Everyone picks a different order for the nucleotides, and of course Vince Gilligan picked GUAC. Cute enough to forgive the scene where they plate RNA viruses on growth media

In my academic career I came to view scientific conferences much the same as I did nightclubs in my 20s: Small is better. Cool subcultures inevitably get mobbed, become meat markets. It takes effort to stay underground. Don’t get lippy with the bouncers (I never tested that one in academia)

100%. Genome Informatics and ProbGen are friendly. BDS positively down to earth. BofG is the one where the prestige obsession becomes cloying

I do remember the CSHL Biology of Genomes meeting right after Watson’s racist comments were published. Several luminaries of the field organized a reception to show him their support. Such receptions are not uncommon at CSHL. A few of us pointedly turned our backs at the edge of the crowd. Not many

I havent read such a banger of an essay in a very long time. This is so well-written!

LinkedIn: Thrilled to announce my new role as First Confessor at Galadriel Inc, where I’ll be an internal evangelist for Torment Nexus 2.0 BlueSky: Humbled to share our 5-year study of a novel torment-sensing circuit bridging the parietal operculum… in mice X: TormentPedia will revolutionize truth

It's true, James Watson rode to glory on Rosalind Franklin's data; but to be fair, he also rode on Francis Crick's knowledge of Bessel functions

I don't see anything in the Cornell agreement that keeps the US government from coming back with new adverse actions in the future. The agreement is only about current actions, and it explicitly says: "The United States is not releasing Cornell ... from any other liability."

Life hack: place your carnivorous plants near your kitchen counter compost bin. (Why did I take this long to figure it out?)

I want to spell this out in case the implications aren't clear: This means all public tools/webapps of GISAID data (all the ones you've been used to seeing thru the pandemic, as far as we can tell) are prohibited. The file allowed this. Cut that - cut off all tools the public & others were using.

I’m more than a little confused by this story. It is (surely) transparently obvious that any set of equations involving complex variables can be expanded into twice as many equations involving reals. The article notes this in several places. The only counterargument is that someone once tried… 1/

Not something I’ve been attending to up close, but GISAID’s access policies always seemed a bit dubious, and their responses to Nextstrain’s questions in the PDF attached to this post are not impressive

Still waiting for a version of the internet that looks halfway as good as the 1981 TV version of Hitchhiker’s Guide

Design stable, folded proteins using only the 10 "ancient" amino acids. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Explore a haunted movie studio. Learn the fates of the tormented souls bound to it. End a 50-year curse inscribed in blood and celluloid. KINOPHOBIA, my first piece of noncommercial interactive fiction in eight years, is now available to play. brunodias.itch.io/kinophobia

We're reading Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Our son noted it was v. unlikely Charlie found a golden ticket with only 5 in world. I explained that there were many kids who didnt find a ticket & didnt have books written about them, so really it was about conditional prob. He groaned & went to sleep

“Bonferonni correction”, an invaluable method in #statistics, refers to the act of repeatedly correcting misspellings of the word Bonferroni at multiple places in a draft manuscript. #science #academia

OpenFold3-preview (OF3p) is out: a sneak peek of our AF3-based structure prediction model. Our aim for OF3 is full AF3-parity for every modality. We now believe we have a clear path towards this goal and are releasing OF3p to enable building in the OF3 ecosystem. More👇

Thank you for giving a name to this strategy. “Stake-driving” has fallen out of use since Van Helsing sold out and “criminal” was getting cliché

Yes. 25 years on, I teach differently: I read to them, we read silently together, we have weekly experiments week of setting different situations to read (with/out food, company, music; in/outdoors; varying light; &c) & discuss them. It's made ALL the difference to foreground reading as a process.

