Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
Joseph Gardens – Botanizing: The best hobby you’ve never heard of: “The quickest way to describe botanizing is that it is like bird-watching, but for plants. To botanize, you go out into natural areas and look for plants growing in the wild, maybe hoping to see new species or particularly impressive populations of familiar species. …
Christina Pagel – Diving into Data & Decision making: “The attacks on science and universities are neither random nor new. This isn’t chaos—it’s a deliberate war on science and academic freedom. In just six weeks, the Trump administration has slashed research budgets, purged health and scientific agencies, censored research, and threatened universities. Making a list …
Washington Post – no paywall: “Kira Pollack, a former editor at Time and Vanity Fair, is a distinguished fellow at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, a research lab co-anchored by Stanford University’s School of Engineering and USC Libraries. When Hurricane Milton threatened Tampa last October, photojournalist Christopher Morris faced a familiar challenge: protecting his …
Via David Ho: Radiosondes on weather balloons are essential for collecting data from the upper atmosphere for accurate forecasting. Due to the mass firing at NOAA, the NWS doesn’t have enough people to launch balloons. Accurate weather forecasts save lives.
Axios: “More than 750 national park workers have been fired amid the Trump administration’s purge of federal employees, per an unofficial tally shared with Axios by a park ranger. Why it matters: Our region is home to over 70 national parks that draw millions of visitors each year, from the National Mall to Shenandoah — …
BBC: “Butterfly populations in the US shrank by more than a fifth within the space of two decades, according to a new study. Numbers fell by 22% between 2000 and 2020, according to research by Binghamton University in New York. A third of species saw serious decline, with some, like Julia’s Skipper, losing more than …
The Guardian: “Half of the world’s climate-heating carbon emissions come from the fossil fuels produced by just 36 companies, analysis has revealed…The Carbon Majors report calculates the emissions released by the burning of the coal, oil and gas produced by 169 major companies in 2023. The database also includes emissions from the production of cement, …
The Biodiversity Collections Crisis – “You might be familiar with the concept of the present “biodiversity crisis“. There is an increasing consensus in the ecological research community that the current loss of species this planet is experiencing is not sustainable, in the sense that the loss of some species may precipitate the loss of more, in …
Climate and DEI Deleted From Government Websites, Federal Workers Fired, Colleges Erase Programs and Research – “Colleges have been a conservative target for years. Under President Trump, it’s total warfare on all aspects of higher education — from student life to hiring to athletics.” This March 2, 2025 update by Sabrina I. Pacifici chronicles Trump’s …
TMP Looting Watch by Josh Marshall – In case you didn’t hear the GSA today announced it’s going to sell off many if not all of the central buildings making up the headquarters of the American republic. Those buildings include FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, the buildings which are the headquarters of the DOJ, HHS, …
TechDirt: “While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recognizable plan unfold — a playbook we’re all too familiar with. We’ve seen how technology can be wielded to consolidate power, how institutional guardrails can be circumvented through technical and …
“A rarely used amendment to the Endangered Species Act allows for the creation of a committee nicknamed “the God Squad” to take unprecedented action during emergencies like hurricanes and wildfires. Trump wants to convene this committee to bypass endangered species protections and other environmental regulations to ramp up timber production across 280 million acres of …
