As I always do with boycotts, I urge: be tough with corporations, gentle with individual buyers. For some people, Black Friday sales are the way they get their kids jackets that fit, shoes that hold up to the weather. Yelling at them doesn’t help the cause.

Sometimes, #endometriosis pain is really rough despite the heated blankets, hot water bottles, and pain meds that I have to try and alleviate things 🫠 I was on 200 mg of Orilissa twice daily and it was LIFE CHANGING to be pain free! ✨ But after a year, my insurance will no longer cover things 🥲 😭

One of the themes of our new police state is the sheer lack of professionalism. They can't do the basics, and when challenged, double down. A dysfunctional organizational culture deeply suspicious of the society they are tasked with controlling. bsky.app/profile/radl...

The three-year anniversary of my PhD defense is steadily approaching ✨ Even though I'm far removed now, I still continue to hear concerning accounts about the lab environment where I did my graduate work... I'm so relieved newer students are openly discussing lab culture fit and mental health! 💖

🧪

seems bad

Hey Bluesky 🦋✨ It’s been a while! 👋🏽 As a small update, a preprint I’m on was posted to bioRxiv! 📑 It was great to work with Ke on analyzing the Butterfly scRNA-seq data, and teach him bioinformatics over multiple boba runs! 🧬 💻 🧪 Seurat has also changed SO, SO MUCH since I last used it ~2020 🫣

"the benefits of NIH research in general are wide and diffuse. A very large number of advances—roughly one in two during the 21st century—are linked to NIH grants that are cut in our counterfactual scenario."

I got a liver biopsy yesterday and, wow, I didn’t expect that to hurt as much as it did … Thank goodness I have sick days so I can rest! 🥲 They also weren’t able to give me as much sedative because my blood pressure runs pretty low to begin with so I felt everything 😭

"This is our generation. This is our time. Will our leaders come together [to address this]? Because what we've seen is impunity, the violation of the international rules-based order" Impunity prevails when 'good' governments do nothing. [And Maria Ressa actually deserved her Nobel Peace Prize]

Again, this is *verbatim* the exact messaging Rodrigo Duterte used in order to run his deadly drug war in the Philippines en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp...

Americans, I am once again begging you to consider that sometimes people aren't in America and may be discussing their own bad governments on the niche microblogging website. Please. I am begging.

Your periodic reminder that mRNA vaccines are a scientific and public health game-changer. Those that have been approved have passed stringent efficacy and safety checks. They protect you and your child against potentially fatal diseases. You may, however, get a sore arm.

I work with a lot of researchers — including many researchers who study AI — and this is consistent with my experience. The more one knows, the less likely one is to use it.

I refuse to give em dashes to the AI

I attended a @anvilproject.org workshop 🧬 💻 🧪 yesterday and we were outrageously Zoom bombed 💣 💥 🫣 Luckily, the workshop runners handled things well, but … it goes to show that passwords in Zoom meetings are still important for webinars because we can’t trust people 🙃 🫠

New study on #BlueSky for #SciComm. “Bluesky posts demonstrate substantially higher levels of interaction (likes, reposts, replies, and quotes) and greater textual originality than previously reported for X, suggesting both stronger interactive and more interpretive engagement.” 🦋🦫🌱🐋🧪 #philsci

Sharing this here on my main feed as well 👀 ! 🧪💻👾 I replied to @carlbergstrom.com’s post about the #GoogleSearch AI Responses, but somebody wrote a cool thing to make them look like “fortunes” and it was featured on @gigazine.net 💪🏽✨

My pet peeve is people who tell other people to quit their jobs while they would never quit theirs.

I went to my community’s monthly 🏠 HOA Meeting 🌳📆 last evening, and the amount of yelling at board members (then gaslighting them by saying it was polite conversation and comments 🙃) was absolutely insane 🫣 Are other communities in #SanDiego also doing special assessments and balcony projects? 🥲

Anthropic says a hacker used its Claude chatbot "to an unprecedented degree": Claude identified vulnerable companies, wrote infostealer malware, analyzed stolen files for extortion purposes, calculated extortion amounts, and wrote extortion messages. www.nbcnews.com/tech/securit...

For the 🦅 MAKE ❤️ AMERICA 🤍 GREAT 💙AGAIN 🇺🇸 campaign, can we PLEASE bring back the trains and public transit modalities that people used to travel around the United States 🥲 (and then modernize them)

Today Taylor Swift accomplished something no AI researcher ever could (made an announcement without posting on X)

I'm currently taking the @uofcalifornia.bsky.social Cyber Security Awareness Training 👩🏽‍💻 🤖 👾 because my certification is expiring, and there was a segment about phishing emails ... 🤔 🥲 Based on this, it seems that a lot of the emails I get from other academics are potential red flags 🚩🚩🚩

Acknowledging that we are living under a fascist regime at the Federal level is essential for figuring out how to fight. And I'm sorry but burying one's head in the sand at this moment is actually allowing fascism to be further entrenched & authority more easily consolidated.

