There was always enough virtue in this Republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency. -Abraham Lincoln

My quote of the day Atifete Jahjaga

A response from MIT rejecting "The Compact"... orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

100% All Achievements xkcd.com/3148/

It is obvious that this absolute power becomes despotic once it has lost its connection with a higher power than itself. -Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Ideas cannot digest reality. -Jean-Paul Sartre

Officials of the modern state ar, by necessity, at least one step removed from the society they are charged with governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture.

Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children

The fact that I'm not allowed to step on this painting feels antithetical to Yoko's intentions

I'm not a fan of their art

This 'pursuit of happiness'... holds that men are entitled to 'the ghastly privilege of pursuing a phantom and embracing a delusion'. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution Quoting Howard Mumford Jones

NIH scientists say that mRNA vaccines have saved untold thousands of lives. A heroin addled nepo baby whose brain was partially eaten by a worm says mRNA vaccines are worthless and even dangerous. For busy medical patients, it can be hard to know who to trust.

I think all the time that this is the "science reform" we need to be having. Discrimination in science probably costs us more in scientific insight and scientists' well-being than anything else. AND these toxic patterns are not independent of fraud because toxic cultures create fraud pressures

Apparently Ulysses Grant's bullies called him "Useless Grant" boy howdy children haven't changed in their capacity for evil

iNaturalist Animals and Plants xkcd.com/3118/

'They took shrapnel from my heart' – the magnets saving lives in Ukraine. The pen-sized magnetic extractors are powerful enough to lift a sledgehammer. 🧪💣🧲🇺🇦 www.bbc.com/news/article...

But one thing SCOTUS did make clear is that its ruling doesn’t have to be final. Congress has a say in the scope of the courts’ equitable powers - i.e., a judge’s authority to craft remedies in a case. It should step in to reestablish the constitutional balance. /fin

Between the centuries of misery and disorder there are others when societies come to rest when the human race seems to draw breath. In actual fact, such times are more apparent than real...

AI, peer review and the human activity of science

Kuldorff is now going to present on the MMRV vaccine. The slides have not been posted. CDC has a briefing doc: www.cdc.gov/acip/downloa... MMRV was shown to have a slightly increased risk of febrile seizures compared to separate MMR + varicella vaccines in a VSD rapid cycle analysis.

They needed no facts, no information; they had a "theory", and all data that did not fit were denied or ignored. -Hannah Arendt, On Lying and Politics, 1971

*crab-walked

Governmental centralization acquires immense power when joined to administrative centralization. In this way, it accustoms men completely and continuously to disregard their own wishes and to obey, not only for once and upon one point but in every respect and at all times.

It's a raging cicada party out there. They waited 17 years for this!

One way of lessening the action of authority lies not in stripping society of some of its rights or in paralyzing its efforts but in distributing the exercise of power in several hands, in multiplying the number of civil servants to whom just enough power is granted to perform what is asked of them.

From the article: Some groups that see nuclear power as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels also offered praise. The call to reconsider the LNT model and other safety standards is a positive step toward reforming NRC’s “overly risk-averse culture, structure, and regulations” 1/3

The further a scientist moves away from the topic of their previous work, the fewer citations their new work will receive, an analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents reveals. The findings are published in @nature.com: http://spklr.io/63325hiCV #SocialScience 🧪

This is cool to see, though the irony of having an article about a nonprofit being behind a paywall is not lost on me. #openscience

1/7) Thoughtful article from @neuralreckoning.bsky.social here, very well worth a read! I am sympathetic to the argument, but not entirely in agreement (no surprise there, I suppose). Specifically, I take a different lesson from other large-scale science projects' successes and failures. 🧠📈 🧪

Large-scale projects run the risk of stifling scientific independence. Instead, let’s explore alternative mechanisms of collaboration, writes @neuralreckoning.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/funding/neur...

A paper on the effect of cell metabolism on biotechnology and medication 👀

Genentech authors flip PNAS study from corrected to retracted following Retraction Watch coverage

Have all centuries reassembled our own? Has mankind always looked out to a world like our own, where nothing is consistent, where virtue is without genius, genius without honor, where the love of order is joined to an inclination for tyranny and the holy worship of liberty to a disdain for the law..

Crash Course is a free educational video series that is used in over 90% of high schools in the US. Because it's free, teachers and students decide for themselves whether they want to use it...and they do. Also...the world record for most high fives in a day is 15,338.

Day 13 of photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver with fossils in the hopes that he saves the Paleontological Research Institution I know John wants to learn the Cretaceous origins of the paperclip form with Diplomoceras maximum, an Antarctic ammonite. Comedian is H. sapiens #savePRI 🦑🧪

A fascinating initiative pushed by the Brazilian science community! I hope more countries follow their lead elifesciences.org/interviews/3... #science #elife

Good night.

Cat alignment chart. Where does your kitty fall?

"For decades the NSF has employed hundreds of scientists... [to] choose the best research to fund. But today NSF officials announced they are essentially abandoning that approach... [to] focus on a handful of areas President Donald Trump has identified as priorities for his administration."

"i dont know what id do widdout my chatgpt 🥺👉👈" Oh my god go back to Baby School you fucking failure

With the power of cutting edge GPT tech we've invented a way to make mediocre coworkers less reliable and more annoying

OMG!!! This students' science communication project on food webs blew me away. Here's PART of it... 1/n #insects #rivers #PUI #AcademicChatter

Nature research paper: Activation of lysosomal iron triggers ferroptosis in cancer https://go.nature.com/4jO9ZVX

It seems like the time honored tradition of becoming the lab rat is alive and well. Dr. Barry Marshall would be proud! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

I hope everyone knows that it's very easy for any social content platform, including Bluesky, to be a misery machine and that if you aren't intentional about it, they will absolutely decrease the positive impact you have on the world while making you less happy.

This is how your email finds me #catsOfAcademia #AustralianMist

Tennis Balls xkcd.com/3080

A rare carnivorous caterpillar—previously unknown to biologists—stalks spiderwebs for food whilst dressed in the remains of its prey, a new Science study reports. This new species, dubbed the “bone collector,” is found only on a single mountainside on the Hawai’ian island of Oa’hu. scim.ag/3GBDcV7

Drug discoverers pursuing a new target in disease have to make careful choices to minimize the risk that their molecules will fail. cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic... #chemsky🧪 #biosky