"Taking this job is a bet, or maybe a hope, that the best science will drive the conversation over the long run." Incoming NAS President @neilshubin.bsky.social spoke with @nytimes.com about the state of American science and his hopes for his 5-year term as president: www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/s...

I first met Neil Shubin 30 years ago when he was digging for fossils of our fishy ancestors in Pennsylvania road cuts. Now he's becoming president of the National Academy of Sciences. We talked about taking the helm of the 163-year-old organization at this fraught moment. Gift link: nyti.ms/4giD3FX

Precise genome editing of human embryos triggers praise and alarm www.nature.com/articles/d41... ... I have some thoughts...

Tonight! The final epsiode of Miracle Nutrition with Hearty White! My last message to my awesome radio friends at 6pm EDT on @wfmu.bsky.social . A celebration of life...except I'm not dead! Let's get more listeners than the final epsiode of "Hello, Larry!" Shemp Jive, kids!

Mercer County down by the river. #filmphotography

⬣INFERNO⬣ @boardsofcanada.bsky.social @warprecords.bsky.social

All my early radio work in the 80s and 90s was recorded on a 1/2 inch Otari 8 track and all my scripts handwritten on legal pads. Thank you, Lord, for that experience. Thank you for film. Thank you for live theater. Bless the young going forward and give them my contact info if they need it.

Very happy to see our study on the development of an in vivo single-cell ribosome profiling strategy for the epidermis now online at @cp-molcell.bsky.social. Fantastic work by @claradure.bsky.social and all co-authors involved. www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Please share widely. The new (simpler) MIRA R35 for Early Stage Investigators (ESI) NOFO is published. First due date is 10/2/2026. files.simpler.grants.gov/opportunitie...

As part of my Month of May farewell tour, I'm getting listeners to record messages I'll play on the air. If you're intersted, let me know!

The average NYTimes Connections puzzle: Monkey Polenta Alfred E. Newman Jazz WORDS THAT END IN A LETTER THAT COULD BEGIN ANOTHER WORD

I am hiring a popgen postdoc! Looking for a creative scientist to join us at USC to investigate recessive variation and complex traits in model or non-model species. The project is funded by a multi-year NIH grant, contract can be renewed. Job add & details 👇🏽 usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

Tokyo 4, 2022 22x28 oil on canvas. One of a series of ten I did aftr seeing Tokyo for the first time. #painting #primitiveart

Time-lapse of scale development and growth of a thyroid hormone mutant zebrafish (hypoTH), compared to a wild-type control. Credit to Dr. Andrew J. Aman & @dparichy.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

I am so excited to share our new findings with you! We provide the structural evidence for a direct protein-to-DNA information pathway, showing how a bacterial enzyme 'reads' its own structure to 'write' DNA. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Infrared self portrait using Ilford SFX 200 with IR720 filter on my Canon AE1. #filmphotography #ilfordsfx200

As a recipient of federal grants from #NIH (for now! 😭) that funds research in my lab, I'd like to sincerely thank American taxpayers on #TaxDay for investing in scientific research that lays the foundation for medical and technological innovation in this country and keeps us ALL safe and healthy

Am I the only one who remembers that there were 5 astronauts on Artemis II?! What happened to Col. Greene? I'm calling Professor Quatermass!

In vivo imaging of zebrafish spinal cord neural circuit development, captured with adaptive optical lattice light-sheet microscopy. Credit to Eric Betzig @hhmijanelia.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

Happy #fluorescencefriday (and start of vacation!) to all those who are celebrating Lifeact-labeled epidermal stem cells closing a wound after in vivo adult zebrafish skin injury

New paper out 🚨! Excited to share this collab between my lab and @kerschensteiner.bsky.social's group, expertly led by Ning Shen. We used a genome-wide in vivo CRISPR screen to uncover novel neuroprotective strategies in the P23H mouse retina, with validation in a new human retina culture model.

Shot on FPP Dracula 64 at Pleasant Hill Shaker Village. #filmphotography #FPP

Our paper is now out in Science! Super excited to share our discovery that #mitochondria #pearling is the elusive mechanism driving the regular distribution and inheritance of #mtDNA nucleoids 🧬 [1/6]

Obsessed with this tree in neighbor's yard. I take some sort of picture of it every week. This was taken with Rollei infra, I think. #filmphotography

The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈 Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."

We are big fins of Dr. Coomer! 🤩 Congrats to @anncmorris.bsky.social as well!

In the science of human behaviour, nature & nurture aren't competing accounts that we must choose between. Each individual person is the outcome of the interweaving of genetics, environmental factors & random events, cascading through development.

