New preprint! How are developmental cycles coordinated across cell types? It turns out that, like Geppetto's cuckoo clocks in the GIF below, individual cell types are each performing their own little crazy routine, but all in sync with each other.

Certain extramural investigators have received NOAs this week listing the indirects at 15%. What's happening at your institution?

In my humble opinion, the embryonic cell lineage paper's longest lasting legacy is the shared aesthetic we in the worm community aspire to achieve in our work: beautiful, elegant, complete, and deeply conceptual.

Post a non-religious photo you think of as holy.

"The crowd’s anger grows, and I notice something that is becoming a trend. Trump’s troops retreat when citizens rise up. In a moment, the squad cars and SUVs pack up and leave, squealing tires, doing U-turns, and vanishing into the night. Anger is an energy." www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

🚨 150 University of California law professors (and counting) have now signed this open letter to the UC Regents and other officials, explaining the flagrant illegality of the Trump Administration’s UCLA funding cut offs, and urging the UC to fight back. sites.google.com/view/uclawfa...

Honored to have collaborated briefly with Jim during my postdoc. We only met a few times but I was struck each time by his incredibly thoughtful and careful approach to science.

Pathway to Independence – an interview with Chee Kiang (Ethan) Ewe. In this interview, @ethanewe.bsky.social talks about about what drives and excites him, and what he hopes to achieve in his own lab: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

As someone who ended up using non-model systems after doing his PhD with Drosophila, you don't realise just how amazing FlyBase or WormBase are until you try to genetics without them.

Obligatory

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com The president and his allies have reshaped the military for their own purposes, say Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, former members of the National Security Council. “We no longer expect resistance from that institution,” they write.

“This isn't scientific disagreement. It's either staggering incompetence or willful misrepresentation,” writes infectious disease physician Jake Scott. www.statnews.com/2025/08/13/r...

This EO, combined with the retirement of Noni Byrnes at CSR/NIH, makes me very concerned about peer review at the NIH

The funds are approved! We're hiring a postdoc to build a CRISPRa toolkit to identify new aging mechanisms in C. elegans. Email or DM me to find out more. Please share & repost!

A senior administration official, as well as other officials, told Rolling Stone that it is a priority of Trump that these kinds of military deployments -- in times of relative calm -- become normalized in American political culture. More: rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Sales of fourth tier blue jeans shilled by Dear Leader’s leering endorsement of partially unclothed model his child’s ~age tank while Subway footlong sandwiches purchases rise on a tide of rebellion. What a country.

😮 Just WOW!! Spray GFP mRNAs on plant leaves and the leaves translate this and you get glowing leaves. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What an utter travesty

The regime halted all federal grants then told UC administration if they pay $1 billion they could have them back. It’s like ransomware. UC is a public university system and we cannot do this. So, no grants = no research and labs will shut down. Are we great yet? dailybruin.com/2025/08/09/a...

I think about this constantly

🔥my latest paper from @odedrechavi.bsky.social lab🔥 we found small RNAs act across tissues to regulate fertlity in C. elegans 🪱. Surprisingly, we also found that O2-sensing neurons inhibit germline maintenance. Follow along our journey👇https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.07.669182v1

He extends this to pursuit of all knowledge, not only in the sciences: "There is no rivalry between the studies of Arts and Laws and Science but the rivalry of fellow soldiers in striving which can most victoriously achieve the common end of all, to set back the frontier of darkness." 8/10

"...flowers by the way." Love it

In this 1892 lecture, the poet A. E. Housman advocates for basic curiosity-driven discovery research: www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poe... I've copied some of my favorite parts below. 1/10

People should scream bloody murder about RFK blocking vaccines for kids. I mean it. Mothers and fathers should get hysterical. I'd rarely advise this as a strategy. But, I think it's appropriate for this. What could be more clear and stark? It's not hard to explain to reporters.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will spend more than $50 billion per year privatizing public schools in America.   We should not have a two-tier education system — private schools for the rich & well-connected, severely underfunded public schools for low-income & working class kids.

Vague language combined with threats is intended to paralyze Program and Grants Management Staff. Who they can later accuse of sabotage and “misinterpretation” of the EO to make Trump look bad. See: Battacharaya on the trigger words list.

your state’s number one public university is under threat and all you’re going to do for us is offer advice?

Always "hilarious" to me that the Bayer and Amgen papers bitching about reproducibility were commentary articles based on internal surveys with almost zero methodological details and almost no actual data. And, yes, those papers really kicked this whole thing off.

Put your money where your mouth is

I mean, call me when people reproduce their results in multiple mouse strains.

Stephen Colbert is going SCORCHED EARTH right now. To RFK Jr: “Fuck you, you roid-addled nepo carnie! Fuck you, you roadkill-munching Luddite human slim jim!”

The authors report that all seven tested deep learning models failed to outperform simple baselines in predicting transcriptome changes after single or double perturbations. I will duck for cover.

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.

I called both @schiff.senate.gov and @padilla.senate.gov this AM and emphasized my concerns about this decision and other recent federal guidance about vaccines, which will put American lives at risk. I asked both senators to start impeachment proceedings against RFK Jr.

UC reports today that $584 million in grant funding to UCLA has been suspended. This adds to months of delays, some previous cancellations, and uncertainty around fund disbursement even prior to the freeze. Where do we go from here www.latimes.com/california/s...

‘Seek Funding’ Step Added To Scientific Method

Have $10M and want to cure some diseases? It costs ~$1B to invent a new medicine…but $10M buys you Project Encore, to see if ANY existing drug might be repurposed for ~100 diseases that have no treatments. Contact me - be a hero for desperate patients! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Well, the times sure are unprecedented. This UCLA federal funding freeze piles onto the uncertainty, hiring remains frozen, much (most?) of funding is now also frozen and science feels minutes away from flatlining. CPR time is now. Hate all of this, for all of us.

Key point: The losses are so large bc the economic benefits of universities to their communities and our country are so great. That's why possible NIH budget cuts--expertly visualized by SciMAP--are so damaging. Check out their maps ⤵️ scienceimpacts.org

Are anteaters the new crabs?? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcini...

After 10 years of work, a complete telomere-to-telomere gap-free genome for C. elegans finally exists: it has 106 Mb rather than the textbook 100.3 Mb, and up to 366 additional genes. genome.cshlp.org/content/35/8...

1/3 It's official, our grants from the NIH/NIEHS have all been suspended. We were aiming to understand how arsenic, a chemical that millions of Americans are exposed to at high levels, is disrupting the epigenetic machinery.

Well, guess it's our turn now

Happy to share our publication - Comparative connectomics of two distantly related nematode species reveals patterns of nervous system evolution www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Senate Appropriations has a modest *INCREASE* in NIH funding but it will need to be recconciled with the house cut. If you have not been calling your representative of late now would be a good time to start again www.appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/ful...

It’s the end of an era! 🙁 Announcing the Final Release of WormBase blog.wormbase.org/2025/07/23/a...

Given the lack of significant outrage, people are either unaware or believe they can weather this storm. The latter set reminds me of folks confident they would get on the lifeboats when the Titanic was sinking. At 5% success & a six-grant application limit, there aren't enough lifeboats. /2