5 million deaths a year globally are attributed to lack of physical activity. Many countries have set policies to promote physical activity but never implemented them.
No improvement in >20 years!
3 new papers
nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com/articles/s44...
Anthropic’s principled stand against the Department of Defense continues to pose enormous risks for the company—but some early indications suggest that it just might pay off, Ken Harbaugh argues.
Damn.
Some more ideas developed from the BMJ stem cell paper www.wjst.de/blog/science...
On sabotage of our young scientists, by @holdenthorp.bsky.social @science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co
The international boycott of ChatGPT has absolutely exploded.
2.5M people have already joined, and this is just the beginning.
Go to quitgpt.org.
Cancel your subscription, delete your account.
And tell at least one person why.
My op-ed: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
The #EpsteinFiles meet #TheUList.
26 universities (and counting) with ties to #Epstein tracked at buff.ly/lR3UE29
🪜 🎓 📜 🍎 ♀️👩🏾🔬 #PhDSky #Blackademia #AcademicChatter #AcademicSky #MeToo #HigherEd #PhDChat #FeministSky
I have professionally followed war in the Middle East going on 8 years. I have had my analysis published in internationally respected outlets. I have not once purposefully watched one of those videos. You don't need it.
"ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation...we don’t know how [it] was trained...what is embedded into its models" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
when your dataset is definitely real
Cover of The Lancet, 28 February 2026 issue. The quote: “The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.”
On the cover of The Lancet:
Editorial — “Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 year of failure”
Read the latest issue: spkl.io/63327Aa31W
@anneapplebaum.bsky.social and @lynseyaddario.bsky.social traveled to Sudan last year to report from the front lines of a brutal civil war. Addario’s photographs have been nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Revisit the cover story:
Turns out an African truck driver had a better model of COVID spread than his former colonial masters.
How to get a universal vaccine vs respiratory threats?
Block via the nasal mucosa
@science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
@natrevimmunol.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
You already know this by reading this post academic.oup.com/icb/article-...
why that @thelancet.com ? drpeterwilmshurst.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/t...
It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
cuplyr version 0.1.0 is now out!
A GPU-accelerated dplyr backend for R, powered by RAPIDS cuDF.
Write familiar tidyverse code, execute on GPU. Lazy eval with AST optimization.
In my benchmarks 60x faster than dplyr on 50M rows.
github.com/bbtheo/cuplyr
#rstats #cuda #DataScience
In January 2017, the African Union noticed that its servers were unusually busy for two hours overnight, when the offices were empty. An investigation would uncover that the AU's confidential data was being siphoned off every night and sent more than 8,000km away, to Shanghai.
1/4
Why?
Von wegen freies Wissen: Unis zahlen tausende Euro pro Artikel, um Forschungsergebnisse – oft mit Steuergeldern finanziert – frei zugänglich zu machen. Doch die Transparenz hat einen hohen Preis: Private Verlage machen damit ein undurchsichtiges Milliardengeschäft. fragdenstaat.de/artikel/exkl...
Maybe add transparency / auditability as distinct from veracity.
Great piece in the NYtimes with quotes from @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social and @sashagusevposts.bsky.social. The misuse of NIH datasets with sensitive personal information for racist aims should be concerning for anybody interested in scientific integrity. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...
January 24, 2026 at 18:42 Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti "We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the 'hero' term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump's murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.
“Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
United States Completes WHO Withdrawal WASHINGTON — January 22, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of State today announced the United States’ completion of its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) due to the organization's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a joint statement on the termination of U.S. membership in the WHO.President Trump on January 20, 2025, announced the U.S. plan to leave the WHO. During the yearlong process, the U.S. stopped funding WHO, withdrew all personnel from WHO, and began pivoting activities previously conducted with WHO to direct bilateral engagements with other countries and organizations. With the exit from WHO, the U.S. will be coordinating with WHO solely in a limited fashion to effectuate withdrawal. The WHO delayed declaring a global public health emergency and a pandemic during the early stages of COVID-19, costing the world critical weeks as the virus spread. During that period, WHO leadership echoed and praised China's response despite evidence of early underreporting, suppression of information and delays in confirming human-to-human transmission. The organization also downplayed asymptomatic transmission risks and failed to promptly acknowledge airborne spread.After the pandemic, the WHO did not adopt meaningful reforms to address political influence, governance weaknesses or poor coordination, reinforcing concerns that politics took priority over rapid, independent public health action and eroding global trust. Its report evaluating the possible origins of COVID-19 rejected the possibility that scientists cre…
And just like that, the US has left the World Health Organization.
Link goes to the official announcement—lies pretending to justify a decision that will kill countless numbers—from people too stupid to even include a proper twittercard.
www.hhs.gov/press-room/u...
Identifying an unethical European research group has rarely been difficult. What remains encouraging is that African scientists were alert enough to stop the exercise.
BMJ not yet prepared to retract this trial bit.ly/4jBjyIA
bit.ly/4aLeQ8L
Despite innumerable integrity issues, including repeating patterns of outcome data, see comment #16: bit.ly/3NxsSks
A Controlled Descent into Pre-Enlightenment Healthcare
