Extremely creative work from the Beerenwinkel group, as always

One of the first internet chats I had was with someone who’d worked on the construction crew on the set of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, telling me about the bike seats they put on the crosses to make them comfortable for the performers

Lineage tracking using methylation states from longitudinal bulk sampling. Sounds 🆒 and given recent work by @trevorgraham.bsky.social and colleagues, looks real. Wondering about other applications like 🦠🧫 👉🏻News and views: www.nature.com/articles/d41... 👉🏻Paper www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Y2K

Magnetotactic bacteria swim along geomagnetic field lines to navigate sediments. Using microfluidics and simulations, this study shows their motility is optimised, revealing how evolution fine-tunes life for challenging environments.

I still think the best idea for progressive donors is to just revive every alt-weekly in the country and staff them with 10 reporters each.

What do you call a flightless bird that thinks it’s got superuser privileges, but is actually just going extinct in a chroot jail? A pseudo sudo dodo

The US far right is gunning for the brilliant and courageous academic @esqueer.net, a woman of colour, for daring to highlight their plan to eradicate trans people. Please show her she has your support, as she has mine.

The Heritage Foundation is going after me this morning calling me a terrorist because I am accurately stating what they are intending to do. Michael Knowles at CPAC explicitly called for the "eradication of transgenderism." I'll continue to speak the truth of what is being done to my community.

Say what you like about Disney, their ACIP coverage has been great

We just released v1.1.0 of our #eDNA amplicon nextflow pipeline! We replaced the way LCAs are calculated - we now rely on Fishbase taxonomy first, then WoRMS and NCBI - and have added FAIRe-standard-aligned output files github.com/MinderooFoun...

I believe this to my core. They're using trans people as a test case to dismantle individual rights in the US.

Robert Redford (RIP) survived a childhood bout of polio though bedridden for 2 weeks In 2014, he directed a short film on the architecture and mission of La Jolla's Salk Institute—honoring founder Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine that has saved countless lives, and architect Louis Kahn

A smart Judith Butler response to @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social www.thenation.com/article/soci...

The threshold and quasi-stationary distribution for the SIS model on networks arxiv.org/abs/2509.11706

50 years ago the first 6501 and 6502 CPUs were made available at the WESCON trade show in San Francisco. However, MOS found out they weren't actually allowed to sell anything on the show floor so set up shop in a nearby hotel. Chuck Peddle led the team that created the 650x family of processors.

when I give presentations on queer natural history I usually include a slide with various journal articles highlighting the biases in scientific publishing over the years, and this one will be added! curious use of "unexpected" when it's been seen in 1000s of species (incl. other shearwaters!) 👀

Woody Guthrie’s guitar has been taken in for questioning

Please chill, "didn't you know ICE was already doing this?" peanut gallery. Chicago has had very low arrest numbers. We've been in a lull since their attempts at immigration court in June. In the last week and a half, they've kidnapped hundreds of people. That we know about.

Where do you do most of your organizing? a. The Crimson comment section. b. Lol. No. I mean, I’m in a Telegram channel with forty-seven members, twelve of whom are Kash Patel under different usernames, and another six are Pete Hegseth under the same username.

Happy to see that Spacedust is now published on Nature Methods! It combines sensitive Foldseek structure search and conserved neighborhood detection to discover functionally-associated gene clusters in prokaryotic & viral genomes. 1/6🧵

It will always be sad to me that we have to resort to making these desperate, extreme pleas about character instead of rational policy discussions, but that’s where infotainment has led us. This is certainly infotaining.

As for scientists we need to be very clear about this. 1) Being transgender is not a mental illness. There is no more support for that than for calling homosexuality a mental disorder in the DSM prior to 1973. Transgenderism appears across cultures and through history, with no associated delusions.

I’m afraid this will be another test that Newsom won’t pass, but I’d like to be proved wrong. The trans community need people to stand up for them right now. There’s a huge danger here.

This is an archived government report that found that “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.” It existed yesterday and is gone today.

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. 🔗 www.404media.co/doj-deletes-...

From the libertarian free-market Cato Institute Political murders since 1975: 83% from 9/11 87% total Jihadis 5% from Oklahoma City 11% total right-wingers (391 murders) 2% total left-wingers Right-wingers commit ~6x the political violence of left-wingers www.cato.org/blog/politic...

