Flora Graham
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floragraham.bsky.social
Flora Graham
@floragraham.bsky.social
5.5K followers 3.3K following 400 posts
I write the Nature Briefing, a daily email for Nature (@nature.com) about all the science, which I hope you will enjoy.
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floragraham.bsky.social
“The government’s phasing out of the penny has been “a bit chaotic,” said Mark Weller, executive director of [penny-advocacy group(!)] Americans for Common Cents.”

www.cnn.com/2025/11/12/b...
Weller said other countries that removed low denomination coins, like Canada, Australia and Switzerland, had guidance for afterwards. Not so in the United States.
November 19, 2025 at 9:01 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
V much looking forward to talking at the immersive art and ideas festival that is *D-Fuse Nine Earths Summit @ P3* in London. See you Sat 29 November which is, happily, 'pay as you can' during the day www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/d-fuse-pre...
November 18, 2025 at 7:49 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
Interesting point! Springer Nature data seems to agree 'across most fields, we see a higher % of women reviewers compared with women authors at submission' but interprets this as a good thing as it suggests 'editor efforts to diversify reviewer pools' are working www.nature.com/immersive/co...
Text version of this data: https://www.nature.com/immersive/content/gender-gap-report/appendix/index.html#section-Fig-7-error-bar-SlfL2nlj4H:~:text=reviewers%20across%20disciplines-,Discipline,-Error%20bar%20%2D%20women
October 28, 2025 at 3:34 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
Leif Penguinson makes a cameo on the latest edition of @natsustain.nature.com 🐧
Cover with photo showing penguin approaching a huge ship. Image: NAPA/Alamy. Cover design: Alex Whitworth
October 23, 2025 at 9:49 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
It's not even politics I just want to spend some time in a bubble where 'ranch' is not considered an ingredient (sorry)
October 17, 2025 at 11:34 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
Forbidden Nutribullet
Woodblock from 1856 showing a Chinese alchemical furnace.Credit: Wellcome Collection, London (PDM) nutribullet Blender 900 Series in Matte Sand
October 13, 2025 at 9:40 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
Imagine having Richard Robson as your 1st-year chem prof AND then he wins the Nobel 😁 www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/new...
Professor Robson was back at work hours after the announcement, taking a first-year chemistry tutorial.
October 9, 2025 at 2:41 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
The Taz looks awesome! Thanks for flagging it to me. But the model seems like it might require some very specific conditions to work (The Guardian does it, for example, but has a HUGE endowment) thefix.media/2025/03/17/n...
October 9, 2025 at 2:32 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
The first exoplanet around a Sun-like star was discovered 30 years ago this month! Makes me think yet again of the AMAZING scrolly (published in 2013, pre-TESS spacecraft) by
@adambecker.bsky.social @peteraldhous.com & MacGregor Campbell at @newscientist.com freelanceastro.github.io/how-many-ear...
Looking up at the night sky, it's hard not to wonder how many other planets might be circling those pinpricks of light – and how many are home to beings gazing back at us. Today, we are starting to get a handle on the number of roughly Earth-sized exoplanets that might be suitable for life.
October 6, 2025 at 2:00 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
WOW this interview by @maxkozlov.bsky.social is a banger
I am worried about the context that we’re placing on our public-health officials, who just want to help people. To contextualize it any other way is to do them such an extraordinary disservice. How are we going to incentivize our best and our brightest to contribute to public health, which is thankless? And what happens if we don’t? I have been in and around government now for 18 years — every administration from [Republican George W.] Bush till now. I’ve always been in a position where I’ve been able to make contributions. We were always marching steadily towards a better world. I’m less naive now than I was.
October 2, 2025 at 1:56 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
Wiki Wiki Bus namesake my beloved
The Wiki Wiki Shuttle (lit. 'Very Fast Shuttle') is a free shuttle bus service at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. Shuttles run between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. local time, carrying people and baggage between the various terminals and gates. Photo of Wiki Wiki Shuttle bus in 2022 In the Hawaiian language, the word "wiki" means quick. In 1994, the shuttle's name inspired American computer programmer Ward Cunningham to build the first ever user-editable website, WikiWikiWeb.[1] Although WikiWikiWeb is itself no longer user-editable, the word wiki for a user-editable website thus derives from the shuttle's name.
