check out a typical Harper's letter signatory's Twitter feed and you'll mostly *still* find 80% complaints about the "woke left", even in the midst of the greatest government crack-down on free speech in at least 60 tears. Why? Because the "free speech" movement is donor/patron-driven.

The journal Science covers the UC spyware saga. The UC administrators’ policy assurances are like saying one does not have to lock one’s car because it is illegal for someone to steal the car or its contents. #highereducation 🧪⚛️🔭 #academicsky www.science.org/content/arti...

SCOTUS just allowed Alabama's execution of Anthony Boyd: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p... Justice Sotomayor wrote this vivid dissent blasting AL for using the method of nitrogen gas. @laurengill.bsky.social's reporting from an AL execution shows you why: boltsmag.org/alabama-nitr...