• I have to agree with Zynep Tufekci, writing on the Texas measles outbreak in the NY Times:

“All governors should be launching campaigns to increase measles vaccination coverage, but some states are led by people who promote falsehoods. And some Americans live deep in echo chambers where most of what they hear about vaccines are lies and disdain. It won’t be possible to reverse all this quickly. Perhaps the best we can do is inform parents skeptical of vaccines what they’re risking, before it’s too late.”

• 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.