When I explain to people what is involved with writing a successful grant, they simply don’t believe me. I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!

This is maybe my favorite photo from Colorado history. From Granby, probably around 1905. I would get a tattoo of this.

Again,

Opportunity to join my lab for a postdoc or PhD student from outside Canada. Very short term. Very competitive. Send me your CV and cover letter before Jan 5. This runs via nserc-crsng.canada.ca/en/news/laun...

This holiday we spun the wheel of countries & landed on St Vincent & the Grenadines, so it is time for Christmas ham, macaroni pie, rum punch, & (eventually) ponche de créme, accompanied by an Anthony Bourdain episode as the tradition decrees. Plus also the 1st Pirates of the Caribbean, filmed there

∪ curse the darkness

For Day 21 #ArtAdventCalendar A Little Night Magic 32 x16 81x40cm Oil on Canvas 2021

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH. And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you. A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

Interesting ML approach for nanopore coupled structure probing, would be cool to see if the signal cleans up even more with the current @nanoporetech.com direct RNA chemistry.

I've tried and failed a couple times to write a post explaining how serious this would be. NCAR is globally essential to our climate change response. This can't just be replaced. Every scientist in the world will be doing climate research with one hand tied behind their back for at least a decade

Great news! A Tenure Track Professorship at the ZMBH in Heidelberg, Germany, has just been advertised (18 January 2026 deadline): nature.com/naturecareer... I encourage excellent candidates in the broad #proteostasis and/or #translation/#ribosome fields to apply! Please RT!

"are you enjoying duo mobile" does a hamburger enjoy being made of quarks. does a fish enjoy linear time. does the mountain enjoy the first taste of a cup of hot chocolate when you get back to the ski lodge. your question means nothing to me. i couldn't enjoy duo mobile even if i tried

Please help! We are looking for tissue-specific RNA-seq datasets or pubs with both male and female individual gene expression data, not pooled, from animal species. If you know of any relevant resources, please drop a link in the comments or send me a DM. Also, please help spread the word - thanks!

The future is not in the training set.

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

Does anyone want a survivorship bias shortbread

I have posted about this before, but... Researchers at Pitt School of Public Health (with NIH funding) developed Project Tycho where they digitized reportable disease data from across the country going back to ~1900. graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d... 1/6

🚀New preprint from our lab! I am very excited to finally share what has been the main focus of my PhD for the past almost 3 years! It is about viral dark matter and a powerful tool we built to shed light on it. 🧬💡 Continue reading (🧵)

Hello, do you have a moment to hear the good word about Huītzilōpōchtli?

Stop the nonsense: Prime editing generation of suppressor tRNA that overcome harmful effects of ‘nonsense’ gene variants — a possible remedy for a range of diseases @nature.com @harvard.edu @broadinstitute.org @stevenerwood.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Introducing the 𝐏𝐈-𝐚𝐭-𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐒𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞! 🤯 When activated, it will auto-reply to your PI's frantic ideas for new experiments, analyses, and projects with "Great suggestion! Saving this for later" (aka: let's talk when you’re back and got some sleep) #sfn2025 #sfn25

Latest #CDlab paper on nanopore protein sequencing on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... Here, Justas Ritmejeris, @xiuqichen.bsky.social, collaborator @albadalab.bsky.social and me developed a conjugation chemistry strategy for nanopore sequencing of natural peptides!

To be effective, data science agents need to be able to read plots reliably. @sara-altman.bsky.social and I wrote about some concerning findings on LLMs' ability to interpret plots when the content contradicts their expectations on the @posit.co blog. posit.co/blog/introdu...

Aurora from Rocky Mountain Arsenal tonight.

We have wondered what a complex archaeal cell might look like ever since 2014. It’s been a long road (and the journey is far from over), but it’s a good time to pause for breath and look. These Asgard archaeal cells are a surprise! And that is the joy of being a cell biologist.

Rare Earth will be back on air soon & in preparation for a programme on Darwin, Wallace & evolution, I found this ace example of evolutionary adaptation. The plant C. argenteum makes seeds that look & smell like dung, so dung beetles roll them away, bury them, then lose interest. Free seed planting!

