As the first ballots are being mailed out to voters for November’s midterm election, there is an enormous amount of uncertainty and confusion about how Americans will vote. Here are some clarifications:

Analysis | What to watch for when voting in the midterms

The Justice Department plans to send 1,000 monitors to polls and voting by mail could be tricky if you don’t plan ahead.

washingtonpost.com

Not stated strongly enough.

Simon W Davis@woodforbrains.bsky.social · 3d ago

Ho-LEE fuck democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/press-r...

I teach about Ariely's fraud in my methods class and it is probably not the best message to undergrads that he still has his job

Philip N Cohen@philipncohen.com · 4d ago

What in the whole wide world of blindingly obvious fraud, clearly documented pathological lying, and nauseating Epstein suck-uppery does a tenured professor have to do to get fired by Duke?

Part 2. There is no bottom to Ariely's malfeasance. The Arday tragedy is so raw now the comparison is unavoidable. Ariely's fraud cost millions. Books were sold, careers altered. People and organizations changed policies and practices based on his fake results...

Data Colada@datacolada.bsky.social · 4d ago

Colada[139] Artificial Deadlines Part 2 Evidence of fraud in the 25 year old gradesheet behind the key finding in an influential paper on deadlines and procrastination. datacolada.org/139

A lot of ink has been spilled on RCP-8.5, but its worth pausing and celebrating just how dramatically the high-end tail of emissions scenarios has changed over ~15 years. Genuine technological and policy progress on climate, reflected in the set of futures we can imagine

Zeke Hausfather@zekehausfather.com · 5d ago

The emissions scenarios underlying the next generation of climate model runs that will be featured in the upcoming IPCC 7th Assessment Report are officially out! I have a big new explainer over at Carbon Brief taking an in-depth look at what they mean and whats changed: www.carbonbrief.org/...

Making models disagree to learn how brains compute — a Review by Tal Golan, Heiko H. Schütt & Nikolaus Kriegeskorte @talgolanneuro.bsky.social @heikoschuett.bsky.social @kriegeskorte.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Making models disagree to learn how brains compute - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Neural network models can express computational hypotheses about brain information processing, but their high parametric capacity makes discriminating model alignment to experimental data challenging....

nature.com

A 76-year-old green card holder with stage 4 cancer was arrested at his citizenship application interview and has been held by ICE for two months. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Excellent piece that articulates many of the parallels I was thinking about when I read Dalrymple's book on the East India Company: how do governments control companies that more economically powerful than most countries, and can purchase political influence in the most powerful country?

William Dalrymple@willdalrymple.bsky.social · last wk.

An essay I've just written for @nytimes on why Big Tech is the 21st Century’s equivalent of the East India Company: "What It Would Take to Dismantle the Most Powerful Companies in the World" www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/o...

Jesus Christ: UC Berkeley international students will no longer be allowed to complete internships or co-ops for course credit unless they form an “integral part of an established curriculum,” following repeated threats from ICE. This is going to send shockwaves across SF and Silicon Valley

Lynda Lopez@lyndab08.bsky.social · 2w ago

“The Berkeley International Office announced Wednesday that it will pause international students’ applications for Course Credit Curricular Practical Training “for the foreseeable future.”

This paper shows how measures and constructs in psychology get introduced but rarely reused. Would love to see a similar analysis done on methods of analyzing neural data. A Fragmented Field: Construct and Measure Proliferation in Psychology" Anvari et al., 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

About bloody time. www.theguardian.com/culture/2026...

London Science Museum cuts links with BP after decades of partnership

Campaigners say ‘seismic shift’ follows years of pressure to sever ties with oil and gas firm

theguardian.com

As like 2/3 of our food gets recalled it occurs to me again how this whole era is perhaps best explained by The Curse of the Preventive Measure

Amazon is officially shutting down Mechanical Turk next month. It feels like the end of an era. I've written about the platform on and off for close to a decade. We wouldn't have the AI tools we do now if it weren't for the low-paid, largely invisible labor of MTurkers

🧪 Scientists and researchers in your life have been freaking out for the past year and a half because we know exactly how hard & how long this work takes. The real damage from RFK's tenure won't just hit now. It will hit in 10 yrs, when the therapies we could have had simply won't exist. #MedSky 🛟

Stand Up for Science!@standupforscience.net · last wk.

Why your doctor can't give you a cure tomorrow: how effective treatments are discovered and developed. Part 1 🧪 🧵 #science #news #education #health #research

Studies show that in conjunctive visual search (e.g. searching for a stimulus defined by both orientation & color), eye movements are much less guided by orientation than other features, despite the fact that eye movements *are* guided by orientation in single feature search. Why? #psychscisky

Last week, the National Science Foundation announced $1.5 billion in new funding opportunities—but none from its Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. #neuroskyence By @callimcflurry.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/funding/futu...

