@dereklowe
Medicinal chemist / chemical biologist, author of “In the Pipeline” at http://science.org/blogs/pipeline. derekb.lowe@gmail.com and on Signal at Dblowe.18 All opinions are mine; I don’t speak for my employer in any way.
Okay Bluesky, supposedly this is where the scientists are now so can someone give me a straight answer on this:
Can I use a PETE (Polyethylene Terephthalate) tray for etching a copper circuit board with ferric chloride without the tray melting?
Because *fuck* if Google is helping on this one ...
Oh no, those cats of yours are the very opposite of “cut rate”.
Tomorrow 😈
Just decided my new description of Donald Trump's cognitive capabilities is that he has the head of a Halloween jack o'lantern that is still sitting on the front porch at Christmas
Good riddance (again) to Vinay Prasad at the FDA. The only problem is that under this administration we can only expect him to be replaced by someone as bad or worse.
Vinay Prasad is out again at FDA in April.
www.wsj.com/health/healt...
it feels like decades since the first Stand auto for Science protests
ahead of this year’s protests tomorrow, I caught up with @cdelawalla.bsky.social to talk about what @standupforscience.bsky.social sees as its strategy as a fully formed organization
www.statnews.com/2026/03/06/s...
I was a Medieval and Renaissance Studies major... my takeaway from that was that for almost the entirety of Western history, the "government" and the "church" were both just gangsters all the way down. This is my first experience with it firsthand and I'll say, I don't care for it a bit.
Yeah, this is idiotic. It’s all too easy to spray venom - there are plenty of things about the whole social media era that don’t speak well for human nature. . .
Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities.
But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham.
It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why:
🧵1/
A post on X from the betting platform Polymarket that says “BREAKING: Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety.”
Literally as I’m arguing with someone about whether AI companies are misleading people into believing their technology possesses God-like super-intelligence I see this monstrosity
We are being governed by gangsters.
Job growth over 14 months of Trump’s second term: 150,000 jobs
The previous 14 months: 1.74 million jobs
Under Biden: 0 months of job losses
Trump’s second term: losses in two of the last three months, three of the last five months, and five of the last nine months.
www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...
Author, unhappy after their problematic paper was retracted, writes on @pubpeer.com: “authors are not responsible for manuscript quality […] because the journal, not the authors, has the authority to accept or reject a manuscript”. pubpeer.com/publications...
This is the world that RFK Jr dreamed of—now that he runs the US health system he’s able to achieve his dreams each & every day, aided & abetted by Drs Bhattacharya, Makary, Høeg, Kulldorff, Prasad & Oz
We can’t rebuild the devastation until all 7 of these federal health agency leaders are gone
We’ll see about that! This is a favorite tactic of the Trump-era DOJ: pretending that the Executive branch has such Godlike authority that none of its decisions can ever be opposed or questioned. Bullshit, is what that is.
I’m getting “DOI Not Found” from that link . . .
Thank you @sciam.bsky.social and @meghanbartels.bsky.social for covering the @standupforscience.bsky.social National Day of Action on March 7th!
Save Science. Protect Health. Defend Democracy.
#standupforscience
www.scientificamerican.com/article/stan...
We know they are likewise keen to enhance "geographic diversity", the sole remaining acceptable factor on CSR's page about study section selection, which goes hand in glove with their desire to punish high intensity research institutions which just so happen to be in blue states.
Democrats may not be able to prevent Mullin's confirmation, but they can certainly turn his track record of offense and stupidity into two days of televised humiliation so spectacular that he is wounded in Trump's eyes from day 1. That is the job.
i cannot stress enough that if you know anything about how kristi noem found out she was fired you must tell me
Envious! Not seeing much crocus action here with 18 inches of snow and compacted sleet on top of the ground. . .
All that plastic surgery and for what?
What academics go through when they decide to leave academia for industry: relief mixed with guilt:
Nooooo doubt about it!
I slipped out of the April ‘86 American Chemical Society meeting to visit the nearby Museum of Modern Art (my first time in NYC). I remember being amazed by some work by Odilon Redon - I couldn’t believe the colors and effects he achieved. That’s when I first learned about pastel vs oil!
Looking over his work, though, I do see some very expressive portraiture. You’re absolutely right that he was extraordinary with the pastel medium!
That’s a really interesting work. The faces and overall skin tones seem a bit gauzy and flat, but the fabrics (and the lighting on them) are terrifically detailed. Was Liotard known for being more sure-handed with clothing?
Grand Challenges for Predictive Modeling in Small Molecule Drug Discovery
chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10....
#chemsky