Currently working on my application for the @ucsandiego.bsky.social Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship 🧪✨ and it's my first time ever writing a Diversity Statement 😅 ... Though right now, it's reminding me of the undergraduate college application essay writing experience 🫠

Are the mRNA vaccines incredible? YES! Are the mRNA vaccines perfect? No. Have the mRNA vaccines saved millions of lives? YES! Can we make the mRNA vaccines even better? YES! Can we use mRNA vaccine technology to prevent and treat many other diseases? YES! Fund mRNA research!

Slowly getting back to working out after the pain flare and medication change 💪🏽 I did a hot yoga class 🧘🏽‍♀️🏃🏽‍♀️ and my joints feel well-lubricated now! 😤✨

Check out the replies in this thread for great non-function reads on science history! 🧪 #ScienceSky #BookSky 📚✨ Also! @ucsandiego.bsky.social has a History of Science major (linked), and I loved going through the course offerings and their syllabi as a student ✨👩🏽‍🏫👩🏽‍💻🏫

To update my #ChronicIllness #InvisibleDisability🌻 saga, I’m switching my long-term pain medication from 1,200 mg/day of gabapentin to Lyrica because of side effects that popped up after taking the med for several years 💊 🩺 🫠 Getting off gabapentin was ROUGH — I forgot how much everything hurts 😭 😩

Academia is basically a collection of people who got lucky early on and mistook it for genius. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

One of the most effective misinformation tactics antivaxxers use is to quote legitimate news sources out of context in order to convey a narrative. Studies suggest that news editors often contribute to this problem by publishing clickbait headlines that are easily weaponized by antivaxxers.

I've officially switched from The Browser Company's Arc Browser to @zen-browser.app 🎉 ✨ I'm sad to drop a wonderful application that changed how I browse the internet ... but with TBC's focus on Dia and abandonment of Arc, I'm happy to make the switch 🥲 As a plus, Zen is also on GitHub 👀

✅ Yes, Snopes is unionizing. Fact-checkers deserve transparency too!

It’s my belief that we should pool our resources to support the most vulnerable among us. That’s all.

With funding cuts and whatnot going on… I want to say that my experience on the @ucsandiego.bsky.social T32 for Genetics with @bahome.bsky.social was VERY influential in my growth as a scientist 🧪🧬💻 and keeping me in bioinformatics during the early pandemic 🦠 (versus pivoting to Big Tech ✨👩🏽‍💻)

Wow, the Guardian journalists who just yesterday published about the network of race scientists getting funding from tech CEOs just broke another story that this group has accessed UK Biobank data without authorization. This is seriously bad for the integrity of science & a massive failure by UKBB

🧪 After the workshop on 7/7, the FDA and NIH are asking for public comments on implementing novel methodologies and other strategies to reduce the use of animal testing by 7/14: www.fda.gov/news-events/...

As more communities migrate off X, I wonder if more scientists will follow or if they will keep their head in the sand 🧪 (For me, the pros of staying on X are almost nil at this point ... 🤔)

While the GRC 🧪 🧬 💻 I'm at has had absolutely engaging talks and discussions ... turns out the whole affair was exhausting enough to trigger a #FibromyalgiaFlare along with the weather changes in Portland + lack of sleep 🥲 🫠 #InvisibleIllness 🌻 Thank goodness for rescue pain medication 😭 ✨

This writeup resonated with me--especially after some of the discussions I've had with other trainees at the GRS/GRC in Human Genetics and Genomics meeting I’m at 😅 Definitely recommend other scientists to give it a read! 💻🧪🧬

Woo-Hoo! This has been a long time coming, and in much testing (beta testing) but the integrated beta more functionality - smooth genome scrolling, nice uploads, and gene + function pages.

I'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.

JBrowse now has a prototype front end to AlphaGenome, thanks to Colin Diesh. Select variants from a VCF track, send them off to AlphaGenome, view prediction tracks - all within the genome browser. Eventually we hope to do Borzoi too jbrowse.org/demos/jb2alp...

The UCSC genome browser team are a great lot and it’s nice to see them celebrated in this article. There are a couple of quotes from me in there, although Michael picked my more reserved comments - I recall gushing quite a lot more about magnificent genomics hippies www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Here’s the press release with details about the science fair:

BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.

I think this is a big part of the right and centrist crash out. He either responds once simply or he stays true to what he's said and believes and just keeps repeating that. It's very very strange to the Dem establishment. They aren't used to it.

Thank you to @calliao.bsky.social and @jsdron.bsky.social for planning a wonderful GRS for Human Genetics and Genomics this past weekend! ✨ 🧬 🧪 In addition to meeting new people from Boston and beyond, it was great to chat with such caring mentors at the Mentorship Lunch 🥹 💕