I saw chaos inside and outside of the ICE detention center Delaney Hall today. Detainees protesting the lack of due process, the disgusting food and poor treatment while their families and advocates stood outside calling for help. 1/4

The legendary jazz saxophonist, who revolutionized the art of improvisation, died Monday at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. n.pr/3Q2hMWr

#RIP Sonny Rollins 📷 Frank Stewart, 2017 “Sonny Rollins’s sound is as uncapturable as it is memorable, so you’re left with nothing to do except to keep on listening.” - Giovanni Russonello www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BBc...

i visited DSHB @dshb-antibodies.bsky.social 2 years ago, incredible how such a critical community scientific resource is run so efficiently, economically and humbly. they maintain 1000s of mAbs at cost, and are fully self-supported from just a couple lab rooms!

I keep thinking I’m done being shocked. It is abundantly clear there is a vendetta against anything that gives joy or laughter and helps people. I cannot believe the brilliant researchers who have been targeted and criminalized. Easy to demolish, hard to rebuild. www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

spine-chilling triple combo of Malik Work's sonorous oration + raw physicality of Krump dance by Brian Henry's HallowDreamz + master musicians on djembe, keys, kora and drums. a mind-expanding, fluid, hour+ improvised work at the Pinkster Festival.

a side note, the out-of-focus fellow on the left of the post is drummer Swiss Chris, who just finished an incredible set as part of the Pinkster Festival! 🥁 sabian.com/artist/swiss...

Do NOT MOVE POST (bat inside) 🦇

We all literally, LITERALLY just watched NASA fly four absolute all-stars the farthest any human has ever been from Earth and back flawlessly, and yet we're still continuously forced to pretend Musk's bullshit catastrophe factory is the future of human space exploration

i can confirm that we found even more bizarre, stretched out, miRNA hairpins since our first study, and it's leading us into crazy town biogenesis principles for small RNAs! the updated MirMachine now accelerates this direction. 🧬

“Units of the NIH are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States.” Grantees also told to remove papers with foreign authors from progress reports.

Earlier this week I posted an example of a fake western blot provided by ThermoFisher to demonstrate the validity of a p53 antibody. I considered it an amusing curiosity. In fact Thermo Fisher Scientific has systematically manipulated antibody validation data!

1. London Underground station flooding has reportedly been reduced by around 90% thanks to a group of engineers: beavers. After conservationists reintroduced a family of beavers into a nearby city park, the animals built dams and restored wetlands that now absorb and slow floodwater naturally.

In this story, they highlight two researchers who scored in the 3rd percentile well over a year ago and were not funded. Is this the environment that’s supposed to “encourage innovation”? How many past papers and discoveries would we have missed under these conditions?

my better half organizes the Pinkster Festival, the oldest African-American holiday. It remembers a terrible history of enslavement, while celebrating Black culture in spoken word, music, dance, crafts, food. join Sat May 26! tickets.hudsonvalley.org/pinkster-2026 hudsonvalley.org/article/what...

This Weds May 20th, attend a free webinar about hosting zine programming in your library! "Cut, Paste, Create: Designing Memorable Zine Workshops" will include tips for running the most exciting, accessible, & engaging zine programs possible. washstatelib.libcal.com/event/16793329 📚 #zines

NIAID employees did not receive any communication about these leadership changes until this afternoon, when the institute sent out an unsigned email.

New fact check of Director Bhattacharya, this time regarding multi-year funding... 27unihted.substack.com/p/fact-check... 1/2

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Ballistic Tongues!👅👅👅

FlyCROSS is a fantastic community-based program that matches mentees with experienced mentors. it's the brainchild of grad student Shefali @iamshef.bsky.social and with Laurel Raftery, already involved 100s of 🪰 scientists from across the world! excited to see how the program grows with new leaders.

this review topic is so metal. and also very @currentbiology.bsky.social! 🤘 one thing i didn't appreciate is that one advantage of "ballistic tongues" is that they operate over a broader temperature range than muscle shortening action. www.cell.com/current-biol...

free books: mostly history, some marvel 📚

my job for daughter's sleepover party is done

favored pastime on #caturday afternoons: snuggles with pickles

Very good on this as well from Jeff Mervis www.science.org/content/arti... and doesn’t cover class of faculty that Universities disappeared due to government threats. My tenured former colleague at Texas A&M fired due to getting some seeds from former lab member in China

oh, to be in a place where they celebrate RNA in public art. (Budbärare = messenger)

If it’s down this much at MIT, imagine state and ag schools in the middle of the country. Actually we don’t have to imagine. It’s unmitigated disaster for some programs.

