Lunch on the Grass (central panel) - 1865/1866 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/6664

I know we get inured to stuff, but it is hard to fathom the cruelty here. At a time of tax cuts for the most powerful, they are trying to remove basic supports for the most vulnerable. The Trump administration's war on people with disabilities continues.

😀DOA stands for “degradation of alpha” : mutants that do not degrade Matalpha2 upon switching from alpha to a: yeast cell bio!! Apoyg!!

Look at this crazy thing

On the NSF- an (other) absolute shame that this administration is responsible for-

Étretat: The Beach and the Falaise d'Amont - 1885 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/1222165

Turns out that I am already amazing at un-AI’ing my writing because I don’t use AI!

The House of Dr. Gached in Auvers, 1873 https://botfrens.com/collections/43/contents/11721

👇!

This is WILD (& microbes rock 🎸) “These findings […] revealing a protein-templated mechanism for sequence-specific DNA synthesis.” Take that, central dogma! 🧪 “Protein-templated synthesis of dinucleotide repeat DNA by an antiphage reverse transcriptase” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Also, care workers for children and the elderly are criminally undervalued. Societies cannot function for long if all the load-bearing functions (raising and education of the young, care for the old) are treated as the dregs of labor, and practitioners shat upon for sport by those more privileged.

Sulfuric acid also kills grass ( and all cancer cells for sure)- let’s make sure he knows that

Trump thinks Diet Coke may prevent cancer because “it kills grass so it must kill cancer cells in the body”. Scientific review: This is a horseshit. It’s also in line with Trump’s understanding of biology, which is a 0.0 on the Got It scale. Anecdote: I drink a lot a Diet Coke. I also had cancer.

WELL NOW, would you look at that? A massive, 4-YEAR-LONG study of NEARLY 30 MILLION people in France found that individuals who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine had a 74% LOWER risk of death from severe COVID-19 compared to unvaccinated individuals and ZERO increased risk of all-cause mortality.

Large study of the effects of mRNA COVID vaccination impacts in France. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... 1/3

Michel Mayor, Nobel de Física: “La gente piensa que la humanidad es eterna, pero somos animales y nos extinguiremos” elpais.com/ciencia/2026...

Iran posted this. What a humiliation for Trump.

Annunciation #1, 1576, by El Greco. Elegant beauty with just enough appropriate agitation. It’s El Greco’s day today.

"... giving clear and actionable advice" 👇

Un croissant de Terre!

Witness the elegance of the swimming Feather Star, a crinoid that dates back to the Ordovician era, over 480 million years ago. A true marvel of evolution in our oceans.

When I told him about The New Yorker's very human fact-checking process, he crowed that "a lot of that is going to go away." To which I said, NO, AI means we need MORE fact-checking, because AI has flooded the web with bullshit. It certainly can't be trusted to fact-check itself, or anything. /

that's right

This is called “strategic defeat.” You have ended up in a worse position than before you began, with your adversary, while battered, emerging in a stronger position than before.

Watch Director Bhattacharya's performance at CPAC really got to me. I chose to share some of my observations with him. Hold on... 1/11

"For more than a year, administration officials have advanced a careful, multifront assault in an effort to impose new rules for November’s midterm balloting." Trump is systematically preparing to steal the midterm elections. wapo.st/415rKbx

Project Hail Mary is a beautiful brilliant film. But molecular biologists be warned there's a deeply disturbing scene midway through when Ryan Gosling's scientist places two eppendorfs directly next to each other in an otherwise empty unbalanced microcentrifuge & sets it spinning with wild abandon.

The first thing Trump did at the FBI and DOJ when he resumed power in 2025 was end nearly all work detecting and stopping foreign election interference. Now we’re told ODNI is looking for signs of such interference—and if it finds them, Trump will try to cancel elections. Q: Does 1+1 still equal 2?

The American people have a right to know what's going on. What you're watching, in real time, is a madman starting a world war for the sole purpose of finding a way to stay in power. I always said Donald Trump would make the world burn if he could benefit from it. Here we are.

Omar: I came to this country as a refugee. To me, America was a beacon of hope. A place where freedom wasn't just a word, but it was a promise. I could have never imagined the day would come when we were staring down at this kind of creeping authoritarianism.

Not a single biologist and only one university researcher on PCAST. This leaves the country unbelievably ill prepared for an age of biotechnology, a race we are already beginning to lose.

I looked into if Medicaid-funded providers who oversee disabled people living independently are ready for worsening climate events. The support they need from the federal government isn’t there, and it’s worsened under Trump. My latest for @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Out today is our paper 'Genomic history of early dogs in Europe', in which we uncover the identity of the dogs that lived in Europe before agriculture—during the Paleolithic & Mesolithic periods: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... A thread ⬇️ (10) @biouea.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social

“I think it’s a real mistake to forget where the pipeline for all this begins.” John Diffley reflects on the importance of basic research, his mission to decode DNA replication and recreate it in the lab, and the scientific optimism of the 1960s that helped shape it. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2026-03...

the republican justices are as pickled in MAGA slop as any pardoned jan 6er

This seems kind of important. fortune.com/2026/03/23/u...

As we self-destruct, China moves ahead. Fewer grants were awarded this year. A recent survey of #NIH funded scientists revealed that they had to close their labs, reduce work. Fewer grants = fewer grad students = slow innovation This is on Jay Bhattacharya et al. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Genius of Raphael in Three Works of Art www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

HHS results even more horrific Share of HHS who say their political leaders "maintain high levels of integrity: 4.2% Share who have trust in their political leadership: 2.8% Share who are confident they can report a suspected violation of law/rule/reg without retaliation: 8.7%

Join us tomorrow! Proud to work with a unified scientific community to show up to a debate with evidence rather than insinuations. If we are going to rebuild trust in NIH, we better make sure the NIH Director is telling the truth #NIHFFS

To watch this event either live or later, tune into open.substack.com/live-stream/... with @angierasmussen.bsky.social and others previewing the Ridley lecture, providing live fact checking, and discussing it afterwards. 3/3

Tomorrow, Director Bhattacharya is hosting the inaugural "Scientific Freedom" Lecture with Matt Ridley sharing his perspectives on the search for the origin of Covid-19 (and hawking his book on the subject published in 2022). 1/3

😂😂cc: my Mom

From our Sept 2023 piece on Joe Kent who you really don't have to hand it to talkingpointsmemo.com/news/joe-ken...

!!! Morocco champ of Africa after all

Kent has more integrity than Gabbard. Not surprising at this point

I Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/o...

A new mechanism for “RNA memory”! This time in Planaria! (Here's a video of a Planarian with mulitple heads, one of the heritable phenotypes we studied). This work summarizes >10 years of research and is an amazing collaboration with the labs of Jochen Rink and Omri Wurtzel labs. Read thrad below👇

Geneticist Evelyn Witkin (b. #OTD 1921) pioneered work on DNA damage repair & mutagenesis. Her discovery of the SOS response revealed how cells actively respond to genetic threats, laying foundations for insights into cancer, aging, radiation effects & chemotherapy resistance. #WomenInSTEM #WHM