Ciro Cattuto

The mechanisms by which ultra-processed foods (UPF) drive obesity, an outstanding review article
"the evidence is sufficiently strong to justify immediate public health efforts to reduce UPF consumption."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Capturing the complexity of human strategic decision-making with machine learning - Nature Human Behaviour Zhu et al. use machine learning to reveal complex insights into human strategic decision-making.

Capturing the complexity of human strategic decision-making with machine learning www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Optimal sampling frequency and site selection for wastewater and environmental surveillance of infectious pathogens: A value of information assessment Author summary For decades, wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) has helped public health officials track and eradicate poliovirus and recently, WES has shown promise for other diseases. Im...

Optimal sampling frequency and site selection for wastewater and environmental surveillance of infectious pathogens: A value of information assessment journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

RFK Jr. essentially wants to force every person to enroll in the kind of programs run by insurers that tie your moral worth and market value to behavioral data from wearable trackers. They don’t work. I wrote about that corporate infrastructure and ideology here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

People not only form social networks, they construct mental maps of them. People think about the ties between other people, including ties among individuals to whom they are not themselves directly connected. These “cognitive social networks” have rarely been studied. 1/

Today, people—from students to federal workers, from immigrants to the LGBTQ+ community—find themselves forced to fight deportations, surveillance, and the drastic erosion of fundamental human rights.

So, WIRED dedicated a whole issue on How To Win A Fight. Start ⬇️:
www.wired.com/story/editor...

Aborto e diritti riproduttivi: la radicalizzazione dei movimenti anti-scelta - Valigia Blu Dagli Stati Uniti all'Europa, i movimenti che si battono per limitare il diritto all'aborto e i diritti riproduttivi stanno adottando strategie sempre più repressive.

🧵 Aborto e diritti riproduttivi: la radicalizzazione dei movimenti anti-scelta | @alevescio.bsky.social
www.valigiablu.it/aborto-movim...

Thanks! Re 1), as long as you install the elftools module you’re fine, venv or not - I’ll update the documentation: re 2) well spotted, will fix 🙏

I referendum su cittadinanza e lavoro, il "decreto sicurezza" che avvicina l'Italia all'Ungheria di Orban, i palestinesi in coda per il cibo uccisi a Gaza, gli attacchi ucraini con i droni in Russia, il voto in Polonia e tanto altro nella newsletter di Valigia Blu di questa settimana 👇

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

Very smart, high ROI initiative from the Spencer Foundation.

Providing bridge funding for canceled NSF grants:

1) directs funds to projects already screened by a top-noch review process.
2) avoids imposing proposal prep costs on researchers.
3) ameliorates the disruption from GOP sabotage.

US science is being wrecked, and its leadership is fighting the last war Facing an extreme budget, the National Academies hosted an event that ignored it.

Science in the US is on a damaging trajectory that could take decades to recover from, and it doesn't seem like the nation's leading scientific organization is rising to meet that challenge.

The gutting of US biomedical research with loss of ~2,500 grants affecting research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious disease, global health and much more
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New publication!

I am happy to announce that the paper "Learning distributed representations with efficient SoftMax normalization" I authored with Enrico Maria Belliardo has been published in Transactions of Machine Learning Research @tmlrorg.bsky.social.

NASA is facing the biggest crisis in its history Widespread proposed budget cuts have left the US space agency facing an uncertain future at the same time as NASA’s intended new leader has been withdrawn by the Trump administration

Widespread proposed budget cuts have left NASA facing an uncertain future at the same time as its intended new leader has been withdrawn by the Trump administration.

La #Repubblica è #antifascista
La #Costituzione è antifascista

Va ricordato SEMPRE, perché memoria corta e amnesia sono molto contagiose

#2giugno
#FestadellaRepubblica
#festadellarepubblicaitaliana 🇮🇹

Taking on the AI Con | TechPolicy.Press Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna are the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, just out from Harper Collins.

New podcast! @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social are the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, just out from HarperCollins. Business Insider calls it a “funny and irreverent deconstruction of AI.”

Many others are posting abt this too but this graphic viscerally shows how dire the presidential budget is for NASA 🔭🧪and worldwide astronomy. I can’t express how sad this makes me, as an American scientist. And it’s mostly already paid for projects, so also no logic in terms of saving money.

How to Think About COVID-19 Vaccines in the Era of R.F.K., Jr. The coronavirus may no longer be a leading danger to our health. That doesn’t mean it can’t hurt us, or that we don’t need to protect ourselves.

"At a time when the country faces no shortage of health threats, the value of evidence and expertise is itself under attack. The anti-establishment has become the establishment, and its decisions will affect us all." — @dhruvkhullar.bsky.social
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Il decreto sicurezza del Governo Meloni e la deriva autoritaria dell'Italia - Valigia Blu Il 29 maggio 2025 la Camera dei Deputati ha approvato con 163 sì, 91 no e un astenuto il cosiddetto “decreto sicurezza”, sul quale il governo Meloni aveva posto la questione di fiducia. Il provvedimen...

Il “decreto sicurezza” è l’ennesimo tassello dell’orbanizzazione dell’Italia.

Norme ad hoc contro i nemici politici, crudeltà verso i più deboli e repressione del dissenso.

La deriva democratica meloniana prosegue sempre più veloce e inesorabile.

Ne ho scritto su @valigiablu.it 👇

Medical Research Funding — Unbreaking How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.

I urge everyone to read Unbreaking’s new page on everything the govt is doing to destroy & diminish medical research funding.

It’s the best thing I’ve read on this topic: @lizneeley.bsky.social & co have such done an incredible job.

unbreaking.org/issues/medic...

Alex Karp in a dark jacket and collared shirt, gesturing with his hands. Text reads: "Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans." Photo by Eric Lee/The New York Times

The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o

"If the proposal is enacted, Americans today and tomorrow will be sicker, poorer, and die younger”
an $18 Billion cut
Only 3 NIH Institutes will remain in place, and even they will have their funds markedly reduced
www.statnews.com/2025/05/30/n...

MPS budget

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

Musk should be asked about this in every interview he does now and forever. To ignore it is a dereliction of duty.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

Opinion | Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death

From @nytopinion.nytimes.com:

Elon Musk “apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children,” our columnist Michelle Goldberg writes.

Excess US Deaths Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic This cohort study examines trends in excess deaths in the US before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

For 40 years, Americans have lived shorter lives than people in other rich countries.

For 10 years, that's been rapidly getting worse.

New research: in 2022-2023, there were 1.5 million "missing Americans," who died--but wouldn't have, if America didn't have such uniquely high death rates.

“Gold standard science”
The top tier medical journals are “corrupt”
Our report with many fabricated references had “formatting issues”

The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.

ummmmm...fake sources, mischaracterization of findings, made up research studies doesn't sound like "Gold Standard Science" to us.

But what do we know? We are just a lowly, grassroots community of the world's leading scientists. 🐸☕

#foolsgoldscience
#standupforsciece

www.notus.org/health-scien...

HHS cancels nearly $600 million Moderna contract on vaccines for flu pandemics HHS has notified Moderna that it is canceling a nearly $600 million contract for vaccines for flu strains that could trigger future pandemics.

BREAKING: In a serious blow to US pandemic flu preparedness, HHS has cancelled a contract with Moderna to test and license prototype vaccines for #H5N1 #birdflu and other potential pandemic viruses.
In a pandemic, mRNA is the fastest way to vaccine doses. www.statnews.com/2025/05/28/m...

The loss data (~$10B) support and N of grants terminated is updated below, but this op-ed by @euanashley.bsky.social hits all the important points @latimes.com @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social
www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...