Michael Mahon, PhD

Looking for a great photo of a freshwater fish (North American) to submit as a journal cover image for a manuscript on fish biodiversity trends! If you have one you’d be willing to share (with credit, of course!), please reach out. 🎣📸 #fishphoto #freshwaterfish #scicomm

NEW: per multiple sources, apparently there may be punishment/retaliation coming for EPA employees who signed the Declaration of Dissent this week. People are starting to get letters putting them on administrative leave, seems like potentially targeted at those who signed with their names.

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper. She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. “We specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,” she says, laughing.

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.

t.co/JXeTALBPds

Vance Boelter, suspect in shooting of Minnesota lawmakers, taken into custody in Sibley County Authorities have taken 57-year-old Vance Boelter into custody in Sibley County. He's the suspect in the targeted fatal shootings of Minnesota House DFL leader Melissa Hortman and her spouse, and the s...

Authorities have taken 57-year-old Vance Boelter into custody in Sibley County. He's the suspect in the targeted fatal shootings of Minnesota House DFL leader Melissa Hortman and her spouse, and the shooting of state Sen. John Hoffman and his spouse.

Make it seven:

DOJ just sought emergency relief from #SCOTUS in the AFSCME/mass-RIFs case. It’ll be docketed as 24A1106.

In case you’re keeping score, this marks the 15th emergency application from Trump in 16 weeks.

Across 16 *years,* the GWB and Obama administrations filed a total of … eight.

FLASH: Federal judge blocks RIFs/Trump administration reorganization plans for 20 federal agencies. SF-based Judge Susan Illston (Clinton) says they appear to exceed executive branch authority to implement without Congressional approval. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Not to mention the coming dissolution of ORD.

Glad to see the MRCC is back up! Funding restored by NOAA/Dept of Commerce. But ridiculous that funding for regional climate centers was removed in the first place.

New preprint finding that eliminating US global health funding over the next fifteen years would cause:
- 15.2m deaths from AIDS
- 2.2m deaths from TB
- 7.9 additional child deaths

Our View: Threats to Duluth water lab not well-thought-out From the editorial: "If the Duluth EPA lab is being indiscriminately targeted, the cutting and slashing (in D.C.) clearly isn’t being done with the care, consideration, or thought such a process demands."

From the editorial: "If the Duluth EPA lab is being indiscriminately targeted, the cutting and slashing (in D.C.) clearly isn’t being done with the care, consideration, or thought such a process demands."

But I do have baseball opinions!

I don’t remember going on a baseball podcast…

Anyone in Duluth looking to support their local EPA employees, come out tomorrow morning!

ANOTHER UPSET.

Drake is heading to the second-round of the men’s NCAA Tournament.

Welp. What a way to find out that my colleagues and I may be soon out of jobs.

Biggest Federal Employee Unions Says Shutdown is Preferable to Elon/Trump CR talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bigge...

Trump Says E.P.A. Layoffs Will Cut Staff by 65 Percent The president said Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, was planning mass layoffs. Several hours later, White House officials said the president was referring to budget cuts.

Do you want water that’s safe for your family to drink, air that’s safe for your family to breathe, or a livable climate?

We’re apparently cutting 2/3 of our capacity, so pick one of those three.

🤷

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/c...

DHA as an interferent? That is probably a better question for my coauthors, but PFO4DA was not on our analyte list. We did check for other known interferents. The most prominent one we ran into was TDCA as a strong interferent for PFOS (reading as branched PFOS).

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠

sciencehomecoming.com

I should clarify that Method 1633 still works well for fillets (human-relevant concentrations), just doesn’t work as well for whole body (ecologically relevant concentrations).

A High Efficiency Method for the Extraction and Quantitative Analysis of 45 PFAS in Whole Fish This study describes and validates a new method for extracting perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from whole-body fish tissue, demonstrates that freeze-dry preservation of tissue con...

New PFAS analytical method from our Great Lakes contaminants lab. We had issues reliably extracting PFAS from whole fish samples using Method 1633, so we found that lipid-extraction resulted in clean extracts. The work was led by my awesome, but Bluesky-less colleagues. doi.org/10.1021/acs....

This this this this this.

RWers be like "Money shouldn't go to salaries it should go to fighting cancer"

BITCH, WHO DO YOU THINK IS FIGHTING THE CANCER

Dear federal scientists: If you have been affected by the probationary firings and would be willing to speak with Science, please reach out to me by email (klangin@aaas.org) or on Signal. We can guarantee annonymity.

a cartoon of a man standing next to a red car bed that says bobtoys on the bottom ALT: a cartoon of a man standing next to a red car bed that says bobtoys on the bottom

Is the last sentence a Simpsons reference?

Federal judge pauses deadline for Trump administration's 'Fork' resignation offer until Monday The Trump administration had given more than 2 million federal employees until today to decide whether to stay or go. A federal judge in Massachusetts has paused the effort until at least Monday.

UPDATE: The Trump administration had given more than 2 million federal employees until today to decide whether to stay or go. A federal judge in Massachusetts has paused the effort until Monday.

If you are reading this and you received any of the HR@opm.gov emails and you are not a current employee of the Executive Branch please email or Signal me a copy of the emails.

In its simplest terms, the apparent demise of #USAID is the result of the world's richest man ending a program that helps millions of poor people. You don't need a Ph.D. in moral theology to see why this is an evil. You can just read Jesus's parables on the rich and the poor.

Musk’s allies were granted access to the U.S. Treasury payment system.

Treasury stays silent.

White House stays silent.

Why the secrecy? Time for an explanation and full transparency.