September 28, 2025 at 9:41 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
FYI
Trans Legal Clinic: free legal advice in the UK http://www.translegalclinic.com
September 26, 2025 at 8:47 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
This story is very interesting, and this detail made me feel sick. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
According to the model, the phrases and words that were most likely to lead to cancellation included ‘gender-affirming care’, ‘assigned male at birth’, ‘affirming care’, ‘racial justice’, ‘LGBTQ’ and ‘hate speech’.
September 25, 2025 at 1:36 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
Oh I am so on board for this week's @nature.com editorial! Take it from someone who grew up without trains, and took a 13-hour train journey on Monday: they are the frikkin best 🚅 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
What if there were a technology that could help to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, air pollution and environmental degradation, while improving health, reducing social inequality and boosting economic growth? There is, and this month it turns 200.
September 17, 2025 at 6:58 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
Gonna restart my old Twitter thread about great immigrant and refugee scientists. Extra bonus in this one for those us who flunked a wee bit of physics here and there back in the day 😜 Rainer Weiss won the Nobel in 2017
Born in Berlin in 1932, Weiss came from an intellectual but unsettled family. His father, a Jewish communist doctor, and his mother, a Christian actress, fled Nazi Germany when Rai was still a child. The family escaped first to Prague and later to New York City, arriving in 1939. Weiss studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge but struggled, failing out in his junior year. He was rescued by nuclear physicist Jerrold Zacharias at MIT, who took him on as a laboratory technician and later a PhD student. Weiss never forgot the kindness and spent much of his career mentoring students in the same spirit.
September 8, 2025 at 1:37 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
I enjoyed this museum-shop vending machine at the William Morris Gallery in London 😁
September 8, 2025 at 8:37 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
Worth reading for Brits theconversation.com/homelessness...
A social cost benefit analysis conducted at the London School of Economics suggested that removing NRPF for households with limited leave to remain on their work-related visa would result in net gains for Britain of £428 million over a ten-year period, due to reduced costs for the NHS, local authorities and increases in tax revenue. This increases to £872 million if applied to families with children. The families we met told us that despite their best efforts to make liveable lives, the cold bureaucratic language of NRPF masks a hard reality of long-term suffering, enforced destitution, and extensive and intensive labour, simply to survive day-to-day.
September 5, 2025 at 11:12 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
This interesting post crystallizes so much about the downsides of using AI to do subtle and nuanced language work. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-...
September 2, 2025 at 9:46 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
Ban cars 😍😍😍 wapo.st/3VtXAM8
Graphics from Airparif, an independent group that tracks air quality for France’s capital region, show that levels of dangerous fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) have decreased 55 percent since 2005. It attributed this, mainly, to policies that limit traffic and ban the most polluting vehicles.
September 1, 2025 at 12:46 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
Looking at the LinkedIn profile of one of the leading quantum-computing researchers in the world and this made me laugh
August 26, 2025 at 11:45 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
Wow! www.nature.com/articles/d41...
On average, a 70-year-old in 2022 had the same cognitive ability as a 53-year-old had in 2000.
August 19, 2025 at 3:37 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
Great that Nike-man Phil Knight will give $2 billion to an Oregon cancer centre. Jarring, to me, that much of it will be spent on helping people navigate the US healthcare labyrinth www.opb.org/article/2025...
The U.S. health care system, said [cancer-centre leader Brian Druker], forces patients to take on an enormous amount of work to manage their own care — finding specialists, arranging travel, negotiating with insurance. With this new funding, the goal is to provide a navigator to every patient at the Knight Cancer Institute to simplify the process of getting treatment, Druker said.
August 15, 2025 at 2:27 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
Thought-provoking words from the former US ambassador to Hungary, where scientists and others have seen their democracy slipping away.
"To the stewards of our nation’s great cultural and commercial institutions: Don’t dupe yourselves. The illusion that you are smarter than the strongman, that you’ll outmaneuver him with silent cleverness, is just that — an illusion. Now, more than ever, your principled leadership matters."
July 23, 2025 at 2:49 PM
floragraham.bsky.social
Today I’m annoyed that SnappySnaps is using AI crap on their sample tat. Surely ye olde SnappySnaps is about celebrating photography in all its shonkyness and real beauty. Depressing.
July 10, 2025 at 8:20 AM
floragraham.bsky.social
Grim parallels
STAT headline: First Opinion A grim milestone: U.S. is on the cusp of losing its official measles elimination status (By Adam Ratner, June 24, 2025) CBC headline: Second Opinion Canada achieved measles elimination status in 1998. Now, it could lose it (by Alison Northcott, May 24, 2025)
June 24, 2025 at 9:54 AM