Seth Jacobson

How pathetic America is. We live in a country controlled by a performative masculinity built around large trucks, gun ownership, and bullying attitude towards those in need. Our schools are transformed from centers of community activity to fortified fortresses.

How RFK Jr. alienated MAGA, MAHA and the White House in a single week The botched announcement about mRNA vaccines reveals a health department full of dysfunction and infighting.

I spent the week tracing how HHS Secretary RFK Jr. canceled $500 million in mRNA research and reporting on a(nother) very chaotic week inside HHS.

Let me introduce you to the fringe doctors, anti-vaccine activists, and MAHA operatives behind the mRNA “debacle.”

www.msnbc.com/news/news-an...

Yes! 10x the number of congress people and have proportional representation for all parties that cross 10% threshold.

Everybody studying #exoplanets needs to be aware of this incredibly important point! 🔭

A passenger on a flight that required an emergency exit via an inflatable slide describes to NBC News' @georgexsolis the moment he watched a wheel come flying off the #plane during takeoff at the #Den... TikTok video by nbcnews

This happened to @astroyami.bsky.social, @carolineszcz.bsky.social and myself but it was a Toyota Hi-lux. We were in northern Namibia and I was driving. www.tiktok.com/t/ZT6kV85NW/

Perhaps, I'm too influenced by Karl Popper, but I think we must recognize that *all scientific claims are wrong*. Science is a process towards truth. The scientific literature is a public record of this process and so it is filled with claims that have and will someday be shown to be wrong. 2/2

Retraction The Research Article “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus” by F. Wolfe-Simon et al. (1) has been the subject of discussion and critique since its online publication in 201...

For whatever its worth, I disagree with the decision by Science to retract a paper because it was wrong. Retraction is a tool to identify and remove works created by willful malfeasance. When scientific claims are wrong, the reason why is important, and Science's decision muddles them. 1/2

I think a key point is that any laws that weaken tenure will be weaponized not to target famous white men at Ivy League schools but rather more vulnerable folks. That's part of the reason one should take the tenure process seriously, and why one has to accept some failure modes with tenure.

I still can’t believe that all NIH grants to my colleagues at Harvard and Harvard Medical School have been nullified. And that, as a nation, we’re somehow okay with this illegal, arbitrary, and petty act. Just think of the consequences: scientists, students, and patients will all suffer.

Yes. The conservative politicians and business leaders that routinely denigrate higher ed and uplift blue collar tradework do so TO LOWER their labor costs and reduce competition for their children, who are still going to college (and learning art, music, literature, and languages in k-12 schools).

Trump and Elon made massive cuts to all US weather tracking and warning systems in the spring of 2025.

Destruction designed to end scientific discovery for public good in America.

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years.

NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

You can go Settings > Display, and toggle on 'asteroids'. Zoom in to see the red-green-blue streaks. That's the sky as it is, filled with the moving foreground of our Solar System! 🔭

Just some creepy armed Mad Max guys trying to gain entry to Dodgers Stadium.

ICE says it wasn’t them. DHS says they were Border Patrol. But honestly who the hell knows? They’ve given permission for any psycho to put on a ski mask, point a gun, grab people & throw them into an unmarked vehicle.

This photo. This is fascism. This is authoritarianism.

This is not normal. Don’t forget.

Unironically they should buy up the domains for about 60 defunct local newspapers in swing states. Hire two reporters to write almost exclusively about highschool sports and new restaurants opening with every 10th article about how the local GOP is screwing over people.

Drove side-by-side to Martin Lawrence on the Chicago Skyway for a few miles.

I want to take a moment to share an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence's grievances against King George III.

Sound familiar?

Maybe the real waste, fraud, and abuse was the DOGE we made along the way.

This is a good idea. Highlight the fact that law enforcement agencies that should be targeting drug trafficking and child exploitation are being used to arrest immigrant moms and workers due to Stephen Miller's twisted ideological obsession, Dems!

Yeah, I don’t intend to go back to LPSC. It needs to leave Texas and be taken over from USRA. Also, with the travel bans and the LPSC travel incident earlier this year, the US is not a good place to host meetings.

Although the really scary part, is if this doesn’t change anything, and we’ve been just drowning in BS the whole time.

Part of me is underwhelmed by what computer scientists have decided to call artificial intelligence, but part of me is very scared that they are right and this is intelligence.

I also saw it. It seems to put pretty strict limits down.

It’s hard to imagine how much BS we are ultimately going to be drowning in.

The money to be made is not developing an app to use AI (everyone’s doing that). The money to be made is developing an app that will guide you through the BS to the real.

Are we living A Tale of Two Cities?

Unless these decisions are reversed, this will be remembered as a disastrous week for @NASA. First, I am not optimistic that whomever this administration nominates next for NASA Administrator will be nearly as qualified or enthusiastic about the agency’s mission as Jared.
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Very little about these decisions by the Trump administration were driven by a considered effort to increase value by reducing costs. This office of NASA was closed because they studied global climate change and we’re located in a blue state. That’s all.

It's just one tax cut! What can it cost, a quarter of a million scientists?

In an education context, this is called meeting the student where there at.

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