This one means a lot. Our paper, “Large extrachromosomal replicons are widespread across bacterial lineages and show coordinated replication termination and spatial coupling with the chromosome,” is out! doi.org/10.1038/s414...

✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa. Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality. docuracy.github.io/datini/ #DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory

I'm really enjoying imagining a scientist who's driven by hatred of isoleucine

Our work on 'hidden diversity' in unbinned contigs is now published in @natmicrobiol.nature.com : www.nature.com/articles/s41... See the linked threads for more details!

👀

Get your applications in today or tomorrow if you're interested!

check out our new work on the design principles underlying cytotoxic T-cell responses. how do trade-offs and cell economics shape immune decision making? led by Obinna Ukogu and in collaboration with Grégoire Altan-Bonnet. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The National Science Board has had staggered six-year terms since 1950, by design. On Friday all 24 members were fired by email. The next board meeting is May 5. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Sounds familiar. From Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”

Breaking WaPo: Multiple scientists who serve on an independent board established to guide the nation's nearly $9 billion basic science funding agency were just terminated from their positions by Trump.

Thrilled to have my first PhD paper with @mmdesai.bsky.social out! @science.org Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Thread below: #mevosky #evosky #evobio #popgen #evolsky #ecoevo #molevol

signals being collected in a book

Woah www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Interested in a *staff computational scientist* position? We are looking for an experienced computational biologist (ideally with microbiology experience) to support published packages while also driving new research. Pay range $73k-$111k w excellent benefits. careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...

Happy to finally share these results: Cross-feeding enables robust coexistence between four bacterial species www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... With @saramitri.bsky.social @lambdapp.bsky.social @dan1elmachado.bsky.social @lhtxra.bsky.social Eric Ulrich, Alisson Gillon & Sam Testa #microsky

This paper is so cool and so important. Rex took a verbal model seriously and showed that it just doesn't so what people say it should do, and it opened up a ton of questions

From a colleague not on bsky: I am writing to share that my lab at Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan is recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher for the FIS2-funded BADGE project. You can find the full details and application link here: jobs.humanitas.it/job/Post-Doc...

Happy to share that I've accepted a CNRS Chaire de Professeur Junior position in computational biology as part of the Génomique Métabolique unit at Genoscope! Looking forward to working with my fellow researchers there as well as with the broader 🇫🇷 research community starting this summer! 🇺🇳/🇮🇹 🔜 🇫🇷

keep calm and trust in thermodynamics

Minor update! Comments still welcome. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

more places should do this, plus France has experience with gendbuntu

It looks like there will be an open postdoc position in my lab soon. I'll be looking for someone with substantial wet-lab experience in microbiology / microbial ecology / evolution / physiology. If everything goes well, an ad will be coming. But if you know someone, ask them to reach out already.

Crafting great pasta sauce requires more than culinary intuition; it’s a science. As Daniel Maria Busiello, @vicioms.bsky.social, and Ivan Di Terlizzi write, understanding how ingredients interact can help cooks consistently achieve delicious results. #physics #pasta #quickstudy #softmatter

unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea

Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.

people split hairs about the genocide classification all the time, but Trump unambiguously wrote down his intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national group, and then he broadcast it out

This is vile. No one needs a lawyer to tell them this is illegal. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment no matter your politics. The U.S. Congress, the American public, U.S. military, U.S. allies or former allies. We need each & every one of you to call him back from the brink.

Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Holy shit. This is like if a foreign country bombed MIT. Sharif University is the top science and engineering institution in Iran, and one of the top in the world. Absolutely unconscionable www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblo...

“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”

Acquired 💯

Happy to share the final version of @oliviamghosh.bsky.social's paper on inferring low dimensional phenotype-fitness maps from high-throughput fitness measurements across environments. Fun collaboration with @oliviamghosh.bsky.social, @grantkinsler.bsky.social, & @petrovadmitri.bsky.social

Was invited to guest lecture AP Physics 2 today in my hometown. They covered electrical circuits, so I attempted part of this recent tutorial from Matthew Scott’s groups that relates bacterial physiology to circuit diagrams. Overall, students were receptive! journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

Had a great time talking microbial macroecology with the folks at JHU, with the bonus of learning some new physiology + biological physics. Thanks to Will Ludington for being a gracious host and Frank Liu for the action shot!

Our Hands On Growth Laws Theory Cookbook is out today! journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst... It covers cell growth models through step-by-step recipes, bridging theory and practical applications, from basic to complex settings. Happy cooking! With @micalilab.bsky.social and @lciandrini.bsky.social

Back in the noughties when I was an academic, my lab did quite a bit of work on (conserved) alternative transcripts. This study in @plosbiology.org presents compelling evidence that most alternative transcripts are deleterious noise journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

"Donors from China have already given 5,000 “household” solar energy equipment sets for installation at three Cuban clinics and a home for the elderly, Chinese official news agency Xinhua said on Thursday." www.scmp.com/economy/chin...

Chemist/physician Dr. Maud Menten co-authored the seminal paper 𝘋𝘪𝘦 𝘒𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘬 𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘐𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘸𝘪𝘳𝘬𝘶𝘯𝘨, 1931. This intro'd the Michaelis–Menten equation (image). It remains a cornerstone of #biochemistry, used in drug design, metabolic studies & enzyme engineering. She was born #OTD in 1879. #WomenInSTEM

“Once you have something to get you going, the rest sometimes follows.” When a scientist tackles writer’s block.

"Using a 10.5-kb segment from the N. genitalium reference sequence as the prompt, we generated ten 580-kb sequences..." The biological meaning would not be obvious, but I'd like to see the pop gen stats of the genome ensemble (tree topology, dN/dS, etc) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

And yet Cuba nonetheless managed to achieve some of the very best social outcomes in the developing world, rivalling even high-income countries in the imperial core.

The “free” QR code expired but here is the preprint: doi.org/10.32942/X20...

Soy Cuba

Posted notes I never published from ~2021 providing a quick demonstration why LD should never be inferred on binned allele frequency data, even in the ideal case. Problem seems mostly solved through weighted estimators, but would be interested in follow up. wrshoemaker.github.io//posts/2026/...

Today! 12:48 in Bluebird 2E

Thought I would share this famous analogy from Felsentein’s book I just re-stumbled on. Just in case you’re bug in a box and missed it 😜

This is kinda bonkers. In addition, 20 amino acids were found on Ryugu, along with uracil and vitamin B3. These have been found in other instances, but since the samples from Ryugu were collected directly from the asteroid and delivered in sealed capsules, contamination on Earth could be ruled out.

Need a moratorium in pop gen on new summary statistics that don’t account for sampling.