A brilliant and haunting essay. Higher education's end times looms. The California State University, the middle child of the state's public system, faces an unimaginable budget crunch. The response was to pay a lot of money for an AI partnership.

Spotify what the hell man I thought we were friends

I sometimes feel like an atheist on some sort of Christian app here

This month @genomeresearch.bsky.social publishes a special @recombconf.bsky.social issue highlighting algorithmic innovations in haplotype assembly and phasing, analysis of genomic variation and its association to phenotype, metagenomic analyses, and more. genome.cshlp.org/content/35/1...

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Pretty much ANY statistic you see cited to frighten you about vaccines comes from the VAERS database. (Including the recent evidence-free missive from Vinay Prasad). Here's why VAERS can NEVER be a proper source for population-level vaccine risk estimates. Thread [1/9]

Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen — Of Monsters and Men The Head and the Heart The National Parks Nada Surf Walk the Moon

People’s feelings: a reliably accurate measurement tool.

Every year around Thanksgiving, I see tons of grad students post heartbreaking messages on social media about how their loved ones don’t understand or support their decision to study what seems like something pointless or silly. Perhaps my American Scientist essay can help! 🧪🌎🦑 #SciComm

Gonna go against the crowd here and say that online recipe searches were already a disaster, AI is just the final nail in the coffin. Human (I assume) “content creators” have been drowning out reliable sources for years with poor quality and/or plagiarized recipes by exploiting SEO tricks.

George was right, and the trend of men dressing like little boys with baseball caps and shorts year round was part of our overall cultural decline.

Based on this rubric I can only assume Philadelphia is in flames

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

60 attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion inside Trump's Justice Department. “If we’re indicting people because the president hates them, that’s counter to the whole point of doing my job.” - Mike Romano, former prosecutor in the Public Integrity Section www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

It's gotta be frustrating for journalists scraping by and doing great work to go to NY Times dot com and read a puff piece written by a nepo baby that whitewashes a journalist who had sex with a source and has now parlayed that into a new book and a job at Vanity Fair

Can we circle back to the part where the NY Times never disclosed that they have incriminating information on Donald Trump from sent by Epstein that's been sitting on their email servers for nearly a decade?

William Gibson called it 40 years ago: “And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97 www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/s...

For every minute I sit in my car alone I get +1 stamina regen

My annual plea to leave the damn clocks alone, and why morning people are the worst: www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

I’m gonna be angry at you for wanting higher wages I’m gonna be angry at you for being on food stamps I’m gonna be angry at you for working full time and being on food stamps I’m gonna be angry at you for trying to get me to connect the dots to the actual problem

The instinct on this site to respond to anyone who expresses surprise or uncertainty with a smug “how can you be surprised” is really unpleasant and obnoxious and says a lot about the kind of person who has gathered here

Experts warn loss of USAID endangers the fight against deadly TB In high-burden countries around the world, the loss of USAID funding has had a devastating impact on critical TB intervention and treatment efforts. www.cidrap.umn.edu/t...

By combining the information storage capabilities of DNA with a design inspired by a cassette tape, researchers have created a storage medium that can hold 36 petabytes of data

One noteworthy fact about local control of land use in Los Angeles is that it's why City Councilmembers keep going to prison. As it turns out, land use rules that are so complex that you need special permission from the Councilmember to build ~anything create irresistible incentives for corruption!

✨bookish checkpoint✨💙📚 ✧ last book read: TILT by Emma Pattee ✧ current read: MICKEY7 by Edward Ashton ✧ last book added to the tbr: LAST RITUALS by Yrsa Sigurdardottir ✧ next anticipated read: EVERYTHING IS TUBERCULOSIS by John Green

For decades, the only way to make custom DNA in bulk has been phosphoramidite synthesis, a chemical process that can construct nucleic acids up to 350 nucleotides or so in length. Advances in chemical & enzymatic methods has more than doubled that. 🧪 By @carolineseydel.bsky.social @nature.com

This is going to be a hard read for many, but it's incredibly important to sit with these truths. We can't keep going the way we're going. "The only way science can succeed for generations is to win over the hearts and minds of the entire electorate, not just liberals." undark.org/2025/06/19/o...

In my latest for Nature Biotechnology I look into how spatial transcriptomics is advancing clinical goals: #biotech #RNA #cancer #inflammation #genomics #transcriptomics #proteomics #AI www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tough days ahead, yes, but the jury is still out on which side it will be tough for "About a half-dozen states have set their sights on mRNA-related legislation since the beginning of the year. Some ... seek to ban mRNA entirely or prohibit its use in children." www.pharmavoice.com/news/vaccine...

✨bookish checkpoint✨💙📚 ✧ last book read: ALL FOURS by Miranda July ✧ current read: THE GHOST MAP by Steven Johnson ✧ last book added to the tbr: THE MEMORY COLLECTORS by Dete Meserve ✧ next anticipated read: FREE: MY SEARCH FOR MEANING by Amanda Knox

Made a cocktail for my wife and she put it in the freezer, inadvertently creating a new superorganism please hel—*glurk*

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs. (“Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, or LOTR)

5/

My latest for GEN explores five groundbreaking cancer vaccine strategies currently in development. Exciting times, truly #cancer #vaccines #scancell #evaxion #geneos #precision #elicio www.genengnews.com/topics/cance...

Exciting times for protein science! 🧪

saw this piece being shared around on the bird site and sharing it here cuz it's so good genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

sometimes I feel like a dinosaur, cause no one looks anything up anymore 🦕

Obvi we’re all in this together with this admin, but industry is not selling one’s soul, not even close. They’re our friends and colleagues and move the ball forward to getting science to impact peoples’ lives.

In this month's Technology Feature, @carolineseydel.bsky.social explores how researchers are using label-free microscopy techniques to study complex biological systems, from living creatures to peptides. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Whenever a scientist posts about some awful new development in the federal funding circus, inevitably somebody pops up in the replies with some version of “just move to Canada! Everything is great here!” Please … stop. What is the purpose of doing this? We can’t all “just move to Canada” ffs

“The party’s severe image, identification, governance, and geographic weaknesses cannot be remedied by mounting the (rhetorical) barricades against Trump and waiting for his administration to self-destruct.” open.substack.com/pub/theliber...

The moment to stop this future is *now*. Once those seeds are gone, they're gone. And once control of them consolidates under private entities, democratic oversight vanishes. This is what collapse looks like in the age of biotech: not a bang, but a sequence of quietly severed root systems.

People like to talk about Crispr genetic engineering, but we simply do not understand anywhere near enough biology to save us when a new crop disease appears. No matter what the tech bros say, we can't engineer our way out of the problems we face and will face in the future.

✨bookish checkpoint✨💙📚 ✧ last book read: CHALLENGER by Adam Higginbotham ✧ current read: MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS by Gerald Durrell ✧ last book added to the tbr: ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD by Russell Shorto ✧ next anticipated read: LAST BUS TO WISDOM by Ivan Doig

Not really surprised, I guess, just disappointed once again. open.substack.com/pub/andrewsu...

Just like last time, people are going to find that everything from the JFK investigation that was still sealed is mundane, and was sealed because it has personal, protected information in it, or somebody in the Kennedy family was embarrassed about it. -OS

this is directly related to my most important journalism (which i struggle mightily to follow myself) which is: questions that might make you aopear dumb to the interviewee are usually some of the best questions