Future unclear for U.S. federal funding of cognitive science

The NSF hasn’t shared new funding solicitations for its Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences or replaced outgoing program officers.

thetransmitter.org

That is what I say too: Every 1/10th degree of warming prevented is a profound gift to our children & grandchildren, & their children & grandchildren. And we, humans, have already averted many 1/10th degrees of warming from the likely outcome. @docsforclimate.bsky.social @gchalliance.bsky.social

Richard Waite@waiterich.bsky.social · 2w ago

“1.5C is impossible” ok try for 1.6! Every fraction of a degree means lives saved!! “It’s too expensive” not stopping climate change is even more expensive!!! “Our voters/shareholders don’t care” make them care!!!! “Political winds are shifting” ok but the impacts are getting worse!!!!! Cmon man

A civilian geography professor was fired from West Point for pushing back after department officials barred faculty from teaching that humans contribute to climate change.

West Point professor fired after pushing back on limitations to teaching climate change, lawsuit says

Adam Kalkstein pushed back after department officials barred faculty from teaching that humans contribute to climate change, the lawsuit says.

stripes.com

MIT has put out an "AI and Education" report summarizing what they've found at their own institution. Seems thoughtful. aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/

Do not normalize children dying from measles. Measles was previously eliminated in the US, thanks to vaccines. When children die from measles, it means that adults have catastrophically failed to protect them because they have rejected basic science.

Hiring for research scientists in expansion chemistry and optical physiology at mindspan.org with @eboyden3.bsky.social, Yongxin Zhao, Xue Han. We will build tools to analyze the human brain. We are into compiling arxiv.org/abs/2603.25713. We are into cutting edge technology.

NSF is substantially reducing grants, zeroing out many SBE subdivisions, & withholding the funds to spend next year on central initiatives: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades

The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.

nature.com

30-40% of the US corn supply in recent years, but yes, point well taken (corn for ethanol covers an area of prime cropland about the size of Indiana)

Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅@cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 2w ago

anytime people raise concerns about land use for solar projects or anything like that i just want to point out that half the corn we grow in this country gets used to make gasoline slightly worse

7. @madisoncondon.bsky.social calls for giving the public real-time and long-term info about how specific towns and regions can anticipate and prepare for climate harms. Make Science Useful! rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

Stand Up a National Climate Service

Exploring why the U.S. needs stronger climate science infrastructure, adaptation planning, and public access to actionable climate risk information.

rooseveltinstitute.org

We are hiring a full professor for "Intelligence in biological and artificial systems". If you don't know about the German system yet, let me tell you a little bit about working as a professor at the institute. Thread 👇

Tim Kietzmann @timkietzmann.bsky.social · 3w ago

📢 We are hiring a full professor in "Intelligence in Biological and Artificial Systems". Come join us at Germany's first and largest cognitive science program. Please share far and wide, and get in touch with any questions. www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/universit...

Climate change is becoming a crisis. So we have a choice to make: 1. Pretend it’s not happening and do nothing. 2. See it’s happening, but spiral into “doomerism” and surrender. 3. See it’s happening and get to work fixing it. The third option is the right one. Join us. Drawdown.org

Home

Project Drawdown drives meaningful climate action by advancing science-based solutions and strategies.

drawdown.org

Hey folks, this hasn’t gotten much attention, but remember those proposed OMB rule changes we all commented on recently? There’s a new attempt to sneak them just for NSF. We have three days to comment. Please don’t sleep on this!

Noam Ross@noamross.net · 2w ago

Three more days to comment on NSF's attempt to smuggle in OMB's already-rejected policies of terminating any grant without cause, gutting civil rights obligations and restricting international collaborations. Submit your comment today! Then call your representatives. 🧪

This is the reported $100,000 fee on Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows foreign students to remain for a couple years in post-graduate employment. The fee would devastate the program, making the US even less desirable as a destination for the world's best and brightest.

Olga Nesterova@onestpress.onestnetwork.com · 2w ago

White House is planning to announce “a large new tax on international students who stay to work in the US after graduation”.

if you wrote something about AI and climate, pls send it my way

Costa Samaras@costasamaras.com · last mo.

I'm teaching my course on AI, energy, and climate again this fall, and restructuring the class as the field keeps evolving. If you have new work or resources you think we should cover, send them my way. The class starts ⁱⁿ ᵗʰʳᵉᵉ ʷᵉᵉᵏˢ at ⁸﹕³⁰ ᵃᵐ

Teaching "AI use" in college (not related to teaching how AI is built) is silly because 1.) the tools are meant to be user friendly with minimal training and 2.) they change so often your education would be good for about a semester

Adam Schiffer@adamschiffer.bsky.social · 2w ago

This is why I get so annoyed with university admins who insist we must teach AI or our students will be left behind. Fine, then require one class and leave the rest of us alone. (After about two weeks in the class, they’ll be like, “shit, what do we do now?” but that’s not my problem.)