To see how important US science is, consider measurements of changes in ocean heat content. US data are ~53% of the total. Over half! But removing the US data is worse than randomly removing 80% of the total data, because unlike other countries, the US makes measurements everywhere. 🧪🌊

“We call on all concerned citizens of our beloved country to contact their congressional representatives to declare their alarm about what is happening at HHS.” diabetesjournals.org/care/article...

The public comment period on the proposal to subject all scientific funding decisions to political review is open through July 13!!!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The takeover of Claude's boxy slides, AI generated podcast-style summaries, and ChatGPT generated illustrations at scientific meetings is really jarring. 👀

NIH funded peeps: This is insane and coming for us.

This adds up since I couldn’t get a host letter as a self-funded visiting researcher to the NIH this summer because I am employed by a foreign institution (Norway). Not that it should matter, but I‘m a citizen and was employed by the same lab at NIH 2013-2015. Absolutely bonkers.

A quick reminder that every time Bhattacharya's NIH asks you to remove words like "gender," "diverse," or "social determinants of health," they are undermining the institution's foundational statue. Gender: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/... SDOH/diverse: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/...

The White House has undertaken mass exclusion of international students. It has slashed new F-1 visas circa 32% in the latest available State Dept. data. That stunning, destructive act says a thousand times more than any empty words uttered at a press conference.

Celiac pet peeve: when even hospitals cannot get the gluten free labelling correct in the cafeterias!

American science right now is basically 10,000 of these stories, all with their own heartbreaking specificity Lost careers, lost progress, lost discoveries I feel so sad every day for all we’ve lost and continue to lose 💔

@maxkozlov.bsky.social covered the staffing shortages at NIH. www.nature.com/articles/d41... 1/3

First, if this is what you expect of parenthood, that you’ll have this level of control over the life of another human being, do not pass go. Parenthood isn’t for you. Second, it’s snake oil peddled by eugenicists who know it’s crap or are ignorantly fanatical about only some people having value.

In today's episode of "Student successes get me through": a paper acceptance for a medical research track student I co-supervise and an ESC oral presentation acceptance for a PhD student I advise. 🎉

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations doi.org/10.59350/5zt... 🧪

It's the absolute worst feeling when I've written something I'm so happy with and I go back to finish it the next day, and I've somehow overwritten or deleted the file. I've looked everywhere and now must settle for recreating what I can remember. An academic nightmare!

Working on slides to teach meta-analysis at next week's Genetic Epidemiology course at NTNU. The EasyQC paper (2014) says "For consortia of comparable size to the GIANT consortium, the present protocol takes a minimum of about 10 months to complete."

Honestly, I don’t understand why anyone has any trust left for this guy. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/u...

Jay Bhattacharya is lying to America about the benefits and extreme effectiveness of the COVID vaccine to continue pushing pseudoscience and conspiracies. (1/2🧵) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/h...

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

Go blue!!! 💛💙

"The struggle of figuring out the right analysis approach, wrestling with an unexpected result, or trying to turn a messy set of findings into a coherent story is not an obstacle to learning. It _is_ the learning". Required reading for AI in the lab: blekhman.substack.com/p/you-need-t...

Omics. Regulation. AI. Explore how integrative genomics and machine learning are redefining cardiovascular research at the Omics, Regulation, & AI for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine virtual symposium, April 28–29. 👉Register now: https://bit.ly/41wDRyt #CardioGenomics #VirtualSymposium #ASHG

Postdoc survival tip: If you're wondering where your time goes in a week, try using an app like Toggl Track to assess your time use. I started pretending I had billable hours, and it helped me focus on efficiently tackling specific tasks instead of getting halfway through several tasks at once.

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025 Who were most affected? www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Early career and women researchers

"as Americans, we really need to remember that having a British accent does not give you extra credibility" Dammit @ggronvall.bsky.social ! 🤣 ht @angierasmussen.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/rasmusse...

Matt Ridley gave the inaugural "NIH Scientific Freedom Lecture Series" earlier today and I just wanted to run through some of the main claims he made - you'll be unsurprised to learn that almost all of them are false. Here's his summary slide - let's start there. 🧵👇

NIH/NSF funding is, for all intents and purposes, frozen again. This somehow almost feels worse than last year. They are running out the clock on biomedical science and all PIs can do is scramble to finish projects before our resources dry up. www.science.org/content/arti...

