Let’s be clear. Carbon capture is mainly about giving a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry and tree-burning #Drax power station—and will actually worsen global heating.

Good to see this reported by @edienet.bsky.social today.

GOOD NEWS! Researchers have created a biodegradable gel that delivers Parkinson’s medications through a SINGLE weekly shot, REPLACING the need for multiple daily pills. Injected just under the skin, the gel steadily releases levodopa and carbidopa, helping keep tremors AND stiffness in check. 🧪🧵⬇️

Scientists Map Miles of Wiring in a Speck of Mouse Brain (Gift Article) Scientists achieved “a milestone” by charting the activity and structure of 200,000 cells in a mouse brain and their 523 million connections.

Nice article on MICrONS in the NYTimes from @carlzimmer.com www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/s...

Yes. The situation at NIH is worse than the public realizes.

The #NIH is on track to be effectively ended as a funder of evidence-based research within a year.

That is not an exaggeration. The firings and consolidation announced today will create a new, MUCH worse NIH.
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Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users The advertising industry is immensely powerful, and disturbingly opaque.

“You don’t know what information a data broker has on you, who they’re selling it to, and what the people who buy your data are doing with it,” EFF’s Lena Cohen told @gizmodo.com. “There’s a real power/knowledge asymmetry.”

Have humans passed peak brain power? Data across countries and ages reveal a growing struggle to concentrate, and declining verbal and numerical reasoning

How to make sense of the world today? "Across a range of tests, the average person’s ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining ever since."
on.ft.com/4kPKLr2

A quick update on the total climf&%kery that's taking place.

Through March 11th, 2025, the monthly average global surface temperature for March, 2025 is the hottest on record.

The madness of this moment is going to end horrifically for most living creatures. And that is incredibly sad.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability need to be resolved. In addition, there...

Chapters 1–7 of the second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications are now available in early release (sorry, O'Reilly subscribers only at this point). Among other changes, you may notice that we now talk about “sharding” rather than “partitioning” www.oreilly.com/library/view...

Marco Rubio saying he will revoke green cards of Hamas supporters

Rubio says the US will now start revoking green cards

Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’ A leading figure in feminism and gender studies, the thinker welcomes EL PAÍS in California after being voted one of the most influential minds in the world

Judith Butler: "Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?"

There is essentially nobody monitoring the multi-trillion-dollar consumer debt markets in the US right now

A Neuropixels Opto probe with 3 blue emitters and 3 red emitters lighting up in succession, with corresponding neural activity in different layers of the cortex.

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of

Neuropixels Opto

Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics

Today in bioRxiv

960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors

By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(1/2)

Since I’m somewhat in a unique position, a short thread why automating Wikipedia is not at all within reach.

Key immediate issue: source relevancy. Not every piece of information is worth it.

David Alton’s amendment on eliminating forced /slave labour from solar panels is profound.

International trade needs to be required to exercise due diligence, as the timber legality discourse learned in the early 00s.

happy you're here 👋

What can AI researchers do *today* that AI developers will find useful for ensuring the safety of future advanced AI systems? To ring in the new year, the Anthropic Alignment Science team is sharing some thoughts on research directions we think are important.
alignment.anthropic.com/2025/recomme...

My deep learning course at the University of Geneva is available on-line. 1000+ slides, ~20h of screen-casts. Full of examples in PyTorch.

fleuret.org/dlc/

And my "Little Book of Deep Learning" is available as a phone-formatted pdf (nearing 700k downloads!)

fleuret.org/lbdl/

CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) has provided real-time data and analysis about disease outbreaks and emerging health threats without a break every week since 1960.

Until today.

A photo of Mount St Helens erupting. A huge column of volcanic ash and gas emerges from the top of a mountain, covering everything around it.

When Mount St Helens erupted in May of 1980, it blew itself apart, blanketing its surroundings in a cubic mile of rock and ash. Around 57 people were killed, along with thousands of birds and mammals, millions of trees and an estimated 12 million baby salmon. (2/x)

Park filled with trees in Paris

According to the City of Paris, in the last 10 years 150,000 trees have been planted and 45 hectares of parks created in the city, all intended to not only improve quality-of-life today, but also help the city adapt to and manage summer heatwaves of 50℃ (122F) by 2050.

Plant a lot more urban trees.

I suppose I should say hello over here

👋 hello