relenski.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

"Do you support reducing federal funding for medical research?" 21% support, 77% OPPOSE www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

submitted 6 hours ago • 0 comments

100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion in the 2024 election. 70% of these donations went to Republicans. Now, Republicans in Congress are gearing up to slash essential programs to pay for another round of tax cuts for the rich. This is what oligarchy looks like.

submitted 5 hours ago • 95 comments

„The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year“

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Warrantless home searches, of all things, don't somehow become constitutional just because Pam Bondi psychically reads your tattoos, attire or astrological sign and decides you must be a TdA member. This gang is torching Fourth Amendment rights that Americans have guarded zealously since 1776.

submitted 20 hours ago • 4 comments

Being able to build simple tools has been so empowering. Here is a reproduction of Jacques Monod's 1942 PhD thesis on diauxic shifts using my handmade turbidometers. Ultra clean signal showcasing textbook catabolic repression, using his exact media. Delighted to share these tools with y'all. 💚

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

Congratulations to the new members elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences including in evolution and ecology: Anurag Agrawal (@anurag-asclepias.bsky.social), Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social), and Jennifer Martiny, among others! www.amacad.org/new-members-...

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

It's important to remember that we're dealing with someone whose whole fortune was built on overpromising and underdelivering.

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

"History has shown that science is fragile and vulnerable to theocratic, ideological, and authoritarian forces." Arturo Casadevall and I wrote this essay last year. Sadly, it has turned out to be prescient. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

“We want to stay in the loop,” the Houthis said.

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

Previous to the FDA, folks would put chalk and plaster of Paris in milk to make it appear white. They could also add formaldehyde to cover the smell and taste of spoiled milk.

submitted 5 days ago • 1435 comments

Workers who track data on car crashes, drownings, traumatic brain injury, falls in the elderly, and other perils lost their jobs. Advocates worry life-saving work will stop.

submitted 6 days ago • 847 comments

Always keep watch. Eventually the aliens will slip up and do something unhuman a little too nonchalantly. Then we'll know. 👽🛸 Yesterday, the lifeform we call "Elly De La Cruz" forgot himself and took flight to catch this baseball. 😮

submitted 5 days ago • 281 comments

During COVID, mRNA vaccines saved millions of lives worldwide. Today, Minnesota republicans proposed a bill stating that "whoever knowingly manufactures, acquires, possesses, or makes readily available to another mRNA injections or products" can be sentenced to 20 years in prison.

submitted 6 days ago • 56 comments

Is this real?!

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

There's only one reason for Trump's massive deletion and closing of national climate, weather, ocean, & environmental data sets: to silence and turn a blind eye to evidence of major threats in order to protect the fossil-fuel industry. This is modern book burning. www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/docume...

submitted 6 days ago • 4 comments

If I was a Greenlander I'd look at stories like this and feel a little more comfortable.

submitted 6 days ago • 17 comments

“In Feb, Trump admin began to put a spending limit of $1 on nearly all govt credit cards. The effect has been disastrous at science agencies, researchers say. NIH labs haven’t been able to purchase essential items:” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

Old North Church in Boston last night on the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride.

submitted 9 days ago • 66 comments

Unless, perhaps, one destroys science as we know it, by replacing it with a centralized top-down system of pretend pseudo-science. Keeping the usual images of lab coats and beakers, etc, but with declarations of "facts" that are unproven or even demonstrably false.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Thoughtful thread, and a good reminder of what science strives to be.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Incredibly grateful for the support our lab is receiving from John and Leslie Sutherland! It'll let us explore crazy ideas that might just work (first up: doing something evolution has never done; turn mitochondria into a phototrophic organelle). cos.gatech.edu/news/will-ra...

submitted 10 days ago • 10 comments

Eliminating Head Start is the opposite of efficiency. These cuts will hurt kids' health and school outcomes (both short-term and long-term) and make it harder for low-income mothers to work for pay. But of course, that's the point. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

submitted 10 days ago • 2 comments

It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Dr. Vilma Yuzbasiyan-Gurkan, a cherished member of the MSU community and a Professor in MGI & the Small Animal Clinical Science department. Read about her extraordinary legacy here: tinyurl.com/22ks8r8e