We live in a tumultuous world. But I take solace in the fact that the 2010 University of Alaska Fairbanks hockey intro video remains the most unhinged thing I’ve ever seen.

Scott Campbell (character designer for Psychonauts) does this ongoing series called Great Showdowns and puts 'em up for sale. He posted this Happy Death Day one today. I have a ton waiting for frames.

How to become a "hot RNA" 🌡️? The answers were kindly provided by hyperthermophilic archaea: rRNA modifications are key! Check out this new publication presenting pan-modification profiling of the epitranscriptome. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... (1/3)

Just sent @foodbankrockies.bsky.social the same amount we’d spend on a really nice dinner out to help with the coming SNAP cliff.

If you've been wondering how to tell ring-tailed lemurs apart, Duke Lemur Center has a very wonderful graph mapping individual variations based on ear angle and pointiness Pointiness range is Round to Elf Angle range is Cat (straight up) to Airplane (side-to-side) lemur.duke.edu/catta-ears/ 🧪

A university that signs the “compact” is one that acknowledges its own inability to compete and succeed based talent and merit. It would signal insecurity and mediocrity to current and future students and faculty. Say no. Recruit the best people, protect their freedom and support their hard work.

We have a bunch of new job ads out @arcadiascience.com. If you haven’t checked them out, take a look! www.arcadiascience.com/careers

this is both clever and I object

tRNA-modification mutants in mycobacteria boost antibiotic recalcitrance by activating WhiB7 & coupling alanine metabolism to ribosome rescue and survival, new study reveals. ✍️ @jvaubourgeix.bsky.social & coll. 📖 shorturl.at/86JTs #MicroSky #AMR #RNAsky @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social @inserm.fr

My HPLC was definitely overlooked www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cute little ET discovered 10,000 feet down off the coast of California. (Remember “terrestrial” has two opposites, one of which is “marine”.) Meet the bumpy snailfish! 🧪 www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/s...

Over the weekend ICE abducted an NIH contractor when he showed up to a courthouse for his green card hearing. He is documented. His wife is a citizen. He is also member of the skeleton crew of animal care staff that works through a shutdown, to ensure the health and wellbeing of research animals.

Quoncierge updates: v0.2 adds an alternative, even more opinionated setup with organization and auto-routing of notebook outputs, intended for users who do lots of interactive exploratory data analysis. Sometimes the notebooks ARE the work, so let's make them reproducible. github.com/lkwhite/Quon...

And look at this graphic abstract….. 😱🤯

☕Pan, David, Chevrier & co show that the microbial #metabolites queuine and preQ1 modify the same host tRNA. PreQ1-tRNA reduces cell proliferation, slows #tumor growth, decreases the translation of ribosomal proteins and is cleaved by IRE1 on the ER #ribosome. 👉https://rdcu.be/eJqFc bit.ly/46BPXtJ

My husband was detained by ICE today Juan Muñoz, an American citizen, father of 2, and local government official, was peacefully protesting w. other elected officials. He was assaulted and taken away I have had zero contact or updates since #SOS @duckworth.senate.gov @durbin.senate.gov

Beautiful reconstitution of amino acid stress-dependent ISR activation by my @harvardcellbio.bsky.social colleagues presenting a unifying mechanism for GCN2 activation, which requires ribosome collisions and is enhanced by cognate uncharged tRNA in the A site! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This looks useful.

The grad student organizers of Colorado's long-running RNA Club have been putting together this event to demystify the PhD application process for the past few years. Pass along to folks applying to grad school this cycle 🍁

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

Fun fact: the Japanese Spider Crab’s Latin name (M. kaempferi) refers to this 17th century Dutchman who “discovered” it in… a restaurant. 🙄

I think the R01 is basically a non-starter at NIGMS now. Data from NIH Reporter for new and competing awards, comparing number of R01s issued relative to R35s (MIRA). This has major ramifications for basic science and basic science investigators that are not yet in the MIRA pool

Every single one of these leaves is a bug.