American TV shows and their British original: 1. Sanford and Son/Steptoe and Son 2. The Office/The Office 3. CHiPs/CRiSps 4. Friends/It's a Wankers World 5. McMillan & Wife/Doctor Who 6. Hogan's Heroes/Ogan's Eroes

David Botstein was one of the giants of genetics and genomics, and my mentor, colleague and friend for more than 40 years. I’m sad that he is gone, but his larger-than-life persona comes through here. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/s...

OMB has posted the full-year apportionments for NIH. openomb.org/file/11511545 I believe this means that NIH now has the spending authority to fund grants! There may be nuances and I will be tracking these as best I can.

Things I forget I've just eaten, then later think the symptoms are the sign of a fatal disease: 1. Beets 2. Cassoulet 3. Protein bar 4. Granola bar w/protein 5. Egg Nog Gelato 6. High Fiber Crunch, Ooops! All Pruneberries!

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.

WFMU's 2026 Fundraising Marathon continues through Sunday! Keep amazing, listener-supported radio cranking out the tunes for another year by pledging here: pledge.wfmu.org/donate. (Shown: the new 2026 WFMU bumper sticker, yours for a pledge of $20 or more.)

Some molecular machines, like ribosomes, can persist for long periods of time in cells. Could molecular aging of ribosomes shape how proteins are made? In our new preprint we track ribosomes as they age in cells and uncover unexpected effects on translation (1/10) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The 2026 Visual System Development GRC and GRS are fast approaching. Jeremy Kay, Kristen Kwan, Robert Johnston, and I have built an exciting program that we hope you will enjoy. Looking forward to seeing everyone at the meeting this summer in beautiful Maine. Register and RT!

This is the first time in 12 or 13 years I haven't gone to Jersey for the WFMU marathon and performed a show too. End of an era. But I'll still be live on the air remote on Thursday so tune in.

Like to see a version of Dracula where when they're signing the papers for the castle, Dracula has his own buyer's agent, and there's also someone there from the title company who did the title search. Maybe that's who the three vampire women in the original Bram Stoker book are.

Happy 38th birthday to the #LTEE! #BOTD in 1988. Keep on evolving! #science #evolution #microbiology

Love when Nosferatu says, "We are entering a golden age of vampirism and I have have vampired better then anyone ever before...these nasty people with stakes...they have stakes. They call them stakes (sucks air between teeth). It's a beautiful thing though how I suck the blood. Completely undead."

Instead of SOTU, I'm watching Nosferatu (2024) because it has some of the same letters and roughly same vibe.

It's so weird that the OJ trial was a real life event on TV, but it still had spin offs. The Kardashians are The Jeffersons of the OJ trial.

A week ago I found out that the grant I was confident would fund our spring mural will not, bc we're 2 blocks too deep into Kensington. This STINKS. This project rocks bc it's community driven, biodiversity-focused (& more! read on!) We're raising money to make it happen givebutter.com/KenzoMural

Did you know @zebrafishhusbandry.bsky.social has a guide to zebrafish husbandry basics in 22 languages including Arabic, Cambodian, Chinese, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Serbian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu & Japanese 1/2 🧪

Does anyone have any recommendations for a low cost amplifier for extracellular recordings that would be good for a teaching lab? We have been using the Grass Instruments P55 ones but they no longer appear to exist and we are running out of working ones. Sharing of this message would be appreciated.

Save the date! The organizers of the Midwest Zebrafish Meeting would like to personally invite you to attend their next gathering, which will be held June 24–26, 2026, at the Van Andel Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Check out this thread for more details about the conference!👇 #zebrafish 🧪

New preprint out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... One of the most salient lessons I learned in all my adventures with screening and protein engineering is the importance of context. The context in which you test a gene or protein determines what function it has.

Since it has been twenty years since I shot film, I forgot the wonderful Schrödinger's film roll feeling of having your photos be both genius and garbage at the same time while they remain undeveloped.

Our paper on TCBE-Umax is out in @natbiomedeng.nature.com! We developed these high-efficiency cytosine base editors for zebrafish, enabling rapid functional testing of disease variants. This work is led by a talented scientist, Wei Qin. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

At some point I will do Quatermass and the Pit as a radio play and replace the Quatermass character with Lt. Columbo. Tomorrow is too soon since I'm out of fresh veggies so can't dissect any martians.

A new study by Barbara Murdoch and colleagues reveals diverse bacterial communities inside scorpion venom secretions, with differences due to geography and between the two species studied, Paruoctonus becki and Anuroctonus phaiodactylus. plos.io/4tfd7zk