Three cool scientists introduce their work "Our new theory has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, but we feel its depths and intricacies are best appreciated on the limited-edition vinyl release."
My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com
VERY COOL PERSON: It's four-twenty, you know what that means?
ME: Hell yeah! [starts shoving blackbirds into a pie]
Is there some reason why 'The tomato is actually fruit, not a vegetable!' has been a go-to revelation for decades, while the fact that the exact same applies to the cucumber, its unshakable comrade-in-salad, is never brought up?
The Empire Strikes Back . . .
Houston’s Darth Vader House
on the market, just a year after being sold
This 7,000 square foot house can be yours today for $7,777,777. It’s less than a mile from the Rectory of Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church here in West University Place.
Won’t you be my neighbor?
I asked ChatGPT who I am. It said I'm Chris Chambers.
I am not Prof. Chris Chambers, and I didn't reveal myself as Chris Chambers (or anyone else) in 2015...
I can see the logic in thinking that we're the same person, since we agree on a lot of things, but it's not true! And it gets worse...
academia trying to regulate the use of ai
“Publishing gives it to China for free.” The U.S. won genomics with open data. China read the same papers. We won because the moat was not the knowledge but the ecosystem: trained people, startup culture, FDA expertise. Papers are open. Ecosystems are not.
NIH published 756 funding opportunities in 2024. 120 in 2025. 14 by mid-March 2026. The one mechanism funding neural interface biology expired in 2022.
We are not losing papers. We are losing the people who would have written them.
Depth vs. speed. That is the competitive axis. One side is being defunded.
I want a "conference" where every academic cooks a dish for everyone and we all talk about our work casually while cooking. People can sous chef for each other. We eat and talk about our work in progress. You submit an abstract and a recipe.
A live lobster on a white background composited with a pan of roasted croutons. The lobster is a dark, mottled red carapace with giant claws.
What does a 'crustacean' have to do with a 'crouton'? They share a Latin root!
'Crouton' is the diminutive of French 'crouste' which also gave us English 'crust'. So a crouton is a "little crust (bit)".
In French cuisine, 'croûton' referred to a baked baguette piece brushed with butter.
Elite higher ed has many problems, but the key factor driving down trust is political. Look at the graph - backlash against costs, admissions, etc. can't explain the changes we see. We should still reform our institutions and refocus on our core mission, but blindly blaming ourselves is abuser logic
Excited to share our new preprint: "Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centered Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment" led by
@binxia.bsky.social w @ken-lxl.bsky.social & co-senior author Luke Dickens (UCL)
🤖🧵👇
Link: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07462
🧠📈#PsychSciSky #compneuro #mlsky /1
Prepping to teach Metropolis in my SF film class, and I love the evocation of Moloch in the film. It's a great example of industrialized labor as folk horror.
Drops of Jupiter is American Pie for Millennials - a foundational text for our Generational Myth that very few of us actually experienced but speaks right to our hearts so we pretend we all lived its truth.
New at @nature.com: what the #ArtemisII crew will see as they fly past the Moon on Monday 🧪🔭
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Humphrey Bogart in his pajamas says "You're a day early for Easter bunnies" to the detective in a suit. They're sitting on twin beds in a hotel room in a black-and-white film frame grab.
Reminder that DEAD RECKONING (1947) is perfect viewing for the day before Easter. Or any day, really.
Grenades, night-blooming jasmine, and sledgehammer highballs! A noir that I seem to enjoy more with every rewatch.
Clearly I could not have picked a better fantasy series to start reading after John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World than N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.
A line of glass bottles of brown liquid, sitting on a shelf. Each on has a tan label with a different color "T" on it
Honest Tea (1998-2022): A line of bottled iced teas, made with organic, fair trade products, in varieties such as Honey Green, Peach Oolong, Orange Mango, and dozens more. Sold to Coca-Cola in 2011, who eventually discontinued in favor of their Gold Peak line
Dubai chocolate is just gussied up Reese’s peanut butter cups.
And the original is better.
Microwaves have too many damn buttons. Remove everything except 0, 1, 2, 3, and 5.
And don't come at me trying to say you've ever used the 7 button on your microwave. Please.
Cake* is awful and having to eat it at everyone's damn birthday is a miserable chore.
*American cake
It’s a crime that in a society which goes crazy for sriracha and hot sauce that Sambal Oelek isn’t available in every supermarket
I think it’s fine that Taylor Lautner married someone named Taylor Lautner! That’s how marriage will be determined in the future! Maybe you’re heterosexual and thinking “it’s unlikely I will find someone of the opposite gender with my name” well in the future your parents will be judged for that!
The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection
Jim Dine, Five Feet of Colorful Tools, 1962
https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1136654
🧠 Focused ultrasound changes emotional processing 🔊
In a new study published in Neuron today, we stimulated the human amygdala using transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) and show it plays a causal role in detecting and resolving emotional ambiguity.
Random-dot stereogram generator made in Claude in minutes (crossed/uncrossed/anaglyph). I know people have a lot of feelings about AI but I could spend my whole day doing stupid things like this.
claude.ai/public/artif...
This is satisfyingly niche. Shots fired by the chemical reaction networks community.
arxiv.org/abs/2603.12060
Me too Sian, me too
What's extra sad is that numbers have only shifted minimally since I did my PhD 25 years ago