Bricked Smartbeds are the Golgafrincham B Ark

Gave an on-paper midterm today, my first in… decades? Ever? It will be ironic if the true water cost of chatbots is all the paper that gets printed because internet use is now verboten in exams

In the event of an encounter with immigration agents in the East Bay, make sure you and your family know your rights. (1/2)

With #AltText

End-to-end protein design in the browser through evedesign. Generate and interactively explore designs in 2D/3D and export them as codon-optimized DNA. The underlying open source framework (released soon) is build to easily add new methods, more on that soon. 🌐 evedesign.bio

In Berkeley High School they tried “Yondr pouches” - little lockable electromagnetically-shielded bags that kids had to stash their phones in during class. Teens just vandalized the pouches

I’ve been avidly consuming* “I, Claudius” wherein young Claudius’ imperial destiny is revealed by an eagle dropping a wolf cub into his arms; later, Herod’s doom is foretold by an owl. All I can say is our augury game has gotten WEAK *also @hodgman.bsky.social’s excellent companion “I, Podius”

A fun little side project I've been working on with @stepadenisov.bsky.social , Mato Lagator, and Andreas Wagner: "Strong promoters are mutationally robust". Briefly... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

You’re not even a poet so it feels weird saying this to you, but my plum apology was totally off the record

Canvas, the course management platform used by my university (and many others), has been down all day due to the AWS outage. It has prompted some good discussions about how much critical infrastructure is now outsourced to a few companies.

People are dunking on this (sorry) but in all seriousness, speak to someone who’s had colon cancer before you scoff at the idea

All-atom protein design via SE(3) flow matching with ProteinZen https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.18.683228v1

Podcast with me and @turiking.bsky.social for the @milnerevolution.bsky.social series, on plasmid evolution over the last 100 years, talking about our ( @cazares-adr.bsky.social , Nick Thomson, @sarah1alexander.bsky.social & co) recent paper www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... youtu.be/Mzr3TD4ijs0?...

tfw you remember you’re Judy, or the bug-impregnated mother of the (deceased) anti-Judy, or the void, or a pack of lions, or something

DiffEM presents a novel method using Expectation-Maximization to train diffusion models on corrupted data, enhancing image reconstruction and posterior sampling. This method surpasses others, effectively tackling real-world issues where clean data is often lacking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12691

Getting excited for #ASHG25. The must see talk is tomorrow at 1:30 by Qiuhui (Iris) Li presenting the first large-scale integration of long-read genome sequencing with electronic health record data across >1000 All of Us participants meetings.ashg.org/event/ASHG25...

Full-sized candy bars are actually the healthier option; by which I mean, you are statistically less likely to guzzle them down post-Halloween as if they were loose peanuts or raisins, as is known to be the case with surplus “fun-size” bars

I've noticed the opposing team's fans only cheer when the opponents score on us. To win those fans over, I recommend we score on ourselves repeatedly; that will surely make them so happy they'll start supporting us. And I'm sure all our fans will keep cheering for us—who else is there to cheer for?

A great weekend to share Jeff Bridges making a perfect joke

Bought a Durian because I’ve always wanted to try one fresh and man, this fruit is a practical joke on *multiple* levels

The next Alliance webinar "A practical guide to Using the Alliance as a research resource" is Thurs. Oct 16, noon EDT Paul Sternberg will demonstrate how he uses the Alliance for comparative genomics in support of his research. Register here to get the Zoom link by Weds Oct 15 tinyurl.com/4f9ycybt

Brassica oleracea / Brassica oleracea / Brassica oleracea

**Me at a Halloween party** Them, looking at my costume: what are you supposed to be? Me: that’s a great question! Let’s think about it carefully step by step. You’re asking about my costu— Them: no stop it

Gaussian, beta, Poisson

Muyuan Chen has turned structural biology into an immersive experience with his new video game Meowtabolism, now available on Steam. Try the demo here: store.steampowered.com/app/4045010/... Give Muyuan feedback: steamcommunity.com/app/4045010 #ScienceGaming #StructuralBiology #CryoEM #STEMOutreach

Interesting! When carcinogenic mutations actually help…

Any university that signs onto this is a finishing school for chumps www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

New iOS is buggy as hell, juddery and slow due to pointless animations, previously convenient options now buried deep in menus, but at least it sends twice as many notifications thanks to “Apple Intelligence” great work guys