Hannah Waters

“It’s just embarrassing that we don’t have a story we can tell people about what reality is.”

Get Out: Adams Opens Campaign Office in Building With Vacate Order The storefront Democratic club HQ where the mayor just had a ribbon-cutting ceremony had a parapet collapse in dramatic fashion two years ago.

whoopsie daisy

Staggering numbers of Palestinians now being shot in Gaza as they try to find food at GHF sites, or along UN convoy routes. More than 4,500 people treated in a single Red Cross clinic. Almost 1,400 across two MSF clinics. Total is more than 12,000, according to health ministry.

Portrait of neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin wearing a grey turtleneck

POV: You’re a cell. You don’t have a brain. How do you form memories? It’s a perspective that the biologist Nikolay Kukushkin is used to inhabiting. “Really, when I close my eyes, I’m inside the cell,” he said.
www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-c...

What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory…

Forgotten studies from the early 20th century are helping scientists probe how and whether individual cells can learn and remember.

Good morning, the biggest story in public health today is still that the United States is building illegal concentration camps

Ms. Rachel grew up on Mister Rogers. Now she’s carrying on his legacy. The YouTube star wants her audiences — adults and children alike — to see the humanity of all people.

I wept through the entire Ms. Rachel profile wapo.st/45dEMW9 (gift link)

What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is...

What can a cell remember? A lot more than you think. My latest, for @quantamagazine.bsky.social, is on memory beyond the brain—in tiny unicellular creatures and the smallest, most ancient parts of ourselves:

www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-c...

News - Newly Deciphered Cuneiform Tablet Contains Unknown Sumerian Myth - Archaeology Magazine CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—A riveting lost Sumerian myth was recently rediscovered thanks to University of Chicago Sumerologist […]

New Sumerian myth just dropped

Heat Death A newsletter about yesterday, tomorrow, and all the crises in between.

Hey, writers! We're commissioning guest essays at HEAT DEATH. We want to showcase your weird deep dives into history, ecology and culture, and intersections between them. We pay a $75 honorarium per piece, edit carefully, and you keep all rights.

Pitch me at aelbein@gmail!

‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’ Odd animals arose at least 12 separate times Findings speak to the dramatic impact ants and termites can have on mammalian evolution

Crab-like creatures are famed for having evolved five times in evolutionary history. But anteaters have evolved at least 12 times--in half the evolutionary span. Cool story by @jakebuehler.bsky.social for @science.org

What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is...

Most of us have a hard time stepping outside our subjective experience to imagine what memory might look like for a cell. But for the neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin it’s an easy leap. “Really, when I close my eyes, I’m inside the cell."

www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-c...

What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is...

If you’ve ever tried to cram for an exam, you know that it’s easier to memorize something if you learn the information in shorter, spaced-out sessions. These dynamics are as relevant to each individual cell’s existence as they are to ours. Claire Evans reports: www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-c...

YouTube video by The Daily Show Peter Beinart - "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning" | The Daily Show

@peterbeinart.bsky.social talks about his book "being jewish after the destruction of gaza" on @thedailyshow.com

The Cells That Breathe Two Ways | Quanta Magazine In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

Bacteria from a Yellowstone hot spring do something no other organism has been found to do: breathe oxygen and sulfur at the same time. 🧪 It's both aerobic and anaerobic, a beautiful freaky creature from a beautiful freaky place

A twitter post explaining how you can “save PNGs to birds” by converting a drawing of a bird into a spectrogram then playing it to a starling who sung it back, reproducing the PNG.

Can’t wait to introduce bird-based storage into my backup system

The Men Trump Deported to a Salvadoran Prison On March 15, President Donald Trump’s administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Last week, the men were released as suddenly as they’d been t...

This is who Trump shipped to a Salvadoran dungeon:

An event planner
A coal miner
An Uber driver
Tortilla maker
Barber
DoorDashers
Soccer coaches
Furniture-maker
Car washers
Taxi drivers
HVAC techs
Auto parts worker
Tire plant worker

and 240 more...

projects.propublica.org/venezuelan-i...

