Billionaire fortunes have reached all-time highs under Trump. So has the movement to tax them Residents in at least 10 states are organizing campaigns to tax wealth in order to fund schools and other social services

wrote about how rage at America's wealthiest, particularly in tech (Musk, Zuck, Thiel), and the inequality of a new gilded age is powering a wave of efforts to tax the rich — out of organizing and anger that's built from Occupy to the 2016 Bernie campaign to Zohran's election. @us.theguardian.com

China could be the world’s biggest public funder of science within two years Forecast by science-policy researchers raises questions about where the epicentre of global research will shift to in the coming decade.

China is on the cusp of becoming the world’s biggest public funder of research, according to a forecast by US academics, as stalled growth in government investment in the United States coincides with consistent rises in spending by the Chinese authorities.

The Cynical, Gullible American Man This is why we live in a world of conspiracism and falsehood.

“Americans are facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism"—one “that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods," Adam Serwer argues.

Great article. I particularly liked(?) this part, about the way manosphere talking points were used to justify the shooting of Renée Good at the very highest levels of the US gov. Reactions that say "duh, the right was always misogynist!" while not untrue, miss the point. This is escalating

Can we engineer cognition in aneural systems? What are the challenges and implications? Can synthetic biology be used to interrogate basal cognition? Our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social explores these questions using models of minimal gene circuits. Available here pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Cellular automata: Vines on a Fence

Cellular automata: Vines on a Fence

Cellular automata: Vines on a Fence

Cellular automata: Vines on a Fence

This is cellular automata applied to a staggered grid, like in beaded peyote stitch. All of these images were created with the same algorithm, what I call “Vines on a Fence.” The only difference among them is how I started each patch. I give the recipe for Vines on a Fence on page 105 of my new book

Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from the CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they …

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!

This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

Oh my god maybe its not parody lmfao

This is Literally the Job Political journalists need to stop pretending they don't know what Republicans are going to do.

"They told us what they were going to do. They published it. They put it on a website. And when it happened, the press was surprised."

Hoo boy, everyone should bookmark this @parkermolloy.com piece & make sure everyone involved in media reads it.

The species problem evolving in the Anthropocene - Nature Reviews Biodiversity The question of how to define a species has a long history and continued relevance for ongoing biological and conservation research. This Review describes the history of the species problem, and explo...

The species problem evolving in the Anthropocene @natrevbiodiv.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Great thread from our resident expert on industry influence, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, enumerating and contextualizing the key results of our recent preprint.

The actual story is that a family of American citizens trying to evacuate from a neighborhood that ICE had made unsafe, and then ICE tossed munitions into the car, causing three kids to be hospitalized and a six month old to stop breathing. DHS called the family “radical agitators”

Convergent genome evolution shaped the emergence of terrestrial animals - Nature Comparisons of 154 genomes from 21 animal phyla and outgroups have been used to reconstruct ancestral adaptation to life on land across 11 distinct terrestrialization events, revealing strong evidence...

Reaults like these have long suggested (eg Simon Conway Morris) that if there are exoplanets similar to earth, any life there might resemble terrestrial life in certain ways. Ecology is a powerful factor in evolution. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

babe wake up, they're doing insider trading on war crimes

my plan to get this country back on track consists of one bullet point: i propose we stop pretending stupid people arent stupid just because theyre loud and theres a lot of them

🚨 What if evolution is the ”law”… and networks are the machines that do the work?

In this paper (just published) I try to formalize how living systems are non-equilibrium, information-processing, adaptive matter. With a great biological flavor! 🧪🌐🌍🧬🦠

👉 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

🧵 1/

Are bacterial spores some kind of travelling neurons? In this @science.org paper the authors show that B. subtilis spores can integrate environmental signals over time and remember transient nutrient pulses. @koseskalab.bsky.social @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.kaitokikuchi.com/assets/pdf/K...

Collage of thermal images printed on receipt paper.

Made this collage from thermal images I took and printed using a mini laser receipt printer hooked up to a raspberry pi zero today:

We need transparency standards for social media research that involves companies | PNAS We need transparency standards for social media research that involves companies

Fantastic and blistering comment about the need for transparency in industry-academic collaborations.

From @georgiaturner.bsky.social, Ian Anderson, and Luisa Fassi

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How out-group animosity can shape partisan divisions: A model of affective polarization Abstract. Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism)

Now is a good time to remind people of our paper. We showed that presence of negative ties (out-group hostility) alone is enough to create polarization - even in a fully connected network. There is no need for social balance theory.
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the invention of smartphones and the advent of social media, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Opinion | As a conservative, I’m beginning to wonder: Are we the bad guys? Republican bigotry, tariffs and defense spending, through readers’ eyes.

they said it. they actually said it.

"Our analysis shows that in the aftermath of extreme weather events, lower-income neighbourhoods are less likely to rebuild and do not return to their pre-disaster state, whereas higher-income areas rebuild and tend to improve...highlighting increasing disparities in their built environments."

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’ AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’

“Farid says that he now counsels students to not go into AI research, because of the “frenzy” in the field and the large volume of low-quality work being put out by people hoping to better their career prospects”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

When formal systems stop working, neighbors turn to each other in what many call 'mutual aid' Organizers say that interest in local, grassroots initiatives to meet community needs has been growing.

Organizers say that interest in local, grassroots initiatives to meet community needs has been growing.

New pre-print with @psmaldino.bsky.social on an agent-based model of propaganda in online spaces.

Using the voter model from physics, we simulate networks with stubborn agents (zealots) who do not change their opinions, asking about their optimal positioning for influencing the network.

Part of the problem is people think what persuades them is logic and facts.

In reality, most people's opinions are shaped primarily what they perceive to be the views of the community they're in.

So if you hang out with Nazis all day, it starts to feel "normal."

RIP Sean Connery you would have loved saying this headline