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” Diary of Anne Frank January 13, 1943

submitted 11 days ago • 275 comments

Before the election, I warned that there is no safe haven under authoritarianism. If they can ship Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a foreign prison—accused of no crime, with no trial—they can do it to anyone. Americans of conscience must stand against this now.

submitted 11 days ago • 1873 comments

Super excited and proud to share the publication of our article @pnas.org reporting a rare missense variant in GPR156 associated with Depression. Although an orphan GPCR with no known binding partners, GPR156 is expressed in the meedial habenula, a region known to be involved in mood regulation...

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

I just landed in San Salvador a little while ago, and I look forward to meeting with the team at the U.S. embassy to discuss the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia. I also hope to meet with Salvadoran officials and with Kilmar himself. He was illegally abducted and needs to come home.

submitted 11 days ago • 2941 comments

While acknowledging what actually is the near certainty that President Trump “may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss,”

submitted 11 days ago • 39 comments

Interested in postdoc opportunities in Seattle, WA? Join us May 6th for Seattle DROP, a virtual event about biomedical research in Seattle. Hear from recruiting faculty, finding the right mentor and enjoy lunch on us via a delivery voucher within the US! Registration: tinyurl.com/seattledrop25

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

WAPO: “.. Martin is now interim U.S. attorney for D.C. .. But as a conservative activist and former Missouri Republican official, he appeared more than 150 times on RT and Sputnik — networks funded and directed by the Russian government ..” @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

submitted 11 days ago • 21 comments

Constituents to Chuck Grassley: "Are you bringing back that guy from El Salvador?" Senior Citizen: “If I get an order to pay a ticket to pay $1200 and I just say ‘no’, does that stand up? Because he just got an order from the Supreme Court and he just said ‘screw it’” “I’M PISSED!”

submitted 12 days ago • 1273 comments

Either the U.S. government is able to exert monetary and diplomatic pressure on El Salvador sufficient to produce Abrego Garcia’s release, or it isn’t. The latter would be either a bald-faced lie or a pretty stunning concession of our national impotence. The Vice President should pick one.

submitted 12 days ago • 1609 comments

New essay on #substack in which I argue that it's time to answer the question. It’s time to be honest with ourselves, our elected officials, and those who would support, tacitly or actively, dismantling American leadership in science. open.substack.com/pub/joshuasw...

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Salmon & Garfunkel

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

Denisovans in Taiwan! Here’s my story (gift link) nyti.ms/3RHlz8G

submitted 17 days ago • 9 comments

I saw a version of this on here before but it's worth yelling: these institutions that Musk is illegally dismantling– the weather service, health system, climate & energy research, international aid, maybe the US mail(?)– they don't belong to him, they belong to us. We invested in them. They're ours

submitted 21 days ago • 38 comments

#GoldenAgeOfAmerica 🥇

submitted 22 days ago • 21 comments

This is part of what’s so insane. As they talk about re-shoring and manufacturing they are actively trying to destroy an entire us manufacturing industry that already exists.

submitted 23 days ago • 620 comments

When President Trump fired the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command on Thursday, it was the latest in a series of moves that have torn away at the country’s cyberdefenses just as they are confronting the most sophisticated and sustained attacks in the nation’s history.

submitted 22 days ago • 107 comments

NEW 🧵 A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far: 1) US consumers are reacting very very negatively. These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.

submitted 23 days ago • 94 comments

The title of my email newsletter today is "Decimation": buttondown.com/carlzimmer/a...

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

“Profound, harmful, and unnecessary errors”applies to all that the current administration has done so far: from foreign policy & relationship with allies to domestic policies incl dismantling the US science infrastructure once the envy of the world but now the subject of worldwide concern and pity.

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

The wealth of the United States has never really been natural resources, stock investments, or industry. For a century, it has been stability. No internal wars. No coups. No currency collapses. That's done now, thanks to religious and tech extremists seizing the levers of power for themselves.

submitted 23 days ago • 5 comments

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. 1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

submitted 24 days ago • 959 comments