Congrats to all the new assistant professors who got STEM jobs at R1 universities! Surprise, one-third of your work is now teaching writing to grad students who mostly avoided humanities and social science classes in undergrad. #AcademicSky
Kathleen Kennedy
@kmkennedy6.bsky.social
Assistant Research Professor at UMD's Center for Global Sustainability. Researching state-level decarbonization pathways in Maryland and beyond. Views my own. She/her.
Van Hollen ‘kicking the tires’ on a 2028 presidential run
Van Hollen ‘kicking the tires’ on a 2028 presidential run
Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen has spent the last year and a half raising his national profile.
buff.ly
Good news! Ministers have finally given green light to new #NaturalHistory GCSE. We’ve campaigned so long for this! Big hats off to tireless advocate Mary Colwell 🙌 Now our young people will have a chance to get to know & love the natural world, to feel awe & wonder, & gain skills to protect it 🌷🌳🦡
Natural history GCSE to teach teenagers to plant wildflower-friendly gardens
Long-awaited course to examine human effects on natural world and explore everyday ways to aid biodiversity
theguardian.com
"We're shipping so much more code with AI!" "Good, stable code?" "Oh heavens no. No no no. not at all. We couldn't possibly"
Sue Smith@suesmith.lol · 3mo ago"The AI engineering impact data shows that output is up. It also shows that the work required to ensure that output is safe, correct, and maintainable has not decreased. It has increased substantially." Aye, if only any of us had been saying this from day one 🤡 www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acce...
New research finds that NYC's congestion pricing program has reduced collisions. "The introduction of the Congestion Relief Zone is associated with fewer overall crashes." doi.org/10.1093/aje/...
meanwhile, the house transportation and infrastructure committee is moving the Build America 250 Act—a bill that would increase highway funding and decrease public transit funding for the next 5-6 years.
Indivisible Central Ohio@indivcentraloh.bsky.social · 3mo agoMy Grandview Ave. gas ⛽️ price update. Nope 👎🏻 prices are not going down. 😢
"If we’re right, the bulk of new gas fired power plants being built will be underutilized or abandoned long before the end of their useful lives. This is where the prospective economic pain will occur for utilities." hmmmm
Why America’s Gas Power Boom Could End in Disaster | OilPrice.com
Utilities are underestimating fuel-price risk, and repeated spikes in gas prices could make many new plants uneconomic, underutilized, or stranded.
oilprice.com
what do you call mass detainment camps that kill the people who stay in them
This will truly become a nightmare at scale and we already went through this with Uber and Lyft. The great promise was that ridesharing would reduce the need for personal car ownership. In reality, it led to increased traffic congestion due to all the deadheading.
David Zipper@davidzipper.bsky.social · 3mo agoNew research examines Waymo's California robotaxi trips btw Aug 2023 and Dec 2025. Conclusion: 46% of miles driven involved no one inside the car. That's 40 million miles of deadheading, with Waymo vehicles using road space w/o transporting a human. doi.org/10.32866/001...
Still thinking about how Trump EPA's economic analysis for its final rule delaying the phasedown of super polluting refrigerants monetized potential savings but *not* potential costs. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
EPA Climate Rollback Counts Savings, Downplays Costs
The agency estimates delaying a super-pollutant phaseout will result in millions of dollars in savings, but its calculation doesn’t take many costs into account.
bloomberg.com
The European Union is tightening the regulatory backdoor through which US automakers have been quietly importing around 7k large SUVs and pickup trucks/year. “The revised rules, expected to launch in 2027, are designed to close loopholes that Brussels says allow unsafe vehicles onto European roads.”
Too big for Europe: America's pickup trucks became a trade war flashpoint - EUROPE SAYS
America loves its pickup trucks. The Ford F-150, the Chevrolet Silverado 1500, the Ram 1500: these are not merely vehicles. They are cultural monuments on
europesays.com
On the scale of their criminality, this is a minor offense, but it points to the Republican regime's desire to destroy independent sources of information so they can be the sole arbiter of truth. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/c...
Trump Administration to Dismantle Ocean Monitoring System
nytimes.com
Death toll from Israel's attacks on Lebanon since March has reached 3,433, with 10,395 injured, says Health Ministry.
