“You can get a other job, but you cannot get another soul”.

I started this work 10 years ago as an undergrad in a "Computing for Biologists" class, and now it's finally out in the world! I'm very proud for it to be my first contributing author paper. This work focuses on predicting and testing gene functions based on their co-expression, but there's more:

Accepted with minor revisions! 🎉

All of my old grievances and resentment toward faculty and administrators who asserted that science isn't political is bubbling to the surface.

Timely for grad school admissions season...

Had a great time talking to @atinygreencell.bsky.social abt my PhD work - small RNA transcriptome of rice gametes & zygotes. Please give his channel a follow. This podcast series of Sebastian is a great idea, and I found all previous episodes informative/inspirational. I hope mine is as well.

What is the world coming to?

Tears In Rain Episode 5 is live!!! I hung out with @daniellebeckman.bsky.social where she told us about her experiences as a student in Brazil that shaped her current interests in viruses inside the human brain. I hope you enjoy! Please like and subscribe for more! youtu.be/27AtqcYNHa8

Grad school interview season is starting, and Sebastian's collecting biology PhD stories that I wish I had heard when I was figuring out where I should go. 🧪 It was a pleasure to share my experience--if I can help anyone think through things, please send me a message!

Just watched Moonstruck starring Cher and Nic Cage: 12/10 no notes, perfect film

Thank you for inviting me on, Sebastian! This podcast is a wonderful project 🙂

Happy new year, everyone

It's now formatted more-or-less correctly!

When a journal rejects your manuscript but recommends that you transfer it to a subsidiary, how do you decide whether to do it or send the paper somewhere else?

Infamous paper that popularized unproven COVID-19 treatment finally retracted Study on hydroxychloroquine by Didier Raoult and colleagues gets pulled on ethical and scientific grounds @cathleenogrady.bsky.social reports. www.science.org/content/arti...

Question for the bird people out there: how do hummingbirds avoid going into torpor while incubating their eggs?

My first last-author paper is out as a preprint! 🧪 "Inferring gene-pathway associations from consolidated transcriptome datasets: an interactive gene network explorer for Tetrahymena thermophila" I wanted to wait til bioRxiv finished formatting it, but I couldn't! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"My other car is a..."

Eugenicists, eat your heart out

In a @currentbiology.bsky.social paper earlier this year, led by @laurawesseldijk.bsky.social, we analysed Beethoven’s genome with a polygenic index related to musicality, as a way to communicate limits of genetic predictions at the individual level & the complexity of links between DNA & behaviour:

In one year, I genetically engineered the boring Arabidopsis into a beautiful ornamental flower 🧬🌹 Here is how and why I gave this model organism a visual upgrade 🧵(1/7)

You've heard of classical eugenics. Now presenting: corporate emotional eugenics!! 🎉

This article, which contains not one critical commentator and reads like a press release, is a shocking dereliction of duty from one of our leading scientific publications 🧪 🔭

This was so cathartic to watch: youtu.be/TwKpj2ISQAc I had a very similar experience being given his "autobiographies" as a kid and again in college, and every time I felt like I was crazy for finding Feynman an intolerable ass

Stunning!

Brat girl summer Bart woman winter

My latest pots :)

Yet another thing for grad student unions to fight against 🙄

Artificial Intelligence? More like Artificial Skill Set (ASS). send skeet

In my circle, people are having important conversations about defending institutions, and I think that it's important to discuss more thoroughly how we define what we mean. Specifically, in the case of academia, I think the modern US university is at least three different things:

E coli are red S aureus are blue Hans Christian Gram Stained them for you

Pro-Tip you can mute the 📌 emoji. And then you never have to see the 📌 emoji. And you can still use the 📌 emoji feed. You’re welcome. ☺️

The perfect title in the perfect journal: "Uncovering the mechanical secrets of the squirting cucumber" in PNAS 🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

While you were munching grass, I studied the blade youtu.be/vIjTxxD3M4U

Wake up babe, new pasta just dropped: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

Wake up babe, new pasta just dropped: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

It’s the LinkedIn of Twitters

For me, the most incredible artefacts from the ancient world are the letters people wrote on clay tablets and sent to one another over thousands of years in Mesopotamia, going back to more than 5,000 years ago. They contain recognisable humanity, warmth and humour. Here's a thread of my favourites.

Perhaps you've heard of comparative genomics, but have you heard of comparative emojinomics? 🧪 In 2020, I rated the most common microbe emoji on their microbiality and charisma. Two of the designs have been updated since then, so it's time to revisit this important task.

Solving the structure of DNA in a public bathroom

Picture 10, everyone. You can thank me later. www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/1...

When a professor of finance is this wrong about how grad school works, I want to yeet the whole university into the sun: stanforddaily.com/2024/11/10/s...

I was talking with a civil rights attorney yesterday, and they told me about defending a group from the charge of "felony conspiracy to commit misdemeanor trespass," which is the most legal brainworms thing I've ever heard

Higher-ed colleagues, our task now becomes to keep our fucking institutions from complying in advance. Do you know what this involves? Service work. Committee work. Being on Faculty Senate. All the shit that many of us turned our nose up at because "that wasn't what we were hired to do."

Over 1,000 scientists have reached out to me across platforms! We have amazing momentum right now and dozens trickling in. If you haven't reached out yet, please do!

1. Philip Morris International is openwashing their seminar series by literally naming it "Open Science" — even though the series itself has little or nothing to do with open science or open science practices. Let's talk about it. www.pmiscience.com/en/news-even...

I'm an early career scientist (a microbiologist), and when I think about the grand projects of science and biology, I feel like I have landed on pretty succinct descriptions: to me, science is a cultural practice that is built around a process for uncovering truth in the world...

Timothy Snyder's video series about On Tyranny is excellent and very accessible. youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Microbiologists in the 1960s would have found a home on Bluesky

I have a dream of naming a species P. value so that it has some biological relevance.