Worldwide flu outbreak killed 45,000 American Soldiers during World War I In September 1918 there were two killers in the world. World War I, which would claim 20 million lives by its end, and the flu pandemic known as the Spanish Flu, is estimated to have killed between at...

The army remembers. www.army.mil/article/2104...

#ImpeachRFKJr

Not knowing what the worst people in the world were thinking every fucking day

the fascists then justified this using the science of the time, now eugenics ... just like the current fascists

RFK Jr. just said HHS is "cleaning up the risk pool" (i.e., people who are unhealthy) to bring down healthcare costs.

Why does music exist, and why does it move us so deeply? Beyond being a universal source of emotion, music reveals something fundamental about how the brain works: we are constantly predicting. Check this @nature.com review www.nature.com/articles/s41... @manlius.bsky.social @gemmadlc.bsky.social

Opinion | Measles Took My Daughter. This Is What I Want Everyone to Know.

Unbelievably sad and heartbreaking. And probably preventable, if other UK parents had vaccinated their own children. An important, moving piece (gift article).

Measles Took My Daughter. This Is What I Want Everyone to Know. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/o...

Influenza

great article in @quantamagazine.bsky.social by natalie wolchover on the bacterial flagellum and proton motive force. alas, I missed this great model on what happens to the stators during gear-shifting. see it in STC:
smallthingsconsidered.blog/schaechter/2...
#MicroSky

Yet again I remind everyone (as Elizabeth does in her very next tweet) that "foreigners are corrupting our pure blood with weakness & disease" is Fascism 101. Not some variant, not some metaphorically similar thing, not some echo -- the thing itself.

I see two schools of thought among Dems.

1. We need a new deal. Make things fair. Everyone prospers.
2. Put them motherfuckers against the wall.

I think they are compatible.

Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

Donald Trump is losing his mind Trump’s superpower is to make the people around him debase themselves while offering them no loyalty in return.

Of note, Washington Examiner is a super conservative paper

"Imagine it was someone other than Trump...posting deranged rants insulting the spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics, threatening entire civilizations with annihilation, and comparing himself to God. What would be the reaction?"

My hope is that someday, hundreds of years from now, the cautionary tale taken from the fall of the American empire is that you shouldn’t put the stupidest people on earth in charge.

Seems like a fair bit of modern philosophy is tribute acts… 😉

New Pre-Print Alert!

Evolving initial conditions: an alternative developmental route to morphological diversity

with Shannon Taylor and @jamesehammond.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📢Preprint: Positional information (PI) and information flows in dynamic tissues.
Our mathematical framework quantifies, from data, how the coupled stochastic dynamics of cell positions and properties preserve, degrade and generate PI. @alex-plum.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

everyone with real American manliness and a basic knowledge of military history knows that serious war efforts have never been derailed by such trifling matters as "communicable diseases"

To be fair, academics are mostly obsessed with flagellating their colleagues, not their actual selves.

I am hiring a postdoc for scRNA-seq research in Lund, Sweden on the visual systems of non-model inverts as part of an ERC project on the evolution and ecology of advanced color and polarization vision. Apply here or share the link with someone who may be interested! 🧪

lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Academic version: Man Finally Understands Enough About Subject To Realise How Ignorant He Is

“…in any given week there are scandals playing out in Cabinet departments, sub-Cabinet posts, and outer-rings-of-Trump influence that never even make the front page — and yet most of them would be bigger than the biggest scandal to hit either the Obama administration or Biden administration…”

BREAKING: A Closer Look at the King of Planets. 🪐🛰️

NASA has just released a new perspective of Jupiter so sharp it’s almost impossible to comprehend. Those intricate, marble-like swirls aren't just clouds—they are colossal storms, many of which could swallow Earth whole. 🌍🌪️

Opinion | Measles Took My Daughter. This Is What I Want Everyone to Know.

“What I didn’t know was that measles can cause long-term complications. A child can seem fine while the virus slowly replicates in her brain… Because both Britain and the United States are confronting outbreaks, I am sharing my story. Parents should know just how dangerous this disease is.”

still can’t believe that given the choice between “bountiful, free, clean energy from the earth, wind, and sun” and “poisonous dead animal sludge price sensitive to global politics” we keep choosing the latter

Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears Alarm caused by posts of Alex Karp, tech firm’s CEO, championing US military dominance and of AI weapons

“A company that has such naked ideological motivations and lack of respect for democratic rule of law should be nowhere near our public services.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Lynn: “low IQ was likely a significant cause of the Irish economic backwardness”

Research Ireland Programme Plan 2026 cover

Research Ireland has been engaging with the Irish research & innovation community on how we deliver our strategy- Curiosity, Capability, Competitiveness. These conversations have strongly influenced the development of our 2026 Programme Plan published yesterday www.researchireland.ie/about-us/pub...

This was an interesting and frustrating saga. One moral is that we need better data sharing and reproducible protocols. Otherwise crazy people like us will have to spend 2 years finding out that things don't work.