Me, watching the #mets today and trying to figure out what happened to Mclean

It continues to be hilarious that so many people consider "unfair biological advantages" in sports to be the most urgent social issue facing society, and literally none of them mean this guy.

What determines who wins in bacterial competition? We review how the environment can influence bacterial warfare! Hopefully interesting for anyone who likes Bacteriocins (my favorite), T6SS, or CDIs! portlandpress.com/essaysbioche...

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

Thrilled to announce that the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington, School of Medicine is hiring at the Assistant Professor level (tenure-track)! The Pacific Northwest is an awesome place to live and do science 🧪🦠. Join us! apply.interfolio.com/185622 Applications due 8/1.

Mathman, on Square One TV. Famously wearing a football helmet for my undergraduate alma mater The University of Delaware* youtu.be/DV1PBo2_kKo?... *i know it’s the Michigan helmet

NIH funded peeps: This is insane and coming for us.

Brave man meme: I like Bluesky fine, but the idea that I would care about it so much to get angry over how/why people use it or what people say about it seems completely unhinged to me.

I wrote this for @rollingstone.com "Spencer Pratt is a quintessential American. His entire life has been fueled by an unfathomable level of self-confidence, despite a data set that suggests he may not be good at anything." archive.is/Eh7dl#select...

It’s a beautiful day, Bluesky is open, and people are having a wonderful time.

The thing about “Bluesky is a bubble” takes is that they start with the false assumption that social media is our job or some sort of responsibility. This isn’t my job. It’s probably not yours, either. It’s not our responsibility to ruin our days on a Nazi hellsite or to talk to dummies here.

*PAC-MAN SOUNDS*

LMAO it‘s okay to just say that you are sad about what happened to Twitter and everything that has tried to replace it comes up a lil short

This is the part where I lost it

It’s Looney Tunes to close down USDA Beltsville….among the multitude of reasons we’re not a serious country anymore

Oh, my sweet summer child

I wish I was as good at something as Stephen Colbert is at this

🎊 New Preprint from phagefoundry.org ! Super excited to share our latest work on generating systematic phage-MDR P. aeruginosa interaction dataset & use of ML to predict phage susceptibility & phage cocktails from target genome sequences alone, w validations www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

AI boom discourse has gotten so out of hand that it’s making the New Yorker relatable🫢 (with alt text)

Super handy

They're nominially concerned about US resources being spent overseas. The really stupid thing is when I have foreign collaborators, this isn't US money going overseas. In a very real sense it's overseas money coming HERE to support the work

Time is running out to sign up for our FREE metagenomics and genomics meeting at Nottingham Trent University! We have a great range of oral and poster presentations from ECRs, and are delighted to welcome @halllab.bsky.social and @alexmsalmeida.bsky.social to give our keynote talks.

One of my all-time favorite moments from Colbert’s show — this exchange with Dua Lipa on faith and grief.

Check out our pre-print led by the fantastic Massimo Amicone, collaborating with the Bollenbach lab! tinyurl.com/4h9p8mfb We build a simple intuition on how ecological interactions affect resistance evolution by expanding evolutionary rescue theory and testing it with two large sets of experiments

The version of record of our revised preprint is finally out today. In it, we introduce a fast and reliable methdology for the full factorial design of microbial communities, i.e. constructing every monoculture, pair, trio, four-member,... n-member co-culture of N strains. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

1. I think Quinta Brunson as Betty Boop is great casting. 100%. Absolutely. Matt Walsh is a racist dumbass. 2. "The character was based on a Black woman! Esther Jones!" is... well... a contested claim.

It remains hilarious that these chuds are (1) obsessed with child-centered pop culture while (2) knowing fuckall about it (Boop was famously based on a black woman) and (3) assuming everyone else is driven by the same weird politics of stunted development and resentment as they clearly are.

This is fucking insanity www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

“The boring answer — eat more vegetables and legumes, less ultra-processed food, default to olive oil, and yes, the source of fat matters less than the overall dietary pattern — is boring because it has been substantially right for a long time and doesn’t sell anything.”

“There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.”

Looking for advice on the faculty job market? Our “Landing a faculty position” series features newly appointed faculty, including @morgancarterphd.bsky.social and Abigail Leavitt LaBella (@lablabella.bsky.social) from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. 🔗Read more: buff.ly/ksnRtZp

It’s lazy MBA “student as customer” bullshit. We see the same thing in hospitals. Satisfaction isn’t the same thing as effectiveness. We shouldn’t poll students at all. Maybe we should poll alumni at 10 years.

IMO, the original sin of grade inflation is that the universities don’t really measure effectiveness of teaching outcomes based on anonymous end of semester student surveys (because it’s easy to give surveys)

If you find yourself worried about grade inflation, ask yourself what you’re really worried about. That students aren’t learning enough? That faculty aren’t challenging students to high enough standards? Then investigate that empirical question, one that requires measuring that outcome, not grades.

NOT NOW, RADIOACTIVE MUTANT SUPER PIGS.

As I kept saying throughout the 2024 election season, Trump would break things most people didn't know could be broken–or that they even knew existed.

Predicting phage anti-defenses that shoot the messenger Mahler & @yuping-li.bsky.social highlight @science.org work developing a structure-guided approach to identify phage proteins counteracting bacterial nucleotide signaling defenses using metagenomic data. www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Chemical inactivation of a bacterial immune system de-domesticates a temperate phage and promotes its spread bioRxiv from Joseph Gerdt at Indiana University with @annadragos.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #PhageSky

"Direct File was not brought down by runaway costs or technical fiascoes. It was murdered for no good reason at all, a victim of reactionary ideology and corporate self-interest." defector.com/free-easy-de...

It’s witchcraft that contact lenses exist which you wear just at night and which RESHAPE YOUR CORNEA so that you can just see normal without them during the day

#Evol2026: Curious about the best papers in Evolution or Evolution Letters that were part of a