Christian Elliott

Thread: imagine you're a historian surveying 16th century copies of the world's most famous ancient astronomy book, and you see one where somebody with handwriting VERY similar to GALILEO (!?) has transcribed... a psalm.

"Galileo, a prayer? That's something that doesn't work," Ivan Malara thought.

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Conservation Enters a New Era - bioGraphic One year after the Trump administration slashed biodiversity protections at home and abroad, people and organizations are figuring out where to go from here.

For a century, the United States dominated & influenced conservation around the world--for better and for worse. That era is over.

@biographic.bsky.social has a special issue on the next era of conservation--what it looks like, who's funding it, & what it means for people, species, & ecosystems 🌱

Whitey on the Moon YouTube video by Gil Scott-Heron - Topic

I'm reminded of "Whitey on the Moon"

Excellent essay from @astrolisa.bsky.social

"Maybe both things can be true. Space exploration “can be this incredibly powerful thing that can bring us together,” Maher says. “It can also be this thing, like a mirror, that illustrates that we have a lot of divisions and problems. That’s the beauty of it, that it can do both things.”

"I am having a hard time accessing that sentiment right now, with the government behind Artemis slashing the country’s scientific infrastructure, denying basic science in dangerous ways and defending its agents shooting civilians in the streets."

On moonshots and Minneapolis Space exploration can bring people together and reflect deep societal divisions.

Why care about the Moon when stuff here sucks so much? Because wouldn't it be nice for things to not suck, even if just for a minute?

For a second I thought he meant a human one to have, like, a spare

America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in. The Mars Sample Return mission got off to a promising start, hunting for potentially humanity-changing space rocks. How did it fall off the rails?

Is there life on Mars? For decades, America was in pole position to find out with its multi-mission Mars Sample Return program.

But MSR is now officially dead. And in the race to find alien life on Mars, it’s now China’s to lose.

Me @technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/26/1...

I spend about equal time on magazine writing and audio (podcast) work. And enjoy both quite a bit!

The takeaway here is not that reporters are no longer interested in reporting on climate. It’s that reporters have fewer opportunities to do so, many climate reporting jobs have been axed, and good outlets have folded or shrunk. Some people are still doing good work, yes, but the trend line is down

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people local newspaper reporters are rarified elites instead of ink-stained wretches driving their Honda Civic to a crime scene so you know don’t have to rely on Nextdoor and the police press release.

Ooh I hadn't seen this before, thanks!

This whole segment is worth a listen, but there's a layered montage in here of local TV station news anchors all reading the same script from their Nextstar/Sinclair overlords that is STUNNING. (s/o to my hometown eastern Iowa station that unfortunately made the cut)

I also like how it let me do like four searches and then told me I was out for now. And it doesn't say when the searches will "replenish." Google advertises this as a secure tool for journalists to search through documents. What if that journalist is on a deadline (it's me, I'm that journalist)?

Not "international-sounding names" 😭 First and last time I try to use Google Pinpoint/Gemini to search/fact check my reporting documents

There was so much more ice skating to Dune than I expected to see

“The heating is going to be so big and so obvious that it will lead, for the first time, to a real global discussion of solar geoengineering as a response. I think that is tragic and also increasingly likely.” @billmckibben.bsky.social on the brewing El Niño and the next chapter of the climate fight

The West’s Winter Has Been a Slow-Moving Catastrophe Without snow in the mountains, the places that depend on the West’s rivers will hurt for water.

The snow this week has been very welcome, but we’re still way behind for the winter. Coverage of the implications of low mountain snowpack in The Atlantic:

I loved the piece & the interview, but idk if this is what "creative nonfiction" is. With the hed it's clear the piece is hypothetical, but to call it cnf the piece itself should make that clear. I think it's... deeply researched activist fiction? Genres don't matter but trust with the reader does.

NIH director Bhattacharya responds to my article on X, calling it misleading. He denies that there is a "banned words list"

The only problem: My article never asserts there's a banned words list at NIH. I report that NIAID staff have been directed to modify "biodefense" and "pandemic preparedness".

maybe this is a stupid question but why do all AI models do this thing where they tell you something that's false and then you say "hey that's not true" and then they "go sorry, you're right"? Whenever I get the idea to mess around with one this happens to me and I give up & think they're useless.

Can't park there

How to wow a popular-science writer with your research expertise Prepping for an interview with an author? Keep it simple, meet in person if possible, and stick to your subject, say five writers who regularly talk to scientists about their research.

Some good tips in here for scientists talking to journalists:

I've transcribed dozens of interviews. With rare exceptions, everyone speaks with those um/uh tics, little restarts, hesitations, and most of us speak in sentence fragments with emphases, tones, pauses that create coherence not replicable in print. Spoken and written are distinct. Translate fairly.

Writing is thinking.

It's not some marginal boring task you can skip. It's the heart of it.

Why we don’t really know what the public thinks about science Measuring trust isn’t enough. Furthering knowledge about the institutions and norms of science is the best way to build credibility.

Good essay. Would add that any attempt to assess public understanding/sentiment of science which doesn't attempt some kind of disaggregation of the public writ large is not going to have the necessary resolving power to actually measure what's going on.

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.