I'm curious if other mid career PIs have considered completely abandoning the trad publication model. We've been making gradual moves towards that end goal. But it's been difficult to completely jump ship for one main reason for me at least. 1/

hey bluesky 👋 visa hurdles mean I’m looking for opportunities outside the US. I’m a computational biologist (bacterial + phage genomics, postdoc in Koonin’s group @ NIH). I am interested in teaming up on funding apps. reach out if this resonates!

Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change. Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned

I would love to hear from psychologists, sociologists, media experts, other experts. In plain English please, maybe even using only the most common 1k words like @xkcd.com’s Thing Explainer, if that’s possible. In one post, succinctly: What are the dynamics of this political weaponization of anger?

Yes I think it’s really about how reassuring it feels to them to be justifiably angry, a wrath that can be summoned at will, the righteous wrath of a grieving family man in the path of which no living evildoer can prevail, a wrath that feels pretty comfortable and quickly wins arguments

The exaggerated rage and threats from the right make a kind sense as displacement: they do, after all, have plenty to grieve in the loss of their up & coming star, and we know they can’t process any emotions except as anger. But I also suspect they’re relieved that the topic is no longer Epstein.

Battle doomscrolling by posting 5 small (or big) pleasures in life: 5. Correctly making a breakfast burrito 4. Explaining Bayes’ Rule w/out audience falling asleep 3. A 1/4” TRS audio jack slides into its socket. Chonk! 2. Someone uses your work for good 1. You play a song to a child and they dig it

This is false. For example, the libertarian @cato.org breaks down the numbers, showing about 6 deaths from right-wing politically motivated attackers for every 1 from left-wing attackers. Moreover, the claim that shooters represent anyone other than an unhinged fraction of society is the deeper lie.

This has been coming from the beginning. All major democracy-supporting NGOs and foundations have their legal complaints already drafted. And in time, perhaps not even much time, they will win their cases. What is needed most in the meantime is courage. Keep saying what you think, doing what you do.

It may be distasteful but it is not illegal to mock someone's death and it should not warrant arrest, ever. The 1st Amendment exists specifically to protect disfavored speech and what is happening now is one of the greatest threats to free speech in the United States.

Elon Musk and several of the largest accounts on Twitter are doing everything they possibly can in this moment to focus the violent retribution people are braying for right now towards trans people. It is IMPERATIVE to be loud ally right now and defend the trans community with our whole chest.

With the Kirk assassination becoming clearer, we need to talk about the radicalized, Right Wing subculture that carries out terrorism and mass shootings. They’re an essential part of MAGA and so people really don’t want to see what is undeniable. jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-threat...

AI systems don't have to be controlled by fascist bootlickers. They don't have to be controlled by for-profit tech companies! Check out our report on the possibility and necessity of an #AICommons: oneproject.org/ai-commons/

it’s time for universities to return to their core mission (an escalating series of pranks played by a trouble-making fraternity on the straight-edge dean who will stop at nothing to shut them down)

Surely you can make any band into a singularity by adding a Kurzweil synth

The Wall Street Journal. The Guardian. All the other outlets who failed to confirm their reporting. I want to see fewer cowardly, shrugging "editor's notes" on these stories and more statements of "wow, we really failed in our reporting on a grave matter, and here's how we're going to do better."

Very illuminating essay, bracing read:

My quote of the day What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents. Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.

None of the young male mass shooters and now political assassins I've written about in recent years had stayed in higher education and pursued a bachelor's degree. Crazy enough, it's almost like college is a positive socializing force, not a radicalizing one

that wsj story now feels like a culmination of anti-trans panic that should prompt a reckoning in the mainstream media. was totally bunk, false, peddled. it’s the kind of thing that has led to reconciliation before, and it should now. news editors should be looking at themselves in the mirror

The AAUP staunchly oppose “campus carry” laws such as those permitted at Utah’s public university & college campuses. The presence of weapons on campus violates fundamental principles of academic freedom & inhibits the free exchange of ideas & critical inquiry.

Horrors of Trump detention centre: Lisburn man tells his story after arrest for 'looking like a Mexican' Lee Stinton was lifted by US immigration police on an American street — in an incident he compared to a kidnapping. Here, he tells us his story.