• 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!
Heather Cox Richardson’s February 6, 2025 Letters from an American Substack essay is worth a read.
• 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.
RIP, Dr. David Crippen, an amazing polymath whose legacy lives on in the International Critical Care List he started.
Dana Milbank, writing in the Washington Post, scarily demonstrates the paucity of knowledge held by #47 with numerous examples.
• Writing in the Harvard Gazette, Christina Pazzanese interviews Daniel Poneman on the state of the nuclear industry in the US.
Can’t resist this seasonal one from the brilliant folks at Joy of Tech:
• 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