If you've used my qqman package in the past, you might take a look at gwasplot: High Performance GWAS Plotting and Annotation. I haven't updated qqman in years and don't plan to. github.com/weinstocklab... #Rstats

Wish I could send this to whoever reviewed my grant and told me there was no evidence we needed prediction and prevention of CVD in the young (<40) www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10....

Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference: Things in US science are far, far worse than people know. Far worse than even other scientists know. 1/

An examination of the association between oral antibiotic use over eight years and the gut #microbiome in Swedish individuals found evidence that antibiotics can have long-lasting impacts on the gut microbiome. go.nature.com/40sw4kU#microbiome#medsky 🧪

Here's our R package for interacting with WGS derived GWAS summary statistics with many rare variants (from e.g. UKB or AofUs). It uses duckdb underneath so it's fast. Includes some helpful tie ins to Open Targets / Encode Screen / Ensembl APIs for annotation. weinstocklab.github.io/gwasplot/ind...

It was a momentous day — one student that I co-supervise presented her first poster and another submitted her first, first author paper. These days as a mentor make the trials of academia worthwile! ❤️

Brent Pedersen, Mitchell Vollger and I have "posted" our preprint of the manuscript describing bedder, a complement to the functionality of bedtools. The "preprint server" we have chosen is google docs because it was rejected by biorxiv. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

🚨 New paper! Very excited to have been part of this collaborative work looking at the effect of antibiotics on the gut microbiota even years after prescription. Amazing effort led by Gabriel @tovefall.bsky.social and many others published today in Nature Medicine! 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We might hope for clinical testing to be more standardized than consumer services, but if 7 different companies can’t even begin to reach the same conclusion from the same stool sample, we might have problems trusting microbiome data to inform anything health-related. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Moved to Claude today!

"HS under Kennedy has made a habit of throwing good money after bad science." That "good money" is our tax payer $$, thrown at unethical studies. He pushes ideology over evidence. The cover of the most recent issue of The Lancet says it all. 🧪 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... #ImpeachRFKJr

This week's cover @thelancet.com

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

A day in the life of Brooke Wolford, a statistical geneticist at NTNU (Norway). It's proof that science is both technical and deeply human at the same time. 🧬☕️🐕

👀 Just when I think it can't get worse...

FDA's decision not to accept Moderna's flu vaccine filing has sent shock waves through pharma. "When there’s uncertainty about the path to approval & the reliability of the process, that really has pretty serious consequences,” one player told @jasonmast.bsky.social. www.statnews.com/2026/02/12/f...

I would ask people to call or message their senators about this and specifically that Vinay Prasad needs to be out at FDA. Even the Wall Street Journal has said as much. There is push back. Companies won’t fund clinical trials if they can’t trust the FDA.

Read @bakerdphd.bsky.social’s piece on the need for institutions and their associations to stand up to this kind of behaviour, and then re-read the UNC story.

Very excited to be a certified Carpentries Instructor thanks to Carpentry@UiO! @carpentries.carpentries.org

Wish it was easier to calculate PGS in trusted research environments (TRE) like DNAnexus or the All of Us workbench? Us to! We've been hard at work on a new version of pgsc_calc to make it more scalable in those TREs! Introducing pgsc_calc v3.0.0-alpha.1: pgsc-calc.readthedocs.io/en/v3-alpha.1/

New NIH funding strategy has been formalized. I really do hope scientists understand what this means for the future of science (funding) - it's not subtle. www.niaid.nih.gov/about/unifie...

I'm at the Willard Hotel where I've been denied entry and kicked out of the Reclaiming Science event with NIH director Bhattacharya & other top agency leaders. @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social and I registered for the event months ago yet were told capacity was full, even as they let in dozens of others.

The latest article by NTNU PhD candidate Vera Vik Bjarkø, MD led by Bjørn Olav Åsvold is online now! It was fun to contribute to this GxE exploration with a team from the HUNT Center of Molecular and Clinical Epidemiology & Dept of Public Health and Nursing.