A colleague received bad news from her NIH program officer today: my colleague’s grant got a great score, but NIH still can’t pay it, and my colleague will have to closer her lab. The call ended with the program officer (not my colleague) crying. Awful on so many levels.

Now out @natbiotech.nature.com ! Do lncRNAs commonly bind 1000s of genomic sites? Maybe they do, but the dozens of studies that report genomic binding maps of lncRNAs are deeply flawed, with probes binding suprious DNA sites rather than RNA-bound ones.

poll of the day: why do you want this job?

NEW: A serious staffing shortage — of the Trump admin's own making — is delaying the agency's ability to send billions to universities around the country, leaving labs reeling in the meantime. “I thought we were at rock bottom”, a senior NIH official said. “We are below rock bottom now.”

This is the horror cherry on top of the egregious fraud, waste, and abuse sundae. DOGE fired the people who send NIH money to research labs—which is a complicated process—so now even more labs are going to go under. All while Jay Bhattacharya goes on a podcast and says no NIH funding was cut.

at @mskcancercenter.bsky.social commencement, beyond proud our pd Seungjae Lee awarded the Tri-I Breakout Prize, endowed by Breakthrough Prize to Sawyers/Bargmann/Cantley. And, Phil Sharp given honorary degree, his work foundational to Seungjae's studies on splicing and small RNA therapeutics. 🧬

"The coiling of animal excreta has fascinated naturalists since Darwin’s detailed observations of earthworm castings, yet the underlying physics remains poorly understood." 💩 Coiling of lugworm feces reveals universal mechanics for the shape of poo www.nature.com/articles/s41...

the Nobel Prize Museum mostly displays personal items contributed by laureates, who are encouraged to sign the bottoms of chairs in the cafe. i searched for Ambros/Ruvkun, and not only found it on my 2nd chair flip, but delighted to see theirs also signed by Gurdon/Yamanaka! #miRNA #regeneration 🏆🧬

“The message, very clearly, they’re sending is, do not speak out on behalf of Chinese postdocs. If you do, you’re going to pay a penalty...It seems pretty obvious that this is an attempt by the current administration to silence people that question their activities." — Roger Innes, IU AAUP member

greta garbo is also a nice choice! i was looking at the riksbank website and thought a cool feature of swedish banknotes are the hidden "microtexts" relevant to each person's life. www.riksbank.se/en-gb/paymen...

it's pretty sweet that some countries put writers (or artists or musicians) on their currency, not just politicians.

i learned a word of swedish 🇸🇪

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

This #InternationalWomensDay I want to tell the story of Lilian Vaughan Morgan. I learned of Lilian this past year - what a badass. Lilian was a leading scientist when women weren't welcome in the lab, nor even the department. But she contributed immensely to the genetics of sex determination 1/n

Can I recommend adding academic.oup.com/icb/article-... LV Morgan never got the credit she deserved in her time in a mysoginistic lab and society, but her discovery of an attached-X provided the basis for understanding dosage compensation, and we still use her chromosomes to this day!

slovakia: near and full of surprises

DOGE’s Termination of Humanities Grants Is Ruled Unconstitutional www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/a...

This paint job—if you can call it that—is costing you $7 million, America, because Trump gave a no-bid contract to a pal This would have been Exhibit A of the sort of shit DOGE was actually *supposed* to be looking for when it was instead cutting lifesaving scientific research

Now up on our History tab of droso4public: droso4public.wordpress.com/history/

always take the moment to notice beauty in the mundane, even in the shadows cast on bathroom tiles.

another installment of my occasional series on staircases. here from the wenner-gren at stockholm university.

Excited to live in a country where you can mail someone a handgun but not an abortion pill

Again this should inspire wall-to-wall media coverage for months. The crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement is dead. Black people just lost all of their remaining political power in the South. This is a monumental moment in American history that simply isn't being treated as such.