By far the most important, vital, educational thread on wtf is happening in Venezuela & WHY 💥 💥

for what it's worth it can be both true that the US has always been like this AND we're absolutely reaching astounding all new heights of straight up violent stupidity the likes of which completely blow away how already very disastrous we've always been. it can be unsurprising and surprisingly worse

Jesus Christ

Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.

You should be embarrassed to be a member of congress and issuing anything other than impeachment resolutions. You're in the model UN. They should give you legos and a propeller hat

It's illegal for the president to relieve student loan debt. It's completely fine for the president to unilaterally decide to have the head of a foreign nation black bagged on foreign soil.

this is the message. yes the attack was illegal but that's secondary to the message we're against this war

this is the message x.com/SenRubenGall...

It is my strong conviction that there is no conviction harsh enough in our current legal systems to be deserved by the degenerates who created Real Politics Gambling.

Remember how appalled we all were in 2022 when Russia completely unprovoked attacked Ukraine? That is what we’re doing tonight with Venezuela. We are the bad guys here. Everyone who supports this is supporting unprovoked murder. Fuck every last one of them

It’s going to be so hard to preserve an accurate portrayal of this bizarre time in history, because future generations will not be able to reconcile the scale of evil atrocities with the aesthetics of a 7 year old’s birthday party in 1990

Just gonna leave this here 🐈

My department (EEOB at Iowa State) is hiring! See isu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/IowaStateJob...

Statistically, SAT scores are only correlated with grades in ones first year of college. They have no predictive power beyond Freshman year. international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-...

As someone who has been on many faculty search committees… (Dies of laughing)

Microbial pangenomics is reshaping our understanding of microbial diversity. Reaching new frontiers of an open and evolving discipline, hear the latest insights at Annual Conference 2026. Registration is open: microb.io/AC26Register #Microbio26

this is the best comp for Cig and Mendoza that I've seen

went back and grabbed the full video of her intro. absolutely incredible 🇮🇹🍝👩‍🍳🤌🇮🇹🍝👩‍🍳🤌🇮🇹🍝👩‍🍳🤌🇮🇹🍝👩‍🍳🤌

🦠 folks, amplifying this. Joe has done amazing work with and for the microbiology community. If you're able, please kick in a few bucks.

I know many of you know Joe James (of Binning Singletons) Joe and his family had a terrible tragedy occur on Christmas. If you can give, this is a good family to help out gofund.me/5cbfe22fe

My dad died last night. Here's a story that came out today about his career in politics. newjerseyglobe.com/in-memoriam/...

And so on the last day of 2025, UC Davis overran its institutional Google Drive storage. And there was much lamentation, for no one could edit any documents.

orcas have the chance to do the funniest thing

So many I love but this is the one I'll always remember. It was huge! Big production values, looked phenomenal and it's a dope tune. Everything about this was BIG. It was a whole ass movie

This is true and I was the only one on set excited about it (and playing the song on my phone to blank stares)

Great responses in replies! Also, I realized I had deep illumina reads from the wild type immediately progenitor strain, and that I can also overlay those onto nanopore read assemblies of the mutants to find SNPs (just, like, in reverse)

Praise be to beaver.

The Synthetic Yeast Genome Project (Sc2.0) set out to redesign and chemically synthesize an entire eukaryotic genome. In 2025 the final synthetic chromosome was completed, marking the culmination of over a decade of iterative design and international collaboration go.nature.com/48Fqxwi rdcu.be/eWPud

This is genius. There are a lot of hidden geniuses in these there corners of America.

Scientific careers can be long and these circumstances can easily change, allowing you or someone in your lab to undertake the project at another time, with assays and/or technology that provide more definitive results.

before I started my lab, I asked several senior PIs what their one piece of advice would be and PI pointedly said: “Know when to drop a project.” And that advice has been invaluable in my lab. There are always other projects to follow up on, dropping one isn’t a failure in and of itself.

Learned a new word (well, new to me) for the thing that happens all over science

What is this Beauty and the Beast shit?

Also, this just in -> the latest bizarre AI fever dream is AI-controlled trivets, staplers, and coffee cups on wheels. So we'll be chased around by inanimate wheeled objects clamoring for our attention.

This is why @wytamma.bsky.social and I have been writing SNIPPY-NG ! It will support short reads, long reads, and assemblies as inputs. You can check it out at github.com/centre-patho... It's not ready for prime-time yet, but it's useable!

Yep. (link)

A free, open-access library of high-quality organism illustrations for science communication

Important to stress that although case and hospitalization reporting have been watered down, death reporting hasn't changed since the start of the pandemic. All data sources — local and federal, qualitative and quantitative — indicate that mortality has fallen over time and is currently low.

We're overdue for the winter wave but these have been tapering off over time too Jan 2021 peak: ~26,000 deaths per week Jan 2022 peak: ~21,000 Jan 2023 peak: ~4,000 Jan 2024 peak: ~2,600 Jan 2025 peak: ~1,000

It's remarkable how low COVID deaths have fallen in the last year. The 2024 summer wave peaked at 1,358 deaths per week; the 2025 summer wave peaked at 466 deaths per week. www.cdc.gov/covid/php/su...

Sweeping science cuts in 2025 halted clinical trials, erased public health data and forced researchers into impossible choices. “This year nearly broke me as a scientist,” one writes. Six researchers share their stories: buff.ly/u2MHIQo 🧪

The National Science Foundation starts 2026 with a new management structure that affects every scientist with--or applying for--NSF funding. Here's what you need to know. www.science.org/content/arti...