Trump talks to Hezbollah, Israel's Netanyahu as Lebanon fighting surges
Death toll from Israel's attacks on Lebanon since March has reached 3,433, with 10,395 injured, says Health Ministry.
aljazeera.com
What the actual f$&k. Trump is dismantling the OOI. A shining achievement of oceanography. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/c...
Trump Administration to Dismantle Ocean Monitoring System
nytimes.com
I’m a climate scientist. Let me fix this headline. “Nearly a century ago, scientists showed that burning fossil fuels warms the planet. Today, we know human emissions account for over 100% of the warming. Yet dark money and disinformation still work to keep Americans addicted to fossil fuels.”
Forbes@forbes.com · 3mo agoScientists have reached a consensus that human behavior is a big driver of climate change—but Americans aren't buying it.
tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.
Science Magazine@science.org · 3mo agoThe White House today announced it plans to make major changes in how the U.S. government manages research funding. https://scim.ag/43HgW4s
Reminder that the Trump regime is still blowing up suspected “drug boats” — killing 197 people since September. But no judge or jury has found these boats were trafficking drugs. We're taking Trump's word for it. This is murder. We must not lose sight of this lawlessness.
Once again: German universities were the envy of the world before the Nazis rose to power and took an ideological wrecking ball to the entire enterprise. If you want to know how long it took for German universities to recover… they haven’t.
Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 3mo agoIt’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.
47/ However, it’s not enough to stop the proposal. The board votes to move forward the proposed changes with 3 board members dissenting. Let’s be clear: Gavin Newsom’s air regulators voted to cut billions from housing, transit, and climate and hand it to Big Oil. This is a betrayal.
It’s bizarre being a policy-oriented researcher in an environment where evidence and public opinion are basically irrelevant to what happens. We’re not informing policy any more, friends; we have to make politics.
Project 2025 promised a right-wing revolution in American government. Democrats’ Project 2029 promises to ... take on the “annoyance economy” and cut down on surprise fees and impossible cancellations. From me: www.ms.now/opinion/proj...
Opinion | Project 2029 sure doesn’t look like an answer to Project 2025
A Democratic group is displaying a puzzling lack of ambition for the party’s policy vision.
ms.now
A city taxing large retailers 1% to fund community solar, free AC for low-income households, and clean energy job training. Turns out when communities design the policy, they build things that actually help people. vist.ly/55wve via Monica Samayoa at WGLT
How one Oregon city has raised a billion dollars for climate change
The Portland Clean Energy Fund has raised a billion dollars for climate change action via a retail tax on large corporations in the city. Other cities are starting to shape similar funds.
wglt.org
NEW — I wrote about my visit to Delaney Hall, the ICE facility in Newark, NJ where detainees are on a hunger and labor strike in protest of rotten food, unpaid work, and unjust detainment, and where protesters outside have spent the last week drawing ICE's ire while keeping strikers' demands alive.
Starved, smashed and bloodied: The violence at ICE’s Delaney Hall
Brutality towards detainees and protesters continues to unfold in Newark, NJ. The Handbasket was on-site to report.
thehandbasket.co
What's really astonishing is not the far right authoritarian party doing this, but the near-total lack of <loud public collective action> by university chancellors & presidents to oppose this existential crisis. Almost impossible to overstate how total a failure of leadership this is.
Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 3mo agoIt’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.
Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-...
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy!
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user del...
thatprivacyguy.com
Reminder that Amazon... -Helps fuel ICE's deportation machine -Donated $1M to Trump's inauguration -Scrapped plans to display tariff costs after pressure from Trump -Shelled out $75M for the Melania movie And now wants to reboot The Apprentice — with Don Jr as host. Still shopping on Amazon?
If the fossil fuel industry had to pay all of its true costs it wouldn't be profitable.
Justin Mikulka@justinmikulka.bsky.social · 2y agoWe definitely need to tally up the bill that the oil and gas industry owes us. It's really big. Take it from this rancher in the Permian. “If people really knew how much liability the state has for these orphans,” he said, “it would scare the hell out of them.”