Today is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women. On this day, we honour those killed and injured during the École Polytechnique tragedy, and all women who experience violence. It is also a day to commit to ending gender-based violence.

“Every year, when I see 14 beams of light projected into the sky above Mount Royal, I have to catch my breath. “36 years ago, 14 young women were murdered in one of the most violent examples of misogynistic terrorism Canada has ever known.” An editorial by @mtltoula.bsky.social. #December6

This nice summary by @michiwagner4.bsky.social makes it easy to fit my post in a few characters. Amplicon sequencing is still an affordable and quick way to get good insights into who lives in your samples. Our new primers make sure your vision is 20/20. Try em, and contact me if you have questions!

Let me excerpt the concluding paragraph:

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

Horrific details emerging from El Fasher, Sudan: pools of blood so large they’re visible by satellite, people being killed systematically. Last week, MSF teams assessed 165 children under 5 fleeing the area and found 75% were acutely malnourished. An accelerating genocide before our eyes.

#MakeItFair #FairnessForCAS

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Wow, our AEM paper on a new methane-oxidizing bacterium just got a Commentary! 🎉 Congrats Kambara-san—so happy to see the work getting recognized! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

I’m excited to share our effort to obtain one of the first estimates of the net rate, in physical time, of lateral gene transfer (LGT) – nature’s own genetic engineering - across a complex, global microbiome: doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Not just classes are cancelled. DFA members have been locked out by the admin since August 20th: we can't sign students in from waitlists, can't advise them, can't share syllabi, can't help them with scholarship applications, etc. etc. #KeepDalStrong www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Wow. Check this out. Politicians actually trying to solve problems can achieve a lot! www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solu...

“Suffering is not a death sentence; it can be confronted, it can be overcome. And we can be creative in how we address the human condition.” —Ofosu Jones-Quartey

I am increasingly frustrated, even angry, about the hypocrisy—tempted to say disinformation—from @dalhousie.bsky.social’s administration. How can you say “the university’s priority is working with the DFA to reach a resolution” when they have not even tried to return to the table? #KeepDalStrong

Chris Algar, Assoc Prof, Oceanography @dalhousieu.bsky.social Lessons in solidarity from the picket lines. This isn’t just a fight to #KeepDalStrong; it’s a fight against employer greed. @ansut.bsky.social @caut.bsky.social

Sequestration by the biological carbon pump: Do we really know what we are talking about? aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #jcampubs 🌊

Our latest, and the second paper led by Jordan Coelho this year. Want to remove bacteria from POM for single-cell microbiology/culturing/'omics applications? We've got some data: Detergent-based separation of microbes from marine particles www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs 🌊

Out in @natbiotech.nature.com: Metagenome taxonomy profilers usually ignore unknown species. SingleM is an accurate profiler which doesn't, even detecting phyla with no MAGs. Profiles of 700,000 metagenomes at sandpiper.qut.edu.au. A 🧵

Please Re-Post. Our global GRUMP microbial ocean database is out in Scientific Data! Unfractionated, single universal PCR, with Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryotes all on the same scale with the same denominator. Pole to pole, depths to 6000m. Lots of metadata. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So excited to announce the GRUMP paper is published! This global dataset provides relative abundances for plankton spanning Archaea to Zooplankton from unfractionated (>0.2µm) water samples using 3-domain universal primers that amplify 16S and 18S in one PCR reaction. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Institutions must support transgender and gender nonconforming and other marginalized scientists by securing their safety and privacy; their access to legal aid and health care; and their opportunities in education, employment, and society," argues a new #LetterToScience. scim.ag/4kQCMtr

A healthy diet outperforms fecal transplants in restoring and protecting the gut microbiome, according to new research from the Simons Foundation’s Joy Bergelson and collaborators: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/05/13/t... #science

NSF: "Biology, engineering, and education will all be slashed by over 70 percent..." "The fleet of research ships [UNOLS] will essentially become someone else's problem" Contact your representatives, even in blue states, as these cuts can still be stopped! arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Very grateful to #MarcGarneau for his kindness and support when we fought to protect environmental laws attacked by Harper administration. We have lost a truly great Canadian.. and far too soon. #RIP

I am honored to have been named a 2025 Howes Scholar by the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship committee! www.krellinst.org/csgf/about-d...

So happy to see this paper finally out! A fun project with collaborators Emily Zakem, @jlw-ecoevo.bsky.social and Yubin Raut!

Our newest on using genomic and phylogenetic information to predict microbial maximum growth rates www.nature.com/articles/s41... with @liangxu.bsky.social

Very cool study - motility in marine bacteria represents a risk-reward trade off under carbon starvation: some keep swimming at the expense of biomass while others stop swimming #MicroEco - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very excited to present the Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database (GBR-MGD), a comprehensive DB of 1000s of high-quality prokaryote, virus, plasmid, and chromosome-level eukaryote MAGs using Nanopore long reads. Subthreads incoming. Please share widely. 🙂 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Microenvironments on individual sand grains enhance #nitrogen loss in coastal sediments #denitrification #oxygen www.nature.com/articles/s41...

When you look at the list of institutions they want to defund: libraries, museums, the Smithsonian, public schools, PBS, NPR, archives, you can clearly see that the real threat to an authoritarian regime is an informed and educated public

Fabulous: An open letter to graduate students and other procrastinators: it’s time to write www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

A wildlife photographer in Canada captured a symbolic confrontation between a goose and an eagle... defiance against bullying of all sorts is critical even when (perhaps especially when) they display their big sharp claws to try and intimidate you.

Your reminder that LibreOffice is free - and free of this BS.

To honour Nancy F. Millis for her introduction to applied microbiology and promotion of wastewater microbiology in Australia, DSMZ researcher named the strain Streptomyces millisiae (DSM 44918) after her. #herstory #HonoringWomenInSTEM #WomenInScience #fermentation #microbiology

S. Hariraj, 8 years, assembles his foldscope. "The Foldscope taught me that the world we see around us can be very different than what we assume," he says. "It's like having a third eye." Photo by Viraj Nayer for NPR. Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India.

Posting your preprint on bluesky