Nora Bradford

APPLY TO THIS!!! It's such a fun experience!!

Simulations of your gut may predict which probiotics will stick A “digital gut” predicted which probiotics and high‑fiber diets would take hold in people's guts and produce healthier outcomes.

"Simulations of your gut may predict which probiotics will stick" www.sciencenews.org/article/prob...

Great reporting on our recent @plosbiology.org paper by @norabradford.bsky.social in Science News 📰

@isbscience.org

And now: It's been nominated for an ASME for Best News and Information Design! 💫 Don't sleep on visiting this jewel box of a special issue with design by @markabelan.bsky.social and art director Samuel Velasco!

the view from our patio this morning! let the snow day begin 🎉

« [AI systems] delegitimize knowledge, inhibit cognitive development, short-circuit decision making processes, and isolate humans by displacing or degrading human connection. »

As cool as this is, modern luddism can be much more. Imagine a self-perpetuating DDOS attack that forces LLMs to cycle through tokens, or Palantir getting its data wiped. The most effective luddites are angry programmers, and there's a growing number of them out there.

it's not every day that a famous author draws a custom picture of your favorite animal doing your favorite hobby!! thank you @dannastaaf.bsky.social !!

omg, I'm imagining we might have to change the safety protocol for this guy, haha. Incredible - thank you!!

omg this is so cool! could you make a cephalopod + pottery/ceramics?

I'm almost positive I first heard it in a show but now I can't remember which one. It was definitely in the zeitgeist when I was living in socal though.

California sober, meet Maryland vegetarian

a crab holds up a cigarette and yells "Call your senators"

JFC I've heard that Fetterman is considering supporting the SAVE act. It's a disaster of a bill that would create sweeping disenfranchisement.

Whoever your senators are, I don't care, call them. I don't wanna hear if you think they definitely will or won't support this, take 3 minutes & call.

PsychoPy Studio: the app we love, reimagined It’s now over 20 years since PsychoPy’s humble beginnings as an open-source Python library to help users present high-precision stimuli and collect responses from participants. Since 2009 PsychoPy…

We're getting excited... just putting the finishing touches to
**PsychoPy Studio**

This is a complete rewrite of the PsychoPy Builder/Coder app, now packaged in Electron.

Faster load, modernised UI, web-ready, independent of the Python interpreter
🎉 🚀

blog.psychopy.org/general%20bl...

CONGRATS JORGE!!

maybe this is analogous to when you cite a paper - you don’t change the way you cite it if you find out that the last author did all the work.

I think a lot of academics see it this way, but it's very common in journalism to just say "X and their team" where X is the person you interviewed (first or last author). Word counts are so tight that we don't usually have space to say "X and their grad student Y who actually did all of the work".

Curious to hear from both the journalists and academics who've dealt with this issue - are there other solutions?

Keep in mind:

1. This is not a comms press release and you do not control who/what gets mentioned and who/what doesn't. That's the humility journalism requires.

2. Just because we interview someone doesn't mean we'll include a quote from them (though we certainly try). Word counts are tight!

1. Ask the journalist if your junior colleague can participate in the interview. I almost always say yes to this! It usually leads to a fuller picture of the work.

2. If the journalist just wants a 1-on-1, ask if you can forgo the interview and have your junior colleague do it instead.

A grad student I know recently had his work covered in a high profile outlet...but his name wasn't mentioned at all despite his advisor explicitly saying he did all of the work.

Since I've straddled the line between academic and journalist, I see both sides. Here are a couple ways to avoid this:

For me it feels like a stand up comedy show gone horribly wrong. (*crickets*)

Our second meeting of our local Science Writers group is happening Tuesday 4-5pm on the UPenn campus. Let me know if you're interested in joining:)

We should use AI not to remove friction but we should use AI to *add* friction. The problem is not a lack of good ideas. The problem is that bad ideas are everywhere. Adding AI carelessly will just add more bad ideas that sound like good ideas. As if we didn't already have enough of that.

whoops *gaze, not attention necessarily

If you, as a scientist, cannot be bothered to engage in the intellectual work of science, please quit your job and leave it to someone with skill and integrity.

very cool! this reminds me a little of marina bedny’s work showing that blind individuals semantically map visual words very similarly to sighted individuals. i wonder if the social norms/societal pressure to ~visualize~ similarly drives the attention patterns you’re seeing in aphantasics

Sorry my feed's been a bummer. It's because things are bad and I don't have anything nice to say.

I heard a story on the radio that I really liked, and I wrote to the reporter to express my appreciation. This is the reply I received:

"Thank you David - your appreciation note is rare and came right when I needed it."

We should do this more often. Journalism is so important to a free society.

😯😯😯 thank you!!

Please join! I'm excited to see what this group turns into! Message me if you have any questions!