Karmela Padavic-Callaghan (they/them)

Today, for @rewirenewsgroup.com, @madisyn-writes.bsky.social looked into the to the limited data and conflicting guidance around breast cancer screening options for trans women. It's troubling. And it could have life-changing consequences for patients. I hope you'll give it a read.

Are you a PhD student in quantum computing and interested in working with our team in 2027 as a student researcher (i.e., an internship that's ~3 months and in-person at our office)? If so, apply here: www.google.com/about/career...

Trump administration has pushed off 13% of Americans enrolled in food stamps

SCOOP: 'Tommy' from the now-viral exchange with Abdul El-Sayed is Thomas Teepell, a former staffer for Republican Senator Josh Hawley with close ties to Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht. He's the son of a former Bobby Jindal staffer whose consultant work was instrumental in getting Hawley elected.

A lot of people pointing out the sinister potential of this tool to personalise insurance premiums based in your appearance. If you look older and more frail, then you'll have to pay more!

Happy #PublicationDay, Kamau Bobb! 🤖 THE BULLWHIP’S ALGORITHM, a warning of the colorblind promises of AI in education in light of US society’s history of race and technology, “is dangerously and necessarily brilliant.” — @chrisemdin.bsky.social

The kind of logical error rate you love to see. Today on New Scientist, I wrote about recent work from Quantinuum and how their quantum computing experiments check another box on the path to making quantum computers more practical and useful. www.newscientist.com/article/2594...

If you’ve wanted to take a food writing class that’s short (two hours), with only four readings, but will give you ways to think about craft, structure, and voice: The Mini Food Essay is coming up on October 27. alicia-kennedy.com/workshops/p/...

"You have the utopia and then you fail and then you have to keep living, and that's I think for a lot of us a constant experience: We find ourselves through failure, to a large extent." -- @kpc.bsky.social, author of ENTANGLED STATES, in conversation with @aliciadkennedy.bsky.social

Listen to @beaconpress.bsky.social author Alicia Kennedy's conversation with @reluctantlyjoe.bsky.social and fellow Beacon author @kpc.bsky.social during their virtual chat last week. www.aliciakennedy.news/p/the-desk-s...

Come work with me at SJSU - we are hiring a physiologist (pretty broad research interests encouraged to apply). jobs.sjsu.edu/en-us/job/56... @apsphysiology.bsky.social @blackinphysiology.bsky.social @blackinneuro.bsky.social

It was such an honor and so fun to be part of this conversation. Do check it out for thoughts on scientific thinking, queer utopias and failures, and cooking as means of literally building up our loved ones.

In a story on political violence (where they depict the targets as equally democratic and republican), the @nytimes.com gives a sympathetic ear to a member of Congress who was part of January 6.

@aliciadkennedy.bsky.social, NO MEAT REQUIRED author, is hosting a virtual event for fellow @beaconpress.bsky.social author @kpc.bsky.social, writer of ENTANGLED STATES, & Nat'l Book Award finalist @reluctantlyjoe.bsky.social this Sunday! alicia-kennedy.com/salon/p/the-...

A new concern about this story: if AI writes the proof and AI formalises it in the proof-checking software Lean, mistakes can happen in that second, translation step. The Navier-Stokes result has not been disproven, but the situation continues to be a sloppy mess www.newscientist.com/article/2592...

"ArXiv policy has long permitted authors to use AI, as long as it is disclosed. But Boboris wrote that arXiv has witnessed “an increase in thin papers of narrow scope” and “low value” research." By @sparkes.bsky.social for New Scientist www.newscientist.com/article/2591...

Good end-of-FY coverage by the Times. The amount of unspent funds has wiggled but it was pretty clear for some time now that NSF was simply not going to spend a substantial portion of its congressional appropriation this year.

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

New study suggests that raising school ventilation levels to ASHRAE 241 targets could reduce flu cases by 33% for the WHOLE POPULATION! We need clean air in schools so bad!!! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

something is only a “culture war issue” to you if you think it’s not about you; otherwise it’s just “politics” or (maybe) “life”

Seems like a good time to re-up this post. It is a list of 26 Dems at the statewide/national level that have made anti-trans statements or voted anti-trans policies. I do not advocate for abstaining from all of the ones on this list, but if the worst offenders who call us “biological men,” I do.

At the centre of the AI maths controversy and hype this week sit the Navier-Stokes equations. What are they, what past human efforts built the foundations for this most recent work, and what do claims of having solved them change? In my latest for New Scientist: www.newscientist.com/article/2588...

This man won his primary by 30 points.

Dolly Parton, among a thousand other amazing things she did in her life, gifted over 330 million books to kids through her Imagination Library program. Her passing is a tremendous loss to the world, but you can support the program today to keep it going imaginationlibrary.com

I had the privilege of profiling one of the most interesting and talented people working in quantum computing today, someone who could single-handedly help make quantum computers work, and unveil just how to run defense against their hacking potential www.newscientist.com/article/2581...

This week on my personal newsletter I write about friendship, what it takes to make it deep, who benefits when we don't, and how my training in quantum physics may have primed me to love my friends an awful lot ultracold.substack.com/p/id-rather-...

Same here, baby. Same.

Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

Super excited to see my two pieces on maths and AI where I chat to two of the best mathematicians working today in print in New Scientist

"A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world."

Yeah, climate change is going to make everyone sicker, but it's already having an impact on those of us with chronic illnesses and disabilities. www.statnews.com/2026/08/12/c...

Many articles/think pieces/interviews about the Democrats pushing back against the scourge of the DSA. I am a DSA member but will, out of the kindness of my heart, offer some advice to the establishment re: pushing back Do something Do literally goddamn anything

“A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.” ysph.yale.edu/news-article...

there is no such thing as "age verification." All "age verification" is actually "identity verification." You can coat it in glitter and "privacy-preserving" wrapping paper. But in the end, mandating age verification means mandating surveillance be built into software and hardware. Period.

What goes into a single chapter of comics? A lot! The books as starting points, articles clipped from @newscientist.com & all the links to articles, research papers, videos, & more to draw it all. Most of this remains unseen, but it takes all this to make the work possible! #Nostos #Unflattening 2

Neat update to the quantum solution of this problem: turns out you really do need entanglement. (You'll note that there are 5x5 and 7x7 colored squares in the image—that's because the classical 6x6 does not exist.)

In the 1700s a Russian empress asked a polymath to solve a puzzle. In 1901 a mathematician proved it unsolvable. A century later, researchers found that this wasn't the case if the puzzle went quantum. Now, researchers know just how much quantumness it takes www.newscientist.com/article/2584...

If there’s a tool that lets me “write” 10 articles a year instead of 1 without any change in my life, let me say: I have zero interest in that Since it’d obviously ramp up “productivity” talk, further perverting an area of life where volume is not an end in itself, I’d avoid it on that ground alone

Anthropic has announced that it will include a watermark on text generated by its future models, and create a public detector tool. A win for transparency, but will it improve academic integrity or reduce slop? Probably not much...🧪 More in my story here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Once again I am asking people who pitch me stories for New Scientist to actually read New Scientist or even skim New Scientist first

Though the majority of visible matter is made from protons, working out exactly what happens inside of this elementary particle continues to keep physicists busy. Now, a new analysis has uncovered that its innards are more quantum than usually assumed www.newscientist.com/article/2583...

Today on my personal newsletter, a peak behind the scenes of my recent interviews with two of the world's leading mathematicians and how AI is changing their field and our society ultracold.substack.com/p/worlds-bes...

New study shows that — contra widely accepted narratives — there is NO EVIDENCE that professors change their students’ politics and make them more liberal through their teaching