Canadian scientists: I’m taking a look at how Canadian science and regulation (e.g., food safety, disease control, drug development & assessment, etc) relies on American science and how that’s changing. Please send me stories of how you use/used American science and how that’s changed/changing.

Experts aren't always right. That's why I put my faith in morons who are never right

This isn't dollar for dollar, at all - the comparison has lots of little issues (and some big ones too). But... Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2024 budget: $1.4bn CAD NIH: $47.1bn USD University of Toronto 2024 R&D: $1.5bn CAD John's Hopkins U: $4.1bn USD

Love this image! I need this "isolator machine" for writing my next book. FOCUS UP! Interesting article: Are attention spans really shrinking? What the science says www.nature.com/articles/d41... “...a huge disconnect between what we feel like is happening and what is actually happening."

There are a few more metascientific implications I'd like to highlight. 1. When reporting replicability rates, there are multiple levels of uncertainty that needs to be modeled in a hierarchical way, and metascientific practice flattens all to the lowest level, masking much of it in the process.

Certainly overkill in response to me switching to Telus after their customer service was so bad last week…

My story on the NSB terminations:

U.S. President Donald Trump has fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees the National Science Foundation. https://scim.ag/4cxQWhl

How it started / how it’s going — Jay Bhattacharya edition. 2025: “We will never use this agency to censor scientists who disagree" 2026 : Bhattacharya “has canceled the publication of a study that found that the Covid vaccine sharply cut the odds of hospitalizations and emergency visits”.

My friend, Dan Breznitz, begins talks about innovation by asking “What exactly do we want from innovation?” I follow up with “Who gets to be part of the “we” in that conversation?” Here’s our pal, Tom Goldsmith, offering a good answer to both.

You should fill this out, if for no other reason than to try to figure out what your own thoughts here are

Brief fun survey from Jessica, Andrew & myself: If you are a faculty member, research scientist, postdoc, or senior Ph.D. student in any area of science, please take five minutes and fill it out. We’ll share the results widely along with some reflections. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

And posing a good question is hard in basic science not because we don’t know what good questions are (though in emerging fields that can be a constraint), but because a good question is one that can be answered definitively with data that can be realistically obtained.

The hardest part of science is posing the right question, not answering it.

Last word: History of science exists. Philosophy of science exists. Science and technology studies exist. There is no excuse for writing about science in complete and utter oblivion about vast scholarship that has produced a lot of knowledge and understanding about what science is and how it works.

Huge result here and the CA jury still deliberating. The idea that social platforms are defective products is going to pick up a lot of steam: www.theverge.com/policy/89991...

All the Saxon Musk posting reminds me of one of the all-timers

Anthropic doing what it does best: hype this as large-scale qualitative study. Qual research is not evaluated by scale but by depth, context, and human interpretation. Stop assuming that “hand-wavey-ness” is a qual problem just because qual work doesn’t look like large-N quantitative analysis.

What if in 20 years an actor named LeBron B. James comes along and people spend weeks arguing about whether him or Michael B. Jordan made better films