Jake Walter

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. 🧵👇

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it.

I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”

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It Turns Out Waymos Are Being Controlled by Workers in the Philippines During a Congressional hearing, Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company's reliance on overseas workers.

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

🌟OPEN ACCESS🌟 In a new #SRL paper, a team of scientists analyzed more than 1,000 small to moderate magnitude earthquakes in eastern Oklahoma spanning June 2019 to June 2022, and considered the relationship to hydraulic fracturing and wastewater disposal. ⚒️

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🌟OPEN ACCESS🌟 Hydraulic Fracturing Enhances Wastewater Disposal Seismicity in Eastern Oklahoma #SRL ⚒️

In eastern Oklahoma, near the town of Quinton, 1,192 earthquakes spanning M 0.2 to 3.7 struck between 2019 and 2022. Scientists explore why.

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I dream of a day I don't have see any of these coke heads in the news anymore

What happens if we discover a cow that shits diamonds? What happens if we find a shrmip that sneezes faster than light speed? What happens if blah blah blee blee pee pee poo poo?

The overwhelming majority of American pediatricians say that children should receive vaccines for flu, rotavirus, and RSV. But this Grok AI result pulled up by an HHS employee says otherwise. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

So on I went.

Two Hundred Years to Flatten the Curve How generations of meddlesome public health campaigns changed everyday life — and made life twice as long as it used to be

Shameless plug:

For a year, I've been working on a series about the vast systems that underlie life in most of the world. Built up over generations, these systems are the cathedrals of our time--but all too few of us know anything about them, and they're all at risk of failing. Here's the latest:

OGS outreach booth at the Women in Science event in OKC, with Brandon Mace, Molly Yunker and Carrie Miller-DeBoer #okquake

Toxic wastewater from oil fields keeps pouring out of the ground. Oklahoma regulators failed to stop it. Salt water laced with cancer-causing chemicals, a byproduct of oil and gas drilling, is spewing from old wells. Experts warn of a pollution crisis spreading underground and threatening Oklahoma’s drin...

A yearlong investigation by The Frontier and ProPublica reveals that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission did not mandate that responsible companies clean up the pollution belowground, as state law requires “when feasible.”

Apple has removed an ICE tracking app that allows users to report ICE activity nearby from its App Store.

The removal came after a direct demand from Trump’s DOJ.

Once again, Big Tech is bending the knee to our tyrant-in-chief to protect its bottom line.

It’s actually really informative about you and other ultra-wealthy people that you can’t distinguish between a proposed plan that had very little chance of becoming law - and would have to be passed by legislators, subject to judicial review - and a guy just taking stuff. Congratulations!

Letter For House of Natural Resources Committee The House Natural Resource Committee is expected to have a hearing on the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Volcano Early Warning System on Tuesday May 20. The at...

Temblor CEO Ross Stein, Paul Segall, Greg Beroza, and Ahmed Elbanna are urging Congress to reauthorize the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program and the National Volcano Early Warning System.

Add your signature. Public support is welcome. Do not sign if you work for a U.S. federal agency.

AnyShake Explorer A fully open-source, high precision seismic monitoring system

This seems like an exciting new open-source hardware effort: www.crowdsupply.com/senseplex/an...

Man in green shirt and hat installing a seismic sensor for the US ShakeAlert system in a field near San Francisco

Regional #seismic networks are the backbone of #earthquake safety in the U.S., and funding them is critical.

Find out why with @uussquake.bsky.social @caltechseismo.bsky.social @usgs-shakealert.bsky.social University of Memphis CERI and Oklahoma Geological Survey
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just a friendly reminder to all my fellow academics that the people who clean and take care of our buildings are also your coworkers, and 1) they need to be part of your advocacy and solidarity and 2) for godssake be nice to them and try to get to know them???

We have our automated Oklahoma earthquake bot up on bluesky (same as on the other site), follow here to stay on the bleeding edge of Oklahoma earthquake information and reporting: okearthquakes.bsky.social

Large earthquake in Texas just now, east of Midland. Ten minutes ago

New study finds decrease in earthquakes, varied pressure in Arbuckle Group A study led by University of Oklahoma scientists gives new insight into pressure monitoring of the Arbuckle Group, a deep wastewater disposal reservoir in the mid-continental United States. The findin...

Our work to better characterize the hydrogeology of the Arbuckle Group of rocks (where the most problematic wastewater disposal occurs in Oklahoma) is out - kudos to Ben Allen, a postdoc at OGS for undertaking this huge lift to make sense out of really messy data: www.ou.edu/news/article...

Hello to you! Ready to build a community away from the other hell-site

Ok, let's take this from a different angle.... Why's the rest of the western US higher than it should be given a lack of crustal thickening?

Let's assume that the Laramide structures and Colorado Front Range (and potentially Rio Grande rifting) are basically superimposed features....

(left) SSA Membership Officer Monica Lu sitting next to teal and white SSA table at 2024 Asian Seismological Commission meeting; (right) SSA President Heather DeShon stands in front of red poster for 2024 ASC meeting

📣SSA President Heather DeShon and Membership Officer Monica Lu are at the Asian #Seismological Commission this week! Be sure to stop by the SSA booth to learn more about free student memberships, travel grants and more. ⚒️🧪

SSA meeting way better and while registration is still quite expensive, a good replacement for AGU if you have an "AGU conference" budgeted in a grant, etc.

Moore students learn about earthquake safety ahead of national event Moore students learned about earthquake safety on Wednesday as the Oklahoma Geological Survey put on a presentation for fourth graders at Plaza Tower Elementary School.

Shakeout is tomorrow, 10/17. Even if you don't want to practice Drop, Cover, Hold On at 10:17 local time, at least take a few moments to think about situational awareness in the event an earthquake occurs. Secure valuables and think about your after-action plan www.koco.com/article/moor...

This figure shared by @katemac.bsky.social lives rent free in my head ever since I saw it.

Tl;Dr Oil companies are spending their money on share buybacks *instead of investing in their own upstream capacity aka future production* - a window into what they really think about their long term future.

Earthquake intensity map of the Sep 03, 2016 earthquake in Pawnee, Oklahoma, magnitude 5.8.

M5.8 #earthquake on Sep 03, 2016 - Pawnee, Oklahoma 🧵

This is a special one since it was most likely the result of wastewater injection in combination of oil and gas production, making it the largest induced earthquake up until now. 🧪⚒️

You can notice the movement of Rancho Palos Verdes also here on the satellite images of Sentinel-2. These are from July 2023 up until now. ⚒️🧪 🛰️

Evaluating Automated Seismic Event Detection Approaches: An Application to Victoria Land, East Antarctica Deep learning models, enhanced by transfer learning, adapt well to varied seismic sources in Antarctica By combining different automated detection approaches and transfer learning techniques, mor...

Really excited that the hard work by Long Ho, a PhD student at U Alabama, is finally out: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/..., using transfer learning with deep-learning earthquake detection architectures on some weird Antarctic events. Fully open science: github.com/longmho/Tran...