Dan Vergano

She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, Employee Says Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded. Behind Meta’s new smart glasses lies a hidden workforce, uneasy about peering into the most intimate parts of other people’...

She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, Employee Says

Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded. Behind Meta’s new smart glasses lies a hidden workforce, uneasy about peering into the most intimate parts of other people’s lives.

www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/met...

Thank you again @michaeldgreen.phd for speaking out.

I don't know what bothers me more:

Director Bhattacharya's callousness that damaging the careers of talented young scientists is "the cost of doing business" for his politics

or

His ignorance and lack of imagination about experimental design.

Well, no kidding. The way you ask the question matters. A lot.

Will El Niño return in 2026? Here’s what we know so far Weather events like El Niño can be notoriously hard to predict, but this year could mark its return

Weather events like El Niño can be notoriously hard to predict, but this year could mark its return

CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar t...

SCOOP: An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations.

This surveillance can happen through all sorts of apps, such as video games, news apps, weather trackers, and dating apps.

In war-torn Ukraine, astronomers are still fighting for their future Russia’s war has left many of Ukraine’s world-class observatories in ruins—but the besieged nation’s astronomers already have plans to rebuild and recover

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: Four years on, Russia’s ruinous war has darkened every aspect of life in Ukraine—even the country’s world-class astronomy. But Ukrainian researchers are still planning—and fighting—for a brighter post-war future.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-...

The shiny illusion of a career in science communication There's joy to be had, sometimes money, but it's never that straightforward.

The shiny illusion of a career in science communication
open.substack.com/pub/billhinc...

Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

Clawed On Anthropic and the Department of War

Highly recommend this Dean Ball piece on the Anthropic / DOD imbroglio over the weekend:

“In summary, excising RNA vaccine research from the NIH research portfolio is antithetical to current goals of making America healthy.”

Grateful to join the great @akelvinlab.bsky.social on why we need to document the impact of MAHA funding cuts to understand the grave consequences that will follow

🏆 Our science communication awards are now open!

These awards recognize exceptional science journalists, communicators, and researchers whose work in 2025 made #STEM accessible and engaging for broad audiences.

Deadline: April 3, 2026

Apply now: www.nationalacademies.org/awards/excel... #scicomm

Prof. Robert Pape:

"I have studied every air campaign since WWI... I've modelled the bombing of Fordow and regime change in Iran for 20 years... We are now in the grip of the escalation trap... This has never worked in over 100 years... Trump is up against the weight of history".

U.S.’s and Israel’s war with Iran leaves uranium stockpiles uncertain The Trump administration’s war with Iran over its nuclear ambitions raises new questions about the country’s uranium stockpile

U.S. and Israel war with Iran leaves uranium stockpiles uncertain

The Trump administration’s war with Iran over its nuclear ambitions raises new questions over the country’s uranium stockpile

www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-...

This is an excellent and useful term for describing one of the things I wrestled with describing in my book One Less Car.

Turmoil Takes Hold at CDC as Top Officials Keep Leaving Trump plans to nominate a new director at the nation’s top health agency following months of upheaval.

Inside the turmoil and leadership vacuum at the CDC

The Trump administration intends to nominate a permanent director soon

One person already turned the job down

NEW [gift link] www.wsj.com/health/healt...

A titan of vaccine development sees his field’s achievements slip away Stanley Plotkin, the 93-year-old "godfather of vaccines," is watching his field’s achievements slip away.

“In a pair of recent interviews with STAT, Plotkin expressed dismay at seeing the achievements of his career & his field slip away. He knows what lies ahead…
“All I can say is that I’m beginning to regret having lived so long —because we’re going downhill,” Plotkin said” @jackiantonovich.bsky.social

On the Media The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger examine threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.

“Media capture,” is a phrase scholars have been using to describe the phenomena of public interests losing possession of the press to political and corporate players. @victorpickard.bsky.social on why the American system was set up to be snatched away from the start lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

I've made a new starter pack of people to follow for news and commentary on Iran.

Got the idea from a request by @kakape.bsky.social

People are going to yell and be assholes today because they're upset. Not telling you how to respond! Just reminding you (and by you, I mean me) in advance that it's going to happen. 99% of cases won't really be about the thing you said or wrote. They're just furious, and you happened to be there.

Politics & Policy | PSO Policy Research Journal | Wiley Online Library This review article analyzes two pertinent and related works by Marcel Dirsus, How Tyrants Fall, and Hal Brands, The Eurasian Century, to investigate how contemporary authoritarian governments utiliz...

"the ways regimes crumble from within, even when they appear outwardly sturdy and technologically equipped"
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
"digital armor of authoritarian regimes conceals profound structural vulnerabilities. Surveillance may suppress dissent, but it cannot forge legitimacy"

Anthropic responds to Hegseth. www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...

The U.S. just surpassed a grim measles milestone As the U.S. officially breaks 1,000 measles cases in 2026, experts say that the rate of infections is accelerating much faster this year than it did in years past

The U.S. has reported more than 1,000 measles cases in 2026—and we're just two months into the year. That's nearly half of all the cases reported in 2025. And public health experts say it's a sign that the U.S. has likely lost its measles elimination status. My reporting for @sciam.bsky.social:

Opinion | Casey Means' Cringey Senate Hearing Should Sink Her Surgeon General Bid The nominee revealed her fundamental confusion between individual healthcare and public health

Casey Means' Cringey Senate Hearing Should Sink Her Surgeon General Bid — The nominee revealed her fundamental confusion between individual healthcare and public healthhttps://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/120089

Here’s the full clip @whyshoulditrustyou.bsky.social

The announcement of the new upper stage for SLS seems to have blindsided the people actually building the rocket.

No work whatsoever has been done on actually designing and integrating this stage with the SLS rocket, not even a basic feasibility study.

TESS confirms what we saw with Kepler and K2 - on average, ***every single small red star has a planet around it***! And a short-period one at that (<30 days).

And you know what the galaxy is mostly made of?

Small red stars.

PLANETS. PLANETS EVERYWHERE!!!

Happy weekend pondering that, everyone.

Private money cannot replace public funding of science Who should pay for American science? In the current political climate, many are looking to the private sector to compensate for cuts in public funding. At the Harvard School of Public Health—particula...

"Private money cannot replace public funding of science"
Thank you @naomioreskes.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🧪 🌊 ⚒️ #scipol

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

The New CBS Is A Clown Show The denigration of CBS is best viewed as just part of a broader effort by oligarchs to create a propaganda-coddled permanent autocracy, propped up by a broad array of highly-paid, useful idiots.

Bari Weiss was hired to create authentic-seeming ratings-grabbing agitprop for the extraction class, but she's genuinely not competent enough to pull it off

the same fate awaits CNN, which is already broadly terrible after years of mismanagement

"All of [the boys] were Black, and researchers believe many actually died because they were overworked, underfed and denied proper care."