When marking a student assignment today, I mixed metaphors so badly that I reminded myself of Archie Bunker. I wrote "In this case, you left two low-hanging fruit on the table".

Has anyone else noticed recent bugs with MyNCBI filters? There seems to be some pretty bad unexpected behaviour.

I have finally, after many months, finished the complete Diary of Samuel Pepys. Monumental. What a singular piece of work. It's impossible to compare against anything else.

One of the dumbest self-owns of Google for researchers is this: paste a research paper title into the google search bar. The paper will be the top hit, and it will indicate the google scholar citation count, but will not provide a google scholar link to follow the citations.

Tom Lehrer's mastery of meter and rhyme was so good that he wrote an entire song shitting on Bob Dylan in 1965.

As an undergraduate who loved physical chemistry and was just starting biology, I thought the Meselson-Stahl experiment was the coolest thing ever. It was so simple in its application of physical theory and experiment to prove a biological truth that it was perfect. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/s...

Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades trying to strong arm the United States into an unprovoked war against Iran and finally found a president stupid enough to do it for him. Unbelievable.

How can one efficiently simulate phylodynamics for populations with billions of individuals, as is typical in many applications, e.g., viral evolution and cancer genomics? In this work with M. Celentano, @wsdewitt.github.io , & S. Prillo, we provide a solution. doi.org/10.1073/pnas... 1/n

What Vinay Prasad is proposing is scientific misconduct that would violate legally-mandated institutional review board review in the United States. He has never conducted a randomized control trial. He is not a scientist. He is a fraud. They are mandating this to block approval, not encourage study

Today I'm taking the lab for a social outing on a boat, and have worked hard to fit in. Should be seamless.

From The Archives: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President theonion.com/you-peo...

Dr. Amanda Thomas appointed inaugural Louise H. Kellogg Endowed Chair in Earth and Planetary Sciences at @ucdavis.bsky.social eps.ucdavis.edu/news/welcomi...

Wow, I know Pope Francis had his enemies, but ... www.reddit.com/r/typography...

yeah man, please make my 85 year old great aunt prove her citizenship to vote in rural georgia, this definitely isn’t reminiscent of anything in the american past

Very interesting and appealing paper for many reasons. So far my only critique is the use of paperpile for links to references.

Our latest work on the bacterial Tol-Pal complex now published! Kudos & congrats to the brilliant @weeboont.bsky.social! We can (finally) confidently assign the true function of Tol-Pal in maintaining OM lipid homeostasis, independent of cell division! 👇 1/7 #microsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Who is fact-checking Trump's fake trade numbers country by country? #Singapore doesn't impose a tariff on US imports and has *never* run a trade surplus with the US, but Trump imposed a 10% tariff based on a fabricated 10% tariff on US exports to Singapore.

Congratulations, Wisconsin!

Disgusting beyond words..

Singapore, an island nation of < 6 million people, has sent an 80 person team from its civil defense, while the US has sent nothing.

Registration now open for HCV-Flavi 2025!

Happy Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day for all who celebrate youtu.be/JeaBNAXfHfQ?...

Few noted it, but the same organization, White Coat Waste, is behind the list of grants on "transgender" animals that were recently cancelled. ▫️5/6 www.science.org/content/arti...

All concordant read pairs are alike; each discordant read pair is discordant in its own way.

A pithier name for the second world described here is "reality."

I miss DEI

Very grateful to our @scripps.edu President/CEO Pete Schultz, for this OpEd in @sandiegouniontribune.com on the key importance of research institutions in U.S. biomedical science and how federal support is critical to fuel new discoveries and medicines. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/02/25/o...

Ain’t that some shit

Oh LazyWeb of #sciscky, I invoke thee: is scite worth it?

My instinct is to make the case that USAID is extremely good, actually. But I feel like it’s more important to say, “What is happening is antagonistic to the foundational document of the nation.”

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

The fact that Deepseek R1 was released three days /before/ Stargate means these guys stood in front of Trump and said they needed half a trillion dollars while they knew R1 was open source and trained for $5M. Beautiful.

TBH, a pretty accurate depiction of many attempts at technology-enhanced learning youtu.be/ua4rYsMdC4U?...

How hung over is Pete Hegseth this morning after his presumed celebration bender?

TRT has important uses, but the way Joe Rogan and RFK Jr use and talk about TRT for themselves is different. They seem to use TRT as a form of gender affirming hormone therapy (in the same way that they oppose the gender affirming care for others).

R.I.P. to a real one. What a creative force David Lynch was.

I see that Hank has drawn parallels between vincristine and fenbendazole. While they both interfere with microtubule formation, they are *very* different drugs, and every difference between them makes vincristine a broadly useful chemo drug and fenbendazole not.

Hank, you've overstated the situation considerably. The clinical research interest in either ivermectin or fenbendazole as cancer therapy is, to put it generously, very narrow. Not exactly nonexistent, but narrow. And the reasons for it are evidence-based. Details below 1/

Reviews have come in for the "Trump Guitars", and not surprisingly, everyone who bought one was was brutally ripped off. Made of 100% griftwood!

today was a bit like Priam receiving Achilles to claim Hector’s dead body, after Achilles had desecrated it beyond all redemption

The fact that people like Latham, Ridley, Chan, Ebright and their faceless lackeys have used their conspiracsims of COVID origin to cast accuations against those who fought Ebola and paid the ultimate price, and re-open disproven HIV origin myths for clicks, should tell anyone all they need to know

To be clear, these accusations are directed against not just myself and U.S. colleagues, but, more sickeningly, against our Sierra Leonean friends and colleagues. Individuals who worked day and night trying to stop this outbreak, giving everything they had, saving the lives of many patients. 1/4

🧪 While LLMs have done well in medical skill comparisons with multiple choice questions, a new study finds GPT-4 scored lower than human doctors in free-text assessments of primary care cases, highlighting its limitations in complex clinical reasoning. 🩺🖥️ #MLSky

This feels like a discussion of vaccines: "All those shots, and nobody even gets those diseases anymore."

Another virus outbreak (Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome Virus -SFTSV) associated with fur farming. It needs to stop. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I wish I had had a chance to meet him. I was aware of, and long admired, his work as a monk and a teacher. But I first heard of him as one half of The Fiction Brothers with Howie Tarnower, a project in which they enlisted many other friends.

I was cleaning up my work calendar today and cancelled a weekly meeting with a grad student that fell on Christmas Day. This student has the right attitude.

This hot-off-press paper reveals how eukaryotic eIF4F recognizes & activates messenger RNA by stochastically sampling along its length & utilizing allosteric communication between its subunits. We get a revised model for mRNA activation & translation initiation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lots of new mammalian viruses from Yunnan. Not bats. academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-...