Jesse Kroll

A gray shorthair cat at the moment of release upside down, with its tongue out looking derpy

A new paper on falling cat science came out and I just have to draw people's attention to this image

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

Picture of an aircraft carrier, The Onion Magazine Cover October 2006: WHY AMERICAN HUBRIS WILL NEVER CATCH UP TO US Richard Perkins On Our Permanent And Unassailable Dominance Of Everything Page 14

My all-time fav

Secretary Hegseth announced this afternoon that DOD will cease ALL graduate study by military personnel at universities including MIT, all the Ivies, Stanford, etc because such schools teach "the enemy's wicked ideology" to officers.

thehill.com/policy/defen...

Toronto harold satire site headline: "Canadian Olympic hockey teams to bring back silver medals to home country that has healthcare and stable democracy"

okay, this is funny, though

A graphical abstract showing the "Shiba pipeline" with two dogs: Shiba and scShiba Title of the paper: "Shiba: a versatile computational method for systematic identification of differential RNA splicing across platforms" https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/53/4/gkaf098/8042001

All graphical abstracts should include at least one animal

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide.

This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

its amazing how chatgpt knows everything about subjects I know nothing about, but is wrong like 40% of the time in things im an expert on. not going to think about this any further

Kīlauea, Episode 42

A leading American research lab is slated to lose its critical supercomputing facility, according to a letter released by the National Science Foundation.https://cnn.it/3MoF7zU

Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change

As a historian of science, I was raised to think rejecting science was a pathology of anti-democratic governments. Well, this might be the proof of that.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/c...

Trump team’s new rule could make firing government scientists easier Although the government says the move will depoliticize US science, some researchers say it will do the opposite.

The revised Schedule F policy, finalized last week, will kick in next month. It could reclassify career government scientists—potentially those involved in grantmaking at agencies like NIH and NSF—into at-will employees, and would strip them of whistleblower protections.

Isn't it super random that all of the "anti-woke" cancel culture academics who all leaned into transphobia and race science later in their careers all seem to be connected through Jeffrey Epstein?

Pretty Cute Watching Boston Residents Play Daily Game Of ‘Big City’

Pretty Cute Watching Boston Residents Play Daily Game Of ‘Big City’ https://theonion.com/pretty-cute-watching-boston-residents-play-daily-game-o-1819574643/

DOE scientists blasted climate report ordered up by boss Secretary Chris Wright handpicked five climate contrarians to write about global warming. Department experts pushed back on the findings.

Internal emails show Department of Energy's debunked climate science report was reviewed by scientists internally, who found it "biased," "misleading," and "hypocritical." Contrarian authors tailored their work to ensure it focused on weakening climate regulations. www.eenews.net/articles/doe...

Proud Paul with Maria. Maria gave me a red flowers - a tradition in China.

Congratulations to Hongmin (Maria) Yu who successfully and expertly defended her thesis "Exploring Atmospheric Autoxidation of Organic Emission from Volatile Chemical Products". Thanks to @jessekroll.bsky.social, and @caltech.edu Profs Mitchio Okumura, and Rick Flagan for serving on her committee.

“You can feel your brain getting smoother as you watch it.”

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

For 50 years, his test has been saving museum artifacts Andrew Oddy looks back on his career as Keeper of Conservation at the British Museum and the exposure test that bears his name.

Great interview — especially since had I assumed that whoever invented the Oddy Test must've passed away a long time ago.
(...Of course, up until Tuesday I also thought that about Philip Glass, so this has been quite the week.)

Share your comments on NCAR with NSF Tell NSF the future that you want for NCAR by 13 March

@agu.org has a tool to help you submit a comment to NSF on the importance of NCAR: agu.quorum.us/campaign/154...

#SaveNCAR

American biomedical science in 2026 Where we are, how we got here, and what to do next

New at Can We Still Govern: NIH scientist @markhisted.org reviews the damage done to American biomedical science in the last year and looks ahead:
"Scientists should not be political partisans, but they should be partisans for liberal democratic principles."🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/american-b...

Our Customers Demand Terrible AI Systems We’ve been banging our heads against the wall, trying to think of the new “it” thing our customers want. At one point, somebody suggested improving...

"I understand that terrible AI systems are technically terrible, but I’ll be damned if they’re not confident... What naysayers don’t seem to realize is that people respond better to a confident liar shouting out answers than a polite expert. Women can back me up on this."

Air quality impacts of stratospheric aerosol injections are likely small and mainly driven by changes in climate, not aerosol settling Abstract. Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is a proposed climate intervention method to offset future global warming through increased solar reflection in the stratosphere, but its broader enviro...

We have a new paper out today, looking more in detail at the potential air quality impacts of Stratospheric Aerosol Injections, finding them more driven by climatic feedbacks than by deposition. This is the 1st questions one receives when discussing this, so really important to explore in depth!

How many STEM Ph.D.s were lost from the U.S. federal government last year?

My colleagues @mghersher.bsky.social and @policyhound.bsky.social dug into a recent data release to find the answer. A @science.org exclusive.

www.science.org/content/arti...

Attention folks in the weather, climate, disaster, wildfire, and Earth science communities: NSF has just published a new "Dear Colleague" letter inviting feedback (by Mar 13) on the proposal to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). www.nsf.gov/funding/...

Promotional graphic with text. "Press Release: Environmental Health Perspectives joins the ACS Publications portfolio"

We are proud to announce that Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), a globally respected journal with a rich legacy as a premiere source for the environmental health sciences community, has joined the ACS Publications portfolio.

Read our announcement: buff.ly/Tc1m9Xp

Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

Writing is thinking

Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.

Found on LinkedIn alongside text describing how PCR works. 😂. #TeamMassSpec #massspectrometry #science #badai