“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature.” — Hubert Reeves

🇺🇸 🇵🇸 Sama Safi, a 20-year-old American citizen and honors psychology student at Birzeit University, remains in Israeli detention after soldiers seized her from her family’s home near Ramallah at 3 a.m. on June 2, with lawmakers warning her life is at risk. Safi, whose family lives in Florida, was taken without charge and transferred to Ofer prison, then to the Moscovia interrogation center in Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society. Her family says she has a chronic condition that causes fevers up to 105°F and requires daily medication and a quarterly injection she travels abroad to receive. She was one of five Palestinian women detained that week, including two members of the Palestinian women’s national football team. The Israeli military said the women were suspected of “promoting terrorist activities.” Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Chris Van Hollen have both demanded her release. “I am really sick and tired of the Israeli government taking American taxpayer dollars and then mistreating Americans,” Van Hollen said. Israel has not told her family or the U.S. embassy where she is being held. Rep. Tlaib said, “Her life is at risk—our government must free her now!”

For many years, I took barbs for refusing to call Israel's policy in East Jerusalem "ethnic cleansing". After all, there were 60,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem in 1967, and 400,000 today. Occupation sucked, and included war crimes, but it wasn't ethnic cleansing. That has changed now. There are 3 Palestinian neighborhoods, all of whose residents are being or are about to be displaced: Batan al-Hawa and al-Bustan in Silwan, and Um Haroun in Sheik Jarrah. The latter two are being razed, or will be razed in the near future. And immediately to the east, the Bedouin hamlet of Khan al-Akmar, adjacent to E-1, is about to be expelled, part of an attempt to "cleanse" Area C between East Jerusalem and the Jordan River valley of its Palestinian residents. Regrettably, I can think of no other term to use other than "ethnic cleansing".

When you see a friend's face repeatedly, your brain gets better at recognizing it even though individual neurons respond less to it. How? Mario Dipoppa's lab used neural recordings and artificial neural networks to discover that adaptation reshapes how populations of neurons represent information, improving discrimination while using less energy. By combining biology with AI, we're uncovering how brains efficiently encode a changing world. Read more here: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

There are new numbers – just landed today – from the U.S. Dept. of Education that show the share of 13-year-olds who read for pleasure near daily has declined from 27% in 2012 to 14% in 2025 and the share of 9-year-olds is down from 53% to 37%. nbcnews.com/data-graphics/ki…

Meet Eyewire II: a new connectomic resource for the mouse retina. ~1 mm² of retina at nm resolution, with synapses and circuits of ca. 100,000 neurons visual responses from the ~400 neurons shown in the video! Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/2026.05.28.… Data: eyewire.ai/

RT @EyeonPalestine: Heartbreaking farewell moments.. Fahd Abu Heikal carries the body of his infant son, Sam, who was killed yesterday even…

Court challenges filed. CRA resolutions pending. FY2027 markup begins summer 2026. Contact your House and Senate appropriators. This is the window. #ScienceAdvocacy #NIH #ScheduleF #SciencePolicy

Nearly 5,000 staff, students urge Belgium’s universities to cut Israel ties A letter representing more than 10 percent of the Belgian professoriate calls for end to all collaborations with Israel. aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/2/…

Neuropixels Opto is out! 🎉🥳🍾🚨 Congratulations to a fantastic team! nature.com/articles/s41592-0…

Now that Gaza lies in ruins—shattered, like a beloved face after a long brutality—Israel moves with a terrible confidence to the next act: The act of leaving every soul there not merely wounded, but permanently disabled. Injured, sick, hungry, homeless, without work, without hope. This is not war’s collateral damage. This is design. As my friend Gideon Levy writes—and he knows, he knows—this is the prelude to expulsion. Think of it: a society without teachers, without doctors, without social workers, without engineers, without clerks. That is not a society. That is a holding pen. A slow erasure. And when nothing functions—no school, no hospital, no office, no heart—then it becomes ‘easy,’ they tell themselves, to scatter the people to the four corners of the earth. Like seeds from a broken pod, except no soil will take them. We must name this. Not with rage alone, though rage is honest. But with the cold, clear tears of recognition: they are making life impossible so that departure becomes the only ‘choice.’ And the world watches, adjusts its spectacles, and calls for restraint. Restraint! There is no restraint in a slow drowning.

🎓 “Peace be upon you. From the students of Harvard, to the youth of Dahieh, to the sons of Nabatieh, and the people of Tyre.” Harvard Medical School graduate Leen Ezzeddine, from the southern Lebanese town of Arabsalim, used her graduation speech to remind her peers of the students in Gaza and southern Lebanon who do not benefit from the same “arbitrary luck and circumstance” that she and her classmates have enjoyed. Ezzeddine said her presence at that podium was “evidence of what survives the border, the bomb, and the exile,” and of “what becomes possible when people the world has tried to erase are allowed to live.”

Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir ATTACKS A FEMALE ACTIVIST and says: “WELCOME TO HELL. The summer camp is over.” Activists from the GLOBAL SUMOOD FLOTILLA are being ZIP-TIED and ABUSED while being forced to listen to ISRAEL’s national anthem.

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir released a video showing detained participants of the intercepted Gaza-bound flotilla being bound and dragged in Israel's Ashdod Port, writing, "That's how we welcome the terror supporters. Welcome to Israel." Read more here: haaretz.com/israel-news/isra…

Mossad booby‑trapped 21,000 communication devices with explosives, sent them to Lebanon through shell companies, and detonated them remotely — killing dozens (including children) and injuring over 3,400. • The devices exploded in people's hands, on their faces, and in their pockets. • They did it over two consecutive days. • On day two, the explosives went off while Lebanese families were at the funerals of those killed the day before. • The attack inflicted roughly 3,000 injuries in a single hour on the first day alone. This terrorist attack was the largest simultaneous mass‑detonation in history by the number of individual bombs. 'israelis' joke about it to this day. If you didn't boycott Apple for the Congo, boycott it now.

What situation @Jim_Jordan ?! As far as much of US and the rest of the of world is concerned, the US government created the situation we're in.

Use an LLM to review the manuscript and ask the submitting author a key questions about the content including motivations for references. The system should not proceed with publishing until it is convinced that the submitter is fully aware of the content it is about to publish.

Today @WHO declared a PHEIC—a public health emergency of international concern—for the Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in DRC/Uganda without convening an Emergency Committee. That is unprecedented. The situation is catastrophic. Six experts explain why: youtube.com/watch?v=bKagaWGw…

Someone has driven this digital billboard into the middle of the UTK rally 😆

Money is important to academics too