@hankgreely.bsky.social
Stanford Law prof, working on ethical, legal, and social issues in the biosciences. Sports fan (especially Stanford sports). And strongly opposed to the illegal & immoral Russian invasion of Ukraine. Slava Ukraini!
a lot has already been written about the heat wave next week, including @weatherwest.bsky.social’s posts here. But it is hard to describe how truly outlandish the forecast is for next week. This is looking to be so far outside of anything that’s been observed before in March in the western US.
@law.stanford.edu leads the country in bar passage rate: 99.43%! 1 failure out of about 175 first time takers. And at least a plurality of our students will take the CA bar, usually the country's toughest.
www.reuters.com/legal/legali...
Fascinating piece by (always interesting) Jason Karlawish on surrealism as a way to understand life w/dementia. I was skeptical on reading the headline, very interested after reading the short piece.
www.statnews.com/2026/03/13/s...
Great, infuriating, story by @turnaray.bsky.social in @genomeweb.bsky.social on epidermolysis bullosa, ICE & inhumanity. www.genomeweb.com/policy-legis... Should be in @theatlantic.com or @newyorker.com. And on newspaper front pages. (CoI - quotes me but only a little.)
Cool! That's even more extra copies than modern humans do—and with modern humans, the more starch in the diet (wh/correlates with agriculture), the more copies. I wonder if rats in human cities have similar duplications? Or cats? (Well, probably not cats—they're just too weird...)
Dogs evolved to eat your leftovers! Comparing dog & wolf genomes revealed dogs have up to 30 EXTRA copies of the amylase gene (AMY2B) that helps digest starch. This is a key genomic signature of living alongside humans & table scraps for thousands of years 🐕 www.nature.com/articles/nat... #2026MMM
Hegseth: "We will keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemies."
No quarter is the refusal to take prisoners and instead just execute everyone. It's been considered a war crime for over a century.
Seems really important that the rest of the world does not treat this lightly, as has been the tendency: "Oh these are just silly men saying things". Needs an ICC response, it seems to me.
This seems rather remarkable to me. These fish are all female, and use sperm from closely related species to get embryogenesis started while incorporating none of the male alleles. So reproduction is clonal - but accumulation of mutations is avoided by swapping them back out.
New study finds IVF doesn't increase overall risk of cancer, but uterine, ovarian and breast cancer rates were slightly higher.
The study I would really like to see is health outcomes among IVF superusers who have done 4+ cycles www.eurekalert.org/news-release...
Today in whoa dude: researchers found part of a cat’s spine can twist 360 degrees, part of why they always land on their feet www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/s...
It is remarkable how much clearer the air is in Silicon Valley than it was ten years ago. Electric cars have made a huge difference
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Here's the basic problem...
More needs to be done, but this is a first step toward understanding how neuromodulation shapes aspects of human development and disease.
In this new BiorXiv preprint, we first generated #organoids containing neuromodulatory neuronal populations, including raphe nuclei-like neurons that produce and secrete serotonin, and then integrated them with cortical organoids.
This week we are introducing neuromodulatory assembloids.
Over the past few years, many circuits and cell-cell interactions have been modeled in assembloids, but these systems have not systematically incorporated neuromodulation.
Join us at Stanford April 3 to celebrate 50 years of the Copyright Act of 1976 and nearly 60 years of copyright teaching by Paul Goldstein
conferences.law.stanford.edu/copyrightat5...
How's about this for a wacko record? PHX all-time record March high is 100F, set one time. The current NBM forecast has PHX hitting 101F or higher (at least) 5 days in a row, topping out at 106F.
The right call. No scientific meeting (even real ones) should be expecting non-US scientists to come into the country now (if not already committed to that).
/4 Timeline for the first 42 episodes in this nearly 2 yr old eruption. Vast majority, esp in the last yr, have lasted for ≤12 hrs. The first 16 often lasted up to 36 hrs along w/a few early ones of several days. Lately 2-3 wk pauses.
Highest fountain: 479 m (1571 ft!) www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/ki...
/3 This just in from USGS:
"Episode 43 of the ongoing Halemaʻumaʻu eruption ended abruptly at 6:21 p.m. HST on March 10, 2026 after 9 hours of continuous lava fountaining."
Catch them while you can!
This is all so cool - being able to get useable DNA from air, from water, from soil...contemporary or ancient. All scientific revolutions are revolutions in tools and sometimes the cheaper, faster, more accurate refinements of tools are more important than the initial breakthrough.
/2 Looks like the fountaining is petering out, at about 9:30 pm PDT. Seems like Kilauea has some kind of emergency pressure release valve; it fountains for a day or less, then spends a week or more building up to another outburst. www.youtube.com/@usgs/streams
Kilauea is fountaining again: Episode 3 of this eruption. V-cams 2 and 3 give good views; V-cam 1 is in a fog (w/occasional clicks that I bet are falling ash). These episodes haven't been lasting long—a few hours to maybe a day. So look fast!
www.youtube.com/@usgs/streams
The 3/10/1933 Long Beach quake killed 120 people and brought home the dangers from unreinforced masonry buildings. It led to the first seismic provisions in the building code and the passage of the Field Act that ensured strong seismic safety measures for public schools.
The 1933 Long Beach earthquake occurred 93 years ago today, beginning near Huntington Beach and rupturing north for 15 miles to just north of Long Beach. It cause strong shaking through much of the Los Angeles region. with the worst damage in Long Beach and Compton.
The official NOAA stats out this week confirm that winter 2025-26 was the warmest on record across a huge portion of the western and central U.S., which has contributed to extremely low mountain snowpack & worsened the CO River crisis. Meanwhile, record March heat is in forecast.
It is like saying "My toddler was strangely lacking interest in the consequences of his tantrum". It is not an insult but simply the evidence of our eyes and ears to say that he is a narcissist with dementia, lacking all coherent thought. To pretend otherwise is to gaslight us all. /3