The Cells That Breathe Two Ways | Quanta Magazine In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

Take a deep breath. You’re using oxygen to free molecular energy from the food you eat. But not all organisms on the planet live or breathe this way. @jakebuehler.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/the-cells-th...

A Palestinian doctor in Gaza shared the following urgent message with Drop Site: “Today is the first day that hospitals run by the Ministry of Health in Gaza have stopped providing meals to medical staff.” Meals for patients and medical teams have now been cut. He warns this means many patients are facing “certain death.” Patients will no longer receiving proper nutrition, leaving them unable to recover or resist illness. “Second, and even more dangerous, is that healthcare workers themselves are now exhausted and will be unable to continue treating patients.” He echoed the Health Ministry in describing the situation as “catastrophic,” and urged soup kitchens and food aid initiatives to immediately redirect their efforts toward hospitals.

I don’t have commentary for this… it is just horror.

GHF operates four sites concentrated in southern Gaza and staffed at least in part by US security contractors, working under Israeli military supervision. The signal for Gazans to set off from their tents or the ruins of their homes often comes from GHF’s Facebook page, where it announces the opening times of its distribution sites. These posts sometimes appear in the middle of the night and can give less than 30 minutes notice, an FT analysis found. A second post, often published only minutes after the scheduled opening times, announces the site is closed, with all aid distributed. In some cases, GHF has declared the site closed even before it was due to open.

Frequent internet outages in Gaza can also make it difficult for Palestinians even to access Facebook to see the posts. But for aid seekers, who must walk for kilometres along barely discernible routes whose landmarks have been flattened by Israel’s 21-month offensive, there is little room for miscalculation. “You don’t see where you are going in the dark,” said Jihad. “The route is provided as a map on your phone screen but on the ground the roads are all destroyed and you have to take a chance. So either you are on the right route, or you die.”

What started as a college networking website is now the information infrastructure by which Israel/U.S. run their Hunger Games-style “aid distribution” sites in Gaza on.ft.com/46ednp8

per a new CBS News poll, public opinion on immigration has flipped. people now mostly think that trump’s deportation agenda is going too far

Portrait of RNA biologist Rachel Green at John Hopkins University.

“What a [sunburned] cell is trying to do is make decisions about whether to live or die based on how damaged the DNA is… but amazingly, it’s the RNA that signals that. That’s the remarkable observation.” — Rachel Green, biologist at Johns Hopkins University.
www.quantamagazine.org/rna-is-the-c...

The #1 way to explain America working properly is by saying “comedians can make fun of he President on TV.” A good way to explain fascism is “the President forces companies to fire those comedians as a condition of allowing them to conduct business.”

I've been saying to friends for a few months that the more I study authoritarianism in other countries, the more concerned I become that the CBS story is the sleeping giant here. The process has been a simmer (people inside the network have spoken out in real-time) but don't mistake slow for safe.

Justice Dept. Asks for 1-Day Sentence for Ex-Officer Convicted in Breonna Taylor Raid

They mean to be as insulting to Black people, as dismissive of our lives, as resistance to our status as full citizens in this country as they can be.

There is no common ground to be had at the expense of our sisters & daughters’ lives and our dignity as a people.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/u...

Yeah

I’ve never seen anything that more clearly refers to underage sex trafficking in my life. A literal confession would be less damning.

As promised, in light of the WaPo report of Everglades camp detainees being swarmed by mosquitoes in the shower and unable to sleep at night due to being bitten, I want to briefly address concentration camp history and mosquitoes. I won't be comprehensive but will give a few examples. [1/17]

I want to be clear: this is what American prisons are like.

I spent years posting about the humanitarian crisis in U.S. prisons. The criminal legal system consigns Americans who are incarcerated to live like this FOR YEARS. DECADES.

Trump Seeks to Cut Basic Scientific Research by Roughly One-Third, Report Shows

'Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.'
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/s...