Had my morning made by @rosebroderick.bsky.social ‘s Matthew McConaughey reference-

Everything IS tuberculosis! *head explodes*

Impromptu American absurdism movie marathon: Zoolander From Beyond Smokey and the Bandit All amazing. Zero regrets. Night well spent. I usually go for Eastern European absurdism, especially Czech. But these were all so different and so insane and beautiful. And Letterboxd reviewers are, too.

Further entries on the list of things I learned on the Simpsons first: The La Brea tar pits Oliver Stone Deviled ham Tom Landry (and Tom Landry’s hat) The Cheers characters Ricketts Vassar Humvees

A grad student just told me she "aspired to my level of zen" while troubleshooting a very complicated plate reader. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it's just applying learned helplessness in the right amounts and scenarios. #gradstudent #labrats #personalgrowth #zen

I call the set “cats fucking with the fabric of reality”. It’s got the Mandlecat set, cats dancing on Koch curves, cats batting at the Julia set, and of course the Sierpiński cat-sket. #fractals #cats #collage #fuckingwiththefabricoftheuniverse

Doing another print run of my favorite design I’ve made, an adaptation of the lab rat knitting a genome. It makes me so happy getting back into printing! #scienceart #sciart #labrats

Another year, another Mandelbrot Set. Comrade Serge made a Taylor Series to go with it this year! It’s maths-y AND it looks like a little grumpus 😻 #mandlebrot #fractals #pumpkin #happyhalloween

I started a Tumblr so I can write absurd abstracts for my absurdist collage graph jokes. www.tumblr.com/experimentst...

Nothing says “manly” like soap labeled specifically for men based on one of cinema’s greatest female protagonists fighting one of cinema’s greatest female monsters, and based on the premise that men, too, can get face-fucked, impregnated, live solely as incubators, and die violently giving birth.

Did You Know- there’s an episode of Murder, She Wrote from 1985 where Jessica harbors, in Cabot Cove, two fugitives from the Russian ballet seeking asylum in the states. A KGB is murdered, and an Orson Welles lookalike plays a more senior KGB agent who is obviously a huge JB Fletcher fanboy.

“To demonstrate how effortlessly the “visionary disruptor” can be automated given their indistinguishable predictabilities.” I can’t decide if I love it. The concept is hilarious. When I wind up working for one, the spite that keeps me going enjoys that my labor won’t benefit an actual asshole.

Hey, you know what, Outlook mail? I'm well aware of the tone of the email I'm sending. My labeling of my samples between experiments over the years varied considerably and yes, I said "sorry this sucks" to my colleague. But you know what? It's on purpose. You don't know me. #AIcansuckit #tonepolice

I can’t put my finger on why, but it’s hilarious to me that Clayton and I have tickets to see T2 at the movies tonight. In 2025. As a repertory screening.

Working on opening a side hustle- Budget Cuts Science-Art. This is what you can use your PhD and back issues of society journals for when funding becomes unstable. #scienceart #budgetcuts #collage

4th of July 2025 impromptu double feature: John Carpenter’s 1996 Escape from LA followed immediately by Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 Starship Troopers. I love how, in the 90s, everyone in the props departments just assumed that the next data storage format would just be smaller CDs. #fascistfututemovies

Researchers Train Mice To Choose Between Life-Saving Medications And Other Essentials theonion.com/researc...

The joys of reading poorly-edited papers! I’ve highlighted the relevant sections for you:

While this label is in no way informative, it *is* at least fun: #H+Estain #pathology #slides

One of the consistent, mild irritations for the last few years has been the lack of science words in the NYT Spelling Bee game, and their choice of what animal names they recognize as words and what they don’t. IBEX is a word but not LINGCOD? That’s anti-cod right there. And a missed pangram. #NYT

A friend of mine who tried halva for the first time described it as “edible kinetic sand” and now I can’t think of any other way to describe it. #halva #kineticsand

Me, trying to make small talk while waiting for A/V issues to resolve at seminar- #awkward #manymachinesonix #dune

Invitation to review on May 28th: you have until the 11th to submit your report. Email 1 June 2: your review report is expected soon. Email 2 June 6th: your review isn’t submitted yet. Email 3 June 11th: your review is overdue. If you want the review before the deadline, MOVE THE DEADLINE.

Done submitting grants for a few weeks. Catching up on my book projects. Plural. Had inspiration for a hard scifi body horror with accurate genetics and immunology. Premise: what if my teratoma had differentiated nervous tissue and we became a hive mind? Starting it off as a short story.

A continuation of my list of things I learned on The Simpsons first: -quince paste -Pablo Neruda -Regicide -Deviled Ham -Tom Landry (and his hat) -several Cheers characters -Rickets -Vassar college -Radio call signs that begin with W (I grew up on the west coast, with K call signs) #thesimpsons

Honestly just impressed that this figure was published in 2022, 38 years after the launch of the Mac 128k.

