Habib Rehman

Indiana's mid-decade redistricting would break apart communities and weaken the voice of voters. Hoosiers deserve fair maps and transparency that puts people first, not DC insiders.

“I’m tired of being constantly confronted by the consequences of my (in)actions.”

Our new study in @science.org built an LLM-powered browser extension to rerank social media feeds without requiring platform cooperation. In a preregistered 10-day field experiment (N=1,256), we found that algorithmic ranking can both raise and lower levels of affective political polarization.

Two posts from Bluesky. The first one shows a figure from a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports full of totally incoherent AI fabricated gibberish words. The other a comment on a recently published paper by eLife discussing the paper and its peer reviews which were published along with the paper.

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

Even God Is Worried About ChatGPT Pope Leo XIV told students not to use artificial intelligence for homework, saying that AI ‘won’t stand in authentic wonder before the beauty of God’s creation.’

Pope Leo XIV told students not to use artificial intelligence for homework, saying that AI ‘won’t stand in authentic wonder before the beauty of God’s creation.’

You know it's bad when his tangents are more coherent than the script.

Neural dynamics outside task-coding dimensions drive decision trajectories through transient amplification Most behaviors involve neural dynamics in high-dimensional activity spaces. A common approach is to extract dimensions that capture task-related variability, such as those separating stimuli or choice...

“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”

evergreen

For the first time in my career, I can’t tell people to trust what the CDC website says. And that is an incredibly sad and devastating place for this country to be.

Image of the Aurora Borealis at night with some trees and a white fence. There's a diffuse green area with streaks of pinkish red above, and a few stars.

Aurora borealis from Indianapolis!

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last.

The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes.

Why?

It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

Powerful new antibiotic that can kill superbugs discovered in soil bacteria Nature - Surprise discovery could pave the way for new treatments against drug-resistant infections.

By studying the process through which a soil bacterium naturally produces a well-known drug, scientists have discovered a powerful antibiotic that could help to fight drug-resistant infections

go.nature.com/4nLbCoC

Strongly agree. The goal isn't to optimize scientific discovery, it's to actively hinder research and punish universities. They only reference "efficiency" or "waste" because cutting research funding is deeply unpopular.

Chicago's "Rat Hole" is less rat, more Scrat CREDIT: Winslow Dumaine via WIKIMEDIA COMMONS | CC BY-SA

Michael Granatosky on debunking the “rat hole”: “I hope this project reminds people that science can start anywhere—even with something as small and funny as a mark in the sidewalk.” That and more from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

The Trump administration’s approach to autism is tangled up with ableism, eugenics, and pronatalism “The current political establishment and their supporters have consistently pathologized difference,” particularly when it comes to autism, a professor of medicine writes.

🧪 I was going to say that I’m happy to share my latest, but I’d much rather be without the reasons to write it: The Trump administration’s approach to autism is tangled up with ableism, eugenics, and pronatalism www.statnews.com/2025/10/03/a... via @statnews.com

Python, the movie! The programming language’s origin story comes to the silver screen The creator of the NumPy and SciPy libraries reflects on their supporting role in the story of Python, now the subject of a documentary.

The creator of the NumPy and SciPy libraries reflects on their supporting role in the story of Python, now the subject of a documentary

go.nature.com/4gHDSGF

Carl Sagan.

A random bit of history (for modern analogies). Lysenko set back genetics in USSR by ~50 years. Hundreds of geneticists imprisoned or died. Cybernetics was also named "reactionary pseudoscience", and about to undergo similar fate, but got lucky that this started close to the end of the Stalin era.

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

GitHub - lh3/longdust: Identify long STRs, VNTRs, satellite DNA and other low-complexity regions in a genome Identify long STRs, VNTRs, satellite DNA and other low-complexity regions in a genome - lh3/longdust

Longdust, a new tool to identify highly repetitive STRs, VNTRs, satellite DNA and other low-complexity regions (LCRs). Similar to SDUST but for long regions.
github.com/lh3/longdust

a brief clip

No Donald, Chicago is not your war zone

“It isn't reform. It's sabotage." 

That's what former CDC director Susan Monarez says about President Trump's Health Secretary. 

RFK Jr. is ignoring science—and our children will suffer for it.

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species

go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

RFK Jr. and Trump tell us they want to Make America Healthy Again.

Great slogan. I agree. Unfortunately, they are doing the exact opposite.

Vaccines work. They are safe. They save lives.

No more conspiracy theories.  Kennedy must resign.

Not to worry. Many countries survive without shipments from these countries. For instance, North Korea.

Gold standard science

It’s giving 11th grade power point.

🎉🎉🎉

UCLA's Jewish community unites against Trump's $1-billion demand: 'misguided and punitive' UCLA's Jewish faculty united around a letter conveying anger over a potential $1-billion settlement between the university and the Trump administration over alleged campus antisemitism.

On A1 today: UCLA's Jewish faculty — some of whom are divided over Israel’s war in Gaza — have come together to sign a letter condemning Trump's pursuit of a $1 billion fine over alleged antisemitism on campus. Their message: it won't make Jews safer.
www.latimes.com/california/s...

This is in the replies and it demonstrates a real issue which is if you find profundity from an AI, you’re responding to something profound a human being wrote that was vacuumed up and what ends up happening is you thank AI and not only don’t thank the person, you have no idea they were involved