pmags

Useful graphics in this NY Times article on the numbers and geography of the outbreak:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/well/us-measles-record-ou...

Your comment suggests that you fundamentally misunderstand the process of scientific discovery and innovation, how the American scientific ecosystem works, or how the economic and technological return on scientific investment has helped to propel the US for the last 70 years.

If you have any doubts that Trump 2.0 will destroy the American scientific workforce for years to come, this summary of cuts at NSF makes the case very strongly.

Engineering: -57%

Math, Physics, Chemistry: -67%

STEM Education: -80%

... and the list goes on...

I already had "deny access to life saving medicines and public health improvements" on my Trump 2.0 bingo card.

What do I win besides greater probability of serious viral infection?

This is a real and important challenge, which is even further exacerbated if you work on microbial organisms. I can easily think of a half dozen times in my own research where we tracked down differences in phenotype between ostensibly isogenic strains from different labs that turned out to be the result of in lab evolution.

See also:

"World Health Organization scales back work after funding cuts"

• https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

You mean like this?

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/06/politics/trump-sharpie-hurric...

The US government is playing "hide the data".

And a related piece on this article in the NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/science/covid-coronavirus...

That's a bizarre interpretation if you bother to take a few minutes to look at the flagged/dead posts on 'newest' of late.

Almost anything policy-adjacent gets shut down almost immediately even if it has a strong tech or science angle.

The synth company SOMA has an interesting new theremin-like synth called Flux, that uses magnetic "bows". See:

https://somasynths.com/flux/

The journal in question, Environmental Health Perspectives, doesn't charge submission fees and is open access (articles are freely available to everyone to read). Its impact factor puts it among the top journals in the fields of toxicology and Public and Environmental Health (https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/journal/ehp/journal-impact-factor).

The article notes that two other open access journals, published by the CDC are also potentially on the chopping block at HHS:

• Emerging Infectious Diseases • Preventing Chronic Disease

This is an odd interpretation if the details cited in the NY Times articles are correct:

> When he informed Ted of his marriage plans, Ted, who had never met Ms. Patrik, fumed, and warned him, in what David called a “vicious” letter, that he was making the biggest mistake of his life. Ted then severed virtually all communication with him.

From this quote it seems like Ted Kaczynski had already cut off most communication with his brother w/out ever meeting the wife.

I wonder how similar / different this to the Filipino martial art known as Arnis, which is also bladed weapon + stick based?

Perhaps an interesting cultural example of convergence or parallelism (depending on how you think about the shared influence of Spanish colonialism w/respect to the development of these martial arts in Columbia and the Phillipines).

Note that admissions for MSc admissions usually differ quite a lot from PhD admissions, and the criteria can be very different across fields. Things have changed significantly since 2010 as well, and are likely to change even more radically in the next admissions cycle as a result of massive funding cuts to the sciences that the US is currently experiencing. Couple this with radically restricted foreign student visas resulting from new federal policy...

So this should probably be read as "Demystifying the American Graduate Admissions Process for MSc programs in CS in the 2010s".

What are the limits of Federal liability when ICE, the FBI, or some other random federal agency mistakenly raids your home?

This very question is currently before the Supreme Court for an FBI raid of a wrong house:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/politics/supreme-court...

Sadly, Douglas Prasher, who actually cloned GFP, couldn't get his work funded at the time and ended up leaving science:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

Arguably, he should have shared the Nobel. Makes one wonder what the rationale is for the Nobel only allowing up to three shared winners.

Nothing scary at all about a 7 ft goat-headed centaur robot with a chainsaw in its hands!

I'm guessing from the domain name this is "satyr"! ;-) Regardless, I for one welcome our mythical woodland AI-robot overlords!

This is a classic middle school science outreach activity, or something older elementary age kids might do at a summer science camp.

Lovely! I wish they had featured even more photos in the article.

Context: This was a popular thought piece as the field of molecular systems biology was emerging as its own sub-discipline in the early 2000s.