Me, with terrible headache, pleading with the electrolyte solution I make, which the humidity has partially solidified: “please. Please just be part of the solution.” *sobs in chemistry joke* #electrolytes

A heads up in case this reaches other investigators: several PAs were canceled last week, and there was very little fanfare and no warning or explanation. One of them is the Katz R01 I was applying for. #NIH #Canceledgrants

THE KATZ R01 PA THAT IVE SPENT TWO MONTHS STRAIGHT WORKING ON WAS JUST CANCELED. I GOT THE ENTIRE APPLICATION TO OSP, THEY ROUTED IT LAST WEEK. NOW ITS CANCELED I prepared an entire R01 from scratch and submitted it. and they pulled the funding announcement

I did it! I finally used a reference to "humsters"- chimeric human-hamster embryos- in a grant proposal. Thank you, 1980s IVF research, for one of my favorite dead ends of human gestation! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6670443/ #oddities #hybrids #waitwhat

“Let’s try to wind up in the same elder care facility” is the new “let’s be neighbors when we grow up and have kids the same age so they can be best friends, too.” #goals

When my R01’s study section (PN) was first canceled, there was a gag on NIH communications, and my collaborator’s VA funding that was my backup funding until I got something funded was pulled and I thought my career was over, I googled “finding comfort in nihilism”. #nihilism #academia 1/

I don’t want power or influence. My dream is to take public transit to my laboratory where I study and help cure diseases and I get money to cover mortgage and food and have healthcare. apple.news/AHjSTYl-zTVa...

Found my favorite explanation of god today in Peter Watts’s Echopraxia. #echopraxia #hardscifi

When we both lower our standards, my spouse and I can wear the same sized T-shirts which, let me tell you, saves a lot of money on band merch and novelty T-shirts. I finally designated the area of the closet where they go last night.

Our cat, Colossus, only drinks water out of human-style drinking vessels, never bowls or dishes. Here he is by his dedicated coffee table pint glass looking like Showa-era Godzilla. Bonus: perfect placement of my husband’s sassy cat mug. #mainecoon #cats #godzilla

I’m trying not to make this book on the past, present, and future of reproduction and assisted reproduction technology just a parade of horrors, but… the historical source material is 100% a parade of horrors. Today’s case: from 1790-1805, a woman had a term fetus in her bladder.

I thought I could beat the storm home from the lab, but alas. Perks to being junior faculty though- my office and lab are already half underground and don’t have any windows, so I can just keep on working through a tornado warning. My only window is this picture my mom took for me. #tornadowarning

Attempts to induce labor from 1854: “Scanzoni’s method of breast irritation”, and Kiwisch’s douche. It’s time to brush up on my German from undergrad because almost everything I can find on Kiwisch is auf Deutsch and I *must* know what was in his douche. #pregnancy #questionableoldtimeymedicine

As a reproductive immunologist and former contraception and STI researcher, I wholeheartedly support the band HEALTH for having their own condoms at their merch table. Also butt plugs, made of materials that will neither degrade nor get stuck and necessitate an ER visit. HEALTH indeed! 👏👏👏 #health

The email address for the Journal of Pregnancy and Child Health is @pregchild.org. Someone should have thought that through a little more.

Sometimes I work late in the lab just so I can start off conversations with “I was working in the lab late one night” and get The Monster Mash stuck in my companions’ heads.

My R01 finally got reviewed. Not discussed. Am most depressed. I turned my bathtub into the Pacific Ocean with cold water, kombu/seaweed from the international market, and sea salt. I’m drinking a west coast IPA and listening to indie rock from the Cascadia bio region. Gotta get back to my roots. /😭

Many things can be said about the 1980 movie “Humanoids from the Deep,” but most importantly, I found my new favorite technobabble scene! Y’see, they treated frog eggs with DNA 5 to induce growth, there were salmon involved, and then a very creative pronunciation of coelacanth. The aristocrats!

My colleagues "chat'n'bitch" text thread is very suspicious of the Taubenberger appointment. "This seems like a very good decision. Where's the catch? There has to be a catch."

I salvaged these ring stand attachments from the trash pile of a lab getting cleaned out during grad school. Finally made my abomination! It looks a little like Crow and Tom Servo had a baby made of very thin parts.

Whatever tornado did or didn’t hit Bordeaux in north Nashville, Clayton and our big cat Colossus are fine, they were in the coat closet, and I bravely sheltered in a brewery in Louisville with a bunch of microbiologists after our American Society for Microbiology branch meeting yesterday and today.

Seen in the wild. Awwwwwwwwww WHAT’S IN THE BOOT?!?!

Thank you so much to @nashseverewx.com. All y’all do great work. Didn’t realize there was a way to make recurring donations, so did that this morning. nashvillesevereweather.com/donate/ for any other locals!

Jeffrey Goldberg thinking he was being pranked and then realizing he was actually just in the war plans group chat is such a good microcosm of how it feels to be alive right now, everything seems fake until you realize it’s actually real and incredibly stupid