Brian Tanis

A chart of "Major concerns of PhD candidates." The top text says, "Financial pressures top the list of concerns faced by PhD candidates, but concerns differ among the sexes. Those studying in the United States rank the political landscape as their main worry." The chart shows that in the full survey, political landscape is the biggest concern for about 20% of students (a bit higher for women than men) but there's an annotation saying "In US PhD students, this rose to 64%". Overall, the highest-rated concern was financial pressures at around 40%.

That's quite the chart annotation.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

webcomicname.com/post/1876713...

Koala chlamydia: Australia approves vaccine to curb killer epidemic Thousands of koalas have died from the disease, with some estimates suggesting only 50,000 remain in the wild.

How about some good news?

Vaccine to curb chlamydia epidemic devastating koalas approved

As a guy who got a cancer that was probably caused by a virus, I think we should have /more/ vaccines.

RFK Jr. rolled out that old chestnut again about how healthy Americans were in the 60’s, so here’s a fact check.

In 1965:

-42% of American adults smoked; it’s 11% now.

-The infant morality rate was 24.7/1000; it’s 5.6/1000 now.

-Overall life expectancy was 70 years; it's about 77 years now.

I keep saying every miserable summer, it was never this hot in the Pacific Northwest, and here's the proof.

This is the one Labor Day graph that tells you the actual problem in America.

The problem is not that America lacks abundance.

The problem is that a handful of oligarchs are hoarding America’s abundance.

www.levernews.com/the-labor-da...

Happy Labor Day to all who celebrate, and a miserable Labor Day to those who don't, because people who hate labor don't deserve nice things.

We’re only a few years removed from creatjng a vaccine to protect against a deadly airborne virus in a matter of months. Now, we have a scion fail son running the CDC into the ground not because it failed, but because its success conflicts with RFK Jr’s eugenicist ideology.

Opinion | America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness

A Labor Day reminder: today there isn't a single city, metro area, or state in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment.

Millions of people with jobs—even multiple jobs—aren't safe from homelessness in this country.

remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature

Whoopsie, Humans Built So Many Dams That We Shifted the North Pole by 3 Feet Our redistribution of mass on the surface has gone a bridge—or a dam—too far.

This impact of dams was not on my Bingo card…

“A team of scientists at Harvard University…[found] that the rampant construction of dams from 1835 to 2011 has locked up so much water that the Earth’s poles have moved slightly from their axial rotation.”

www.popularmechanics.com/science/envi...

Here's how millions of people could lose health insurance if Trump's tax bill becomes law Roughly 11.8 million adults and kids will be at risk for losing health insurance if Republicans’ domestic policy package becomes a law.

Fun fact: Members of Congress keep stable, subsidized health insurance - even in retirement. Sounds great, right?

Last week, many of them voted for the Big Ugly Bill, which strips coverage from millions.

Healthcare is a human right - for me, not for thee.

Photo of quill and top of Declaration of Independence.

"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." (1776) 🗃️

Comic by Rori titled "How it happens..." Little gumdrops are trapped holding up a boulder with a king and a billionaire on it, with all their money. panel 1: one gumdrop thinks "Things can be better" panel 2: The gumdrop says "Things can be better." and the other gumdrops start thinking it. panel 3: all gumdrops shout in unison "THINGS CAN BE BETTER!" and throw off the boulder, king, billi and money panel 4: The gumdrops are brighter, smiling, with more space between them and no boulder shading them. They say: "Things are better."

Just a quick little comic thing.

Heave-ho 😏

Teal and blue graphic saying "The United States spends at least 300 times more on our military defense than on our health defense, yet COVID killed more than a million Americans."

@drtomfrieden.bsky.social had a great Insta post that we are sharing here.

"We spend 300 times more on military defense than on protecting our health. But when the threat came, it didn't wear a uniform. It didn't knock. It slipped through systems we never built and funding we never prioritized"

"Thus are our cruel enemies warring against liberty, virtue and the arts and sciences. To make war against literature and learning is the part of barbarians."

From J. Thatcher, 1777. "A military journal during the American revolutionary war, from 1775 to 1783."

A bar graph. On the left side is a bar showing that Republicans are cutting $930 billion from Medicaid. On the right side is a bar showing that Republicans are giving $910 billion in tax breaks to corporations under their budget bill, paid for by gutting Medicaid.

Republicans may lie about what's in their budget bill but the numbers sure don't.

Yet Luigi launched a thousand hand-wringing op-eds from the chattering class. Makes you think

I just wanna write about astronomy and talk about Star Trek and make high-level puns and post fun photos but instead we have secret police and federally sponsored kidnappings and horrifically repressive legislation jammed through and oh yeah also a massively illegal war in the Middle East.

Dammit.

I'm willing to forgive the Democratic establishment a lot more than most folks on this site, but rallying behind Cuomo is self defeating and inexcusably craven.

Hi! My name is Monica and I'm a landscape painter from Canada 🇨🇦
This is my art, let me know what you think!

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays.

Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn.

arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

Colorful quilt of a nighttime scene with Harriet Tubman in an orange jacket and purple dress carrying a rifle. She is leading other figures who walk behind her.

Harriet Tubman #quilt by my Mom, Vera P. Hall, who makes quilts celebrating Black people who fought for their own freedom. This seems to be the crowd favorite of the “We Didn’t Wait for Freedom” series. Happy #Juneteenth #quilting

‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides

When warnings of Insectageddon were issued a few years ago, there was widespread denial. Less so now. It's devastating. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

nature is for EVERYONE! 🏳️‍🌈

https://owlsintowels.org/

Omg, 😍.

“This is a site for pictures of owls… in towels.”

owlsintowels.org

Supplemental Feeding as a Driver of Population Expansion and Morphological Change in Anna's Hummingbirds Bird beaks are highly adaptable, with the potential to undergo rapid morphological shifts in response to environmental change such as climatic variation or food availability. Anna's Hummingbirds (Cal...

🚨New paper alert!🚨
We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵
📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....
#ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology

It’s Mary Anning’s birthday, so time to share @katebeaton.bsky.social’s brilliant cartoon again.