😎😎😎😎😎
Check out my book!!

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746817...

Tuberculosis Outbreaks Worsening in Nunavik While Quebec Government Ignores Calls to Declare Public Health Emergency New research finds lack of resources, language barriers persist in this Inuit region, where Red Cross has been called to help with TB.

« There are systemic and structural reasons for why Nunavik, as part of Quebec, is veering farther from the goal of eliminating tuberculosis by 2030, while its neighbouring Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut is getting closer »

pressprogress.ca/tuberculosis...

as a science journalist, lemme say it is utterly astounding to get science *and* journalism this wrong on every level

Belief in & support for vaccines is normal.

“But that reality is not immune to the stories we tell about it… [Bad polls] change what clinicians say in the exam room, the decisions policymakers & leaders make, and ultimately become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Methods matter for talking points

She will often put on an act. In conversation, she might suddenly "get down" and be very chicken-and-ribs, sucking her teeth, poking a finger into her scalp and scratching -a strange, primitive gesture that makes her hairdo rock back and forth on her scalp like a wig. It's not difficult to get the impression that she's putting you on, at times, taking pleasure in watching you try to figure her out.

The New York Times on Toni Morrison in 1979, for anyone thinking them targeting minorities with atrocious dehumanizing tropes is at all new

“poking a finger into her scalp and scratching ‐a strange, primitive gesture”

www.nytimes.com/1979/05/20/a...

“This is Kawhi Leonard with Fresh Air”. @pablo.show

The Yale report on trust in higher education has some good recommendations for reforms in many areas that I hope Yale and other schools implement.

But its diagnosis is oddly silent about what I suspect is the most important force driving the decline in trust in higher education: political attack.

This is where the reports lack of discussion of recent history, as @fishkin.bsky.social pointed out in his superb thread, matters because it helps contextualize statistics like this.

Estimates suggest that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans among faculty nationwide by a margin of about 10 to 1.

Why is this statistic surprising? The GOP has been at the forefront of attacking and defunding higher education for decades. Trump has made it priority to “take down” elite universities, seeking to fine them, tell them what to teach, and who to hire. JD Vance said “the universites are the enemy.”

There is nothing unique about my courses. Colleagues around the country in higher ed with whom I am in touch use a similar assortment of texts that highlight “conservative intellectual traditions.”

I also teach a course called, “From the New Deal to the Age of Reagan,” in which we read texts by the likes of Russell Kirk, Phyllis Schlafly, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and use a documents book called THE RISE OF CONSERVATISM IN AMERICA, 1945-2000./4

Moreover, even in humanities/social science areas there has been an efflorescence of scholarship on conservative ideas and traditions. Just to take one example, In the “History of American Capitalism” class that I co-teach, our main text for this week is Milton Friedman’s CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM./3

And in popular majors or schools where they are clearly relevant, such as economics and business, these traditions are hardly absent. Indeed, one could argue that the intellectual diversity problem in those areas is a lack of attention to left/liberal perspectives./2

The idea that universities ”tend to exclude conservative intellectual traditions” is off base on two fronts: 1) how are “conservative intellectual traditions” relevant to the most of the popular majors and faculty research areas, such as computer science, engineering, the natural sciences?/1

Congratulations!

The longer a species stays in the wildlife trade, the more dangerous it becomes. A new study explains why A study finds that 41% of traded mammal species share at least one pathogen with humans, compared with just 6.4% of species not involved in trade.

Nice coverage of our study in the LA Times! www.latimes.com/science/stor...

RFK Jr. Lied His Way Into Office and American Health Is the Victim He is pushing quackery as science as health secretary

Kennedy canceled $500 million in mRNA research and announced no new mRNA projects will ever be initiated—killing the technology that produced the fastest vaccine rollout in human history.

I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸

We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto.

The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.

Every story reporting a scientific result should do what Carl does here, pointing out the source of underlying funding and whether it has been cut by the Trump regime.

There is No Consensus on Biological Sex At this critical moment when misinformation about sex is being applied to policy globally, scientific clarification on the definition of biological sex is valuable. Here, we evaluate the primary…

"The fact that there is no current consensus of biological sex is not
antithetical to science... However, the field urgently needs an ethical
and reproducible approach for discussing sex"

There is No Consensus on Biological Sex

“Most importantly, regardless of scientific debates, no biological definition of sex should be used to dictate human rights.”

A star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his career Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught.

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

The variety of German bees before the Industrial Revolution (187, top) vs after the introduction of pesticides (43, bottom), DHM

The LTER program specifically supports experiments and monitoring to study processes that play out over much longer time-frames than a typical three-to-five-year NSF grant. It's basic infrastructure for how we understand biodiversity... and how biodiversity responds to long-term environmental change

OMG. The LTER program is one of the best, most ambitious programs in ecology. It's 26 sites supporting science about the long-term and large-scale phenomena. Like: how does farming change soil over time? How do sites recover from disturbance? What makes a healthy river? etc. 💔💔

My masters research (community ecology) was funded at a LTREB location.

Sunsetting decades of time series data sets from LTERs is infuriating.

I would not be party to implementing this policy if I worked there.

For non-scientists, LTER programs run for decades, so scientists can learn how ecosystems change over time. These programs cover ecology, evolution, systems biology, and it includes animals, plants, even microbes, and more. We learned so much about how our world works with LTERs. This sucks :(

👇🎯 There is no plan for how to fund public universities w/o foreign graduate students, just as there is no plan for how to fund them w/o the illegal federal cuts being restored. But the public doesn't know there has been no loud public collective action from our leaders.

bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Attended this talk in DC as well to mark @chanda.blacksky.app ’s new book, The Edge of Space-Time - so may great thoughts, ideas, perspectives. Came away with notes and a whole reading list. Buy the book, go listen to a talk if there’s one near you. 📚

Study shows thawing permafrost releases much more greenhouse gas than expected Thawing permafrost emissions could accelerate climate change as Arctic soils become 25x to 100x more permeable, releasing much more gas.

New laboratory experiments from the University of Leeds shows that thawing permafrost can become 25 to 100 times more permeable, allowing greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere much more easily than when frozen.

www.earth.com/news/thawing...