Aatish Bhatia

Franzi Schimmer captured this Grizzly bear in Brooks Falls, Alaska just floating along, tippy-tapping down the river, browsing the salmon.

Prior to hibernation, up to 40% of a bear's body mass is fat, which is less dense than water (~0.9 g/cm^2), so the murder-monster is also a floaty-boaty.

"Cognitive effort—and even getting painfully stuck—is likely important for fostering mastery."

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

"We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades."

F.D.A. Refuses to Review Moderna Flu Vaccine

NEW: The F.D.A. refused to accept an application from Moderna for its mRNA flu vaccine.

Its reason: The agency did not think Moderna compared the new vaccine to one of the best flu shots available. The company spent $750M+ on a 41,000 person study.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/h...

I cannot stress this enough: you want to write a book? Write it. Do it now. Don’t wait. There is never a perfect time and you don’t need anyone’s permission. There are always dragons ahead. Not to be dark, but the cliff awaits. Write it in scraps, in voice notes, in a crappy notebook...

Graduate Students’ NSF Fellowship Applications Are Being “Returned Without Review” - Eos Graduate students applying for NSF funding have had their applications returned without review—even though their proposed research appears to fall squarely within the fields of study outlined in the p...

Graduate Students’ NSF Fellowship Applications Are Being “Returned Without Review” 🧪
eos.org/research-and...

Don’t forget about Daniel @sadbumblebee.buzz himself, who is a brilliant and compassionate writer, climate reporter, and developer — among many other talents.

Some of my faves of his work:
wapo.st/4rv3WZJ
wapo.st/4a1IIwS

The Post was foolish enough to unleash a bevy of the world’s most talented multi-disciplinary journalists out there for their competition to scoop up. These are some of the most hard working and skilled people I know.

Save this one and reshare it please! 📊

Donate to Washington Post 2026 layoff fund, organized by Rachel Siegel On Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026, The Washington Post laid off hundreds of journalists. We ar… Rachel Siegel needs your support for Washington Post 2026 layoff fund

Today I was one of the many laid off from the Post. It is a dark day for news. For now I am going to take some time with my family before figuring out where I go from here.

In the meantime, please consider supporting my colleagues. Any contribution helps: www.gofundme.com/f/standing-t...

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions.

"The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

YouTube video by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert "There's Nothing I Enjoy More Than Acting In The Theater" - Ian McKellen EXTENDED INTERVIEW

This is an incredible performance and worth four minutes of your time www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l2R...

A tray of colorful drinks on a display stand at CVS that sat “the flu shot” on them

America: where you can sell a random “wellness” drink at CVS, claim it “may” somehow “reinforce” your immune system, and literally call it “The Flu Shot.”

Opinion | ICE Took Their Classmate. They Started Writing Letters.

When kids have the moral clarity that many adults lack

His Kenyon college commencement speech is a regular source of inspiration for me. I go back to it often web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www...

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2025 Many data things were made this year. These are my favorites.

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2025, a.k.a. my favorites flowingdata.com/2025/12/31/b...

My favorite evidence that congestion pricing in New York has reshaped peoples’ behavior: we can see a surge of people trying to enter the zone before the price kicks up at 5 a.m., and after it decreases at 9 p.m.

27 Million Fewer Car Trips: Life After a Year of Congestion Pricing (Gift Article) How life has changed in the New York area, according to data on traffic, transit and the responses of 600 readers.

Brilliant piece. The Upshot doing what it does best, a clear and comprehensive look at the data.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The image shows the hourglass shape of the length of the day and night over the 365 days in 2025. Diagonal bands indicate when the Moon was up in the night sky.

Happy new year! My all sky camera imaged the sky every 15 seconds and this picture shows what happened in the sky in 2025. It shows the length of the night and day with the hourglass shape, the monthly lunar cycle with the diagonal bands, the elevation of the Sun at local noon, and lots of clouds.

Six-decade math puzzle solved by Korean mathematician A Korean mathematician has won international recognition for solving a geometry puzzle that had resisted proof for nearly six decades. US magazine Scientific Am

"Describing the research process, Baek compared it to repeatedly building and discarding ideas.

“You keep holding on to hope, then breaking it, and moving forward by picking up ideas from the ashes”"

m.koreaherald.com/article/1064...

YouTube video by TED How I Turned Frustration Into Creative Success | Joshua Schachter | TED

Loved this

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholi...

"We're not going to get a better internet by waiting for platforms to become less extractive. We build it by building it."

The planet Jupiter with its many bands of clouds spanning around it. The Great Red Spot is visible on the right side of the planet, about to rotate out of view. To the left of the planet is a bright dot, which is the moon Europa.

Last night I set up my telescope so we could all watch the planets while waiting for the new year to arrive.

After the fireworks had subsided, I attached my camera and captured my first astrophoto of the year featuring Jupiter and its moon Europa. #astrophotography

Happy New Year everyone!

ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown

Love everything about this project. Great work!

YouTube video by ChefSteps How to Master the Omurice Omelet

I love how well every step is explained here. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol_Q...

How New York Is Preparing for Its First Major Snowstorm in Years Streets were brined, plows were ready and flights were canceled as the metropolitan region braced for up to 10 inches of snow.

New York City was bracing on Friday for its biggest snowfall in more than three years. The area in and around the city was expected to get 6 to 9 inches of snow over the weekend, with up to 10 inches predicted in some areas.

maybe don't replace your office workers with LLMs, one just called me to tell me to bring "a valid photo Idaho" to my appointment tomorrow

Transformer Explainer: LLM Transformer Model Visually Explained An interactive visualization tool showing you how transformer models work in large language models (LLM) like GPT.

This is pretty amazing: poloclub.github.io/transformer-... A basic language model (GPT-2 small) that runs in the browser, with all of its calculations visualized.

Slain M.I.T. Professor Was a ‘Brilliant Scientist’ and a Beloved Colleague

“He was the kind of guy who went up to the chalkboard and started writing out equations and explaining everything” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/u...

Comic. [Equation [rjf = 2GM / (4.5 m/s)2] with small drawing showing a circle with the radius delineated. On top of the circle there is an arc showing a small frog jumping and landing with RIBBIT and PLOP sound effects.] [caption] More practically useful than the Schwarzschild radius, the *Jumping Frog Radius* is the radius at which an object’s gravitational pull is so strong that even a champion jumping frog can’t escape.

Jumping Frog Radius

xkcd.com/3181/