A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

Popgen folks, Jiseon, Nate, and Andy, along with Yuxin Ning and Franz Baumdicker, just released a really cool new method for simulation based inference (think ABC) using normalizing flows. It seems to work really well! full joint posteriors ftw! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Something I think about too much: we teach and define logarithms as the inverse of exponentiation. True of course, but I think there’s a lot of intuitive value describing them another way — the number of times you can divide the input by the base. Log2(8)=3 because 8 can be cut in half 3 times.

The release of silksong while I have other time obligations is cruel.

former CDC official Dr. Houry: "I first learned that the secretary had changed our CDC covid vaccine guidance on an X social media post. CDC scientists have still not seen the scientific data or justification for this change. That is not gold standard science."

There was also a long, boring meeting of the relevant FDA external advisory committee, which was streamed live and is still on YouTube (eg) www.fda.gov/advisory-com...

Yes, it was carefully hidden in the New England Journal of Medicine. Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... ) 1/2

I haven't read the others yet but I can say with great confidence that if you love contemporary speculative fiction you really must read METAL FROM HEAVEN, SIEGE OF BURNING GRASS, and THREE EIGHT ONE (they also go remarkably well together)

In the earliest stages of adaptive introgression, beneficial immigration can drive genome-wide changes. In a new preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... colleagues & I document exceptionally rapid genomic introgression in a lake population of stickleback.

It is insane that such measures are needed to get Congress to care about the fact that the agency that keeps Americans healthy and safe has been completely dismantled and taken over by crazy people who are trying to kill us all

Tick tock. Tick tock. RFK Jr.'s time is running out. Today, Senators Cassidy and Sanders both challenge RFK Jr's reign of (t)error at HHS. Call your Senators and Representatives. U.S. Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Detail of two hyenas #SciArt @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

American Public Health Association: “Legislators and officials at all levels of government who are interested in protecting their constituents should demand Kennedy’s removal.” That’s what I call leadership 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 www.apha.org/news-and-med...

TIL about the existence of corpse flower and durian brandy. Has anyone tried it?!?! tamworthdistilling.com/spirits/corp...

Please share broadly: I am looking for a postdoctoral fellow to work on a collaborative project on the temporal population genomics of invasive Capeweed (using contemporary and herbarium genomics), with ‪‪@shaky-dingo.bsky.social‬ and colleagues

Krasner: So, if what you have is a group of ICE agents, or even the military, coming into Philadelphia and committing crimes—assaults that are illegal, kidnapping, unlawful restraint, obstruction of the administration of justice—they can be prosecuted.

A nice profile of the wonderful Annie Schmitt www.ucdavis.edu/news/among-a...

If you mock a fascist for being fat, you mock fatness. If you mock a fascist for being fascist, you mock fascism. Stay on target.

🧠 Yes. Happy Tuesday. 🧠

Just received this statement from Lisa Cook: "President Trump purported to fire me 'for cause' when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022."

Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.

Don’t be afraid to share your writing. There are six Sharknado movies.

In 25 years, every business school in the country will be doing case studies about how a long defunct company known as “Google” once had an unbeatable lock on online information retrieval and then started doing shit like this.

As one can imagine, I have some thoughts. Here’s a thread no one asked for: 1. SCIENCE IN THE US IS POLITICAL. No matter how much you want to ignore that fact, it is supported by taxpayer dollars and is therefore, political by nature. 2. BUT it has had bipartisan support for decades, which…

🙏

Hey everybody! @drjuliawester.bsky.social and I have a new paper! We surveyed over 800 scientists, science communicators, and science educators who use social media. Conclusion: Scientists no longer find Twitter useful or pleasant, and many have switched to Bluesky! 🧪🌎🦑 doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

Super cool! Love the gif highlighting marginal trees along the arg!

Al Gore didn’t hold back: The Trump admin is “attacking the heart of truth,” twisting facts like the Nazis did in the 1930s. From climate denial to rewriting the Ukraine war, it’s all about power—not reality. Gore warned the U.S. is under siege—and every former leader should speak out like he did.

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Texas Democrats know how to fight.

What a neat idea!

“A close look at the so-called data reveals that the vast majority of the cited papers — all but about 40 — have little or nothing to do with the vaccines. They concern the consequences of COVID-19 infection, not the shots.” *screams into the void*

Bird flu is spreading a LOT in dairy farms now in US- now is the time for surveillance and stepping up action on vaccine- but US has Kennedy who seems to think infections are fine and has cancelled the contract for developing a mrna bird flu vaccine

Please repost and amplify ! We are hiring a faculty position in Evolutionary Genetics in the Biology Department at U of South Carolina! Check us out and come be our colleague! sc.edu/study/colleg... Deadline for applications is Oct 1 #AcademicJobs #EvoBio

Fascism is here. We are not “getting closer” or “in danger of.” This matters because it frames our discussion: We aren’t trying to prevent it, we’re trying to defeat it. It’s not taking over our institutions, it’s taken them over. Otherwise, we’re always behind, fighting a past we’ve already lost.

A large-scale, government-funded study tracking 1.2M children over two decades found something Kennedy doesn't like, so he wants it retracted. The journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, responds: that's not the way science works. Moreover, you have no professional credentials in this area.

Big news! We are recruiting a postdoc to work on tomatillo evolution: jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta.... The clade containing tomatillos and its allies (ca 300 spp) has evolved lantern fruits at least 25 times - we want to know why! Join us @rociodeanna.bsky.social & @caschenck-bio.bsky.social

Our paper showing that variation in transcription factor binding sites underlies the majority of additive genetic variance for phenotypic variation in maize is finally out! Sadly they didn't use our suggested cover image below (made by the inimitable Andi Kur). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Louise Glück, Bayesian statistician.

Essay which clearly outlines the scientific and ethical problems with selecting embryos for polygenic traits. Scientists associating themselves with embryo selection companies, and those who’ve previously defended sociogenomics but are staying silent on these companies, come in for criticism here

BREAKING: We filed a class action lawsuit against ICE for denying people access to lawyers and subjecting them to inhumane conditions at 26 Federal Plaza in New York. ICE is illegally holding people here for weeks, often without adequate access to medical care, food, or legal counsel.

At the start of 1965, federal voting legislation wasn’t even on the agenda. But eight months later, relentless activism, national outrage, and bipartisan leadership made the Voting Rights Act a reality. bit.ly/4fpZYN5

#Viewpoint: Measuring #NaturalSelection on the transcriptome John R. Stinchcombe & John K. Kelly 👇 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #LatestIssue

Just to give the TL;DR on this one: *The* main purpose of the EO is to move funding priorities and decisions away from experts and career professionals over to political appointees. With the ultimate power held by Vought / OMB.

My latest for @thenation.com: "These attacks on higher education are not uncommon, and we do not have to reach back to distant history to see how they are rooted in the desire to dominate, destroy, and crush political and civic opposition." www.thenation.com/article/acti...

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

This looks like an amazing tool www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

To have this paper appear the same day that RFK Jr is canceling all mRNA vaccine funding is further indication that irony is not dead, even though we might all be soon.

Day 2 of Popgen is also where I say “Please look at your kinship matrix.”Probably the best summary of pop structure there is, identifies problems or weird stuff in the data, and avoids pitfalls of structure-like plots and PCA.