• A fun post from Steve Newman’s Am I Stronger Yet Substack discusses AI capabilities: We’re Finding Out What Humans Are Bad At  I’d recommend it!

• The heavy-handed, indiscriminate, and woefully uninformed attempts at budget cutting by Musk and his seeming puppet Trump continue with the imposition of a 15% “indirect research costs” cap at the NIH. Researchers (like, alas, many others) in the US are under siege by people wielding hammers whose authority is dubious at best. For more details, read Jeremy Faust’s February 8 Substack post here. And/or see Harlan Krumholz’s 5 minute video.

• Writing in the Harvard Gazette, Christina Pazzanese interviews Daniel Poneman on the state of the nuclear industry in the US.

• We’re littering near-earth space just like we junked up the planet. The Washington Post Editorial Board describes the issue well – Space trash is falling from the sky. And that’s not the worst of it.

• John Muyskens, Kevin Crowe, Shannon Osaka, and Niko Kommenda, writing in the Washington Post,  do a commendable job of describing the variable rise in sea levels across the globe. Definitely worth a read: WHY SEAS ARE SURGING

• A quick video re. the Polio vaccine’s beneficial impact from Kristen Panthagani.  She encourages sharing!

• David Chandler advocates for the ideals of John Rawls in his NYT essay The Democrats Are in Trouble. This Man Can Save Them.

• Zeynep Tufekci writes in the NYT re. some of the reasons JFK Jr. is a less than ideal selection for HHS secretary: John F Kennedy Jr. Could Do Almost Limitless Harm

• In his NYT opinion piece Trump Says the Country Is ‘Dying.’ The Data Say Otherwise, Steven Pinker tries to narrow the optimism gap by presenting evidence that the U.S. is really in pretty good shape. Worth a read if only to make yourself feel a little bit better about things…

• Joy of Tech strikes again: