Leonard Leo is a lawyer, but he's never argued a case in court. He's never held elected office. But for years he rebuilt the American legal system, resulting in the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority. (Published Oct. 2023)

Last thing I did before vacation was submit a public comment on the destructive OMB proposal through @standupforscience.net and e-mail my reps again! Comments close July 13th

New preprint from our lab Statistical learning of bacterial growth in combinatorially constructed environments, led by brilliant PhD student Andrea Arrabal. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We systematically study nutrient-nutrient interactions in bacterial growth under carbon-limiting conditions.

Looking forward to digging in! It seems totally reasonable to me that hgt/recombination based sweeps are 'harder' than snv based ones!

As you might imagine, as someone who studies science and works on metrics, I have some thoughts on qed myself. I fully agree that the messaging can be described as tone-deaf and problematic. I don’t think it had to be. ripplingideas.org/2026/06/26/t...

Microbes that have the greatest genomic potential for secondary metabolism tend to be multicellular. Here, we show that signatures of ancestral BGC expansions within 3 bacterial phyla and 2 fungal lineages coincide with origins of complex multicellularity [1/12] 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

People always say "tell a story" but then don't explain how to do so! How is that helping? If we knew how to tell a story we wouldn't need the advice in the first place. 1/

When I first saw the data that ultimately fueled these charts, my mind was blown. (See the note at the bottom of our story for detailed sourcing!) projects.propublica.org/why-carbon-c...

How to give a bad talk? Short and precise points by @itaiyanai.bsky.social on how to give a talk and present your ideas. Highly recommend saving this and reading it before your next presentation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out our latest T7SS toxin story. These reverse toxins aren’t as rare as we thought!

the 2nd paper in Nature *this month* by Gerard D. Wright! that's the 1st one www.nature.com/articles/s41...

even more impressive — the huge improvement in treating kids with cancer we can cure many now, precisely because of painstaking research and clinical trials over decades ourworldindata.org/db734210-96b...

"Power Law"

Gopen and Swan www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-lon...

Are restriction/modification modules only used for host defense? @selmamhm.bsky.social shows an alternative use. "Restriction-modification systems are required for Neisseria gonorrhoeae pilin antigenic variation" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2602688123 #Microd #Microsky. #Microbiology

You rarely see a perfect headline in the wild like this

www.science.org/content/arti... somehow i missed this bit of excellent news!

In what may be one of Earth’s craziest forms of mimicry, researchers in 2023 reported a species of rove beetle that grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it. Learn more during #InsectWeek: https://scim.ag/4mM2aS9

Unpopular opinion: Going straight to AI limits your creatively, because it short-circuits the iterative process you need to develop new ideas.

New preprint up: the power of protein language models - using a single gene (adenylate kinase) to predict the temperature optima of bacteria and bacterial communities from genomes or metagenomes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Out Now! Commensal yeast Malassezia produces tryptophan metabolites to promote tissue homeostasis via the aryl hydrocarbon receptor in mice #MicroSky

Over the past 50 years, we have learned much about how transcription factors and other DNA-binding proteins search for their targets, but we know much less about how sequence-specific RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) search for their targets. 🧵⤵️ (1/26)

A fundamental study of individual variation and contribution of learning to behavioural individuality. Conclusions are supported by compelling, rigorous analysis across a number of experiments in thousands of individuals across genotypes and conditions.

Wrote a short piece about the opportunities and challenges of pushing ancient pathogen genomics into a new frontier: the zooarchaeological record. Pretty excited about what is going to come. www.science.org/eprint/MSG3Z...

are you in the weights? Hilarious and fascinating including the mess ups intheweights.com

one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband

Excited to share our lab's newest preprint here on Bluesky! Really proud of Jamie Pan and the team that brought this together to demonstrate a homeostatic role for the microbiome in regulating dermal collagen production via epidermal signaling www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Spent the last two years developing a new Intro to Physics course for undergrad biology majors. It features tons of examples from biology (especially Ecology & Evolution!) and requires only middle school-level math. Lecture note here shorturl.at/0PiVp Any comments or feedback are highly welcome!

Ths is flying under the radar, but Russ Vought is advancing a new scheme to give Trump's cronies total control of nearly $179B in federal grant funds. Billions for lifesaving disaster relief and medical research would be subject to Trumpian loyalty oaths. Make no mistake: this is fascism.

"Either way, the concentration of wealth at the very top is much higher now than it ever was during the Gilded Age. And these are numbers from last year, before the SpaceX IPO. The robber barons were pikers compared with today’s oligarchs." paulkrugman.substack.com/p/meet-the-n...

“A deliberate crippling” is a very accurate description of what Russell Vought and Jay Bhattacharya are doing to NIH. cssh.northeastern.edu/a-deliberate...

Out Now! Purine bias in bacterial genes is driven by runaway transcription #MicroSky

including state-of-the-art #CryoET #CryoEM #teamtomo

Richard @rmcelreath.bsky.social and I wrote The Natural Selection of Bad Science over a decade ago, and it's been very frustrating to watch the process get worse rather than better in many cases. doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

New blog post! I analyse the new [email protected] basecalling model from @nanoporetech.com and discuss the conspicuous lack of a new sup model: rrwick.github.io/2026/06/11/d...

I’m so excited. Our secret (not so secret) observational experiment is about to begin. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for wastewater surveillance. FIFA World cup. 1/ @securebio.org www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Excited to have Alex Crits Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social join the lab today as a staff scientist! I had a hunch it was good time to find an experienced computational microbiologist to join the lab, but still feel very lucky to have him joining us. Looking forward to cool science!

So cool! I watched this 10x in a row.

As always, we end our Bachelor's practical class with an agar art contest using the bright colis from @atinygreencell.bsky.social. As always, lots of beautiful images were created. Meet the winner, the Coli Cougar, our next year's class lab book cover.

The largest ebola outbreaks to date started in 2014 and 2018. Sadly given this trend, the continuing limited testing capacity and everything we know about the virus, I would be very surprised if this does not end up worse.

New NIH Request for Information regarding capping the number of Research Project Grants allowed per investigator. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... Open for comments until August 3rd, 2026

Hurrah, my account is back after being locked/deactivated for a few weeks. I presume I got hacked. This is a good reminder to stop using your old weak passwords.

Nine more Erdos problems resolved with LLMs + Lean: arxiv.org/pdf/2605.227... Worth noting they got 9/353 after trying a giant set of open problems by Erdos, and 44/492 OEIS open conjectures. Likely would've gotten 0 a year ago.

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

Excited to share a preprint from my postdoc research at @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social in the @banfieldlab.bsky.social! We surveyed soil microbiomes for autotrophy - and found it nearly everywhere, but most abundant in deep, saturated soils. Check it out below! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Missed this very cool protocol for amplicon sequencing using nanopore

So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey, And these have smaller yet to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum: -Jonathan Swift, 1733

Another banger

Moulana, Dupic & Desai uncover rugged and smooth regions of SARS-CoV-2 fitness landscape and underscore the importance of epistasis in shaping its evolution. These findings improve our ability to anticipate future viral variants. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag100 #evobio #molbio #sarscov2

New blog post: Galton's Grandma was right. I locate the the preprint from Jaishankar et al in this history of Galtonian behavior genetics: a remarkable methodological achievement, with devastating-- and mostly unacknowledged-- substantive implications for the field. open.substack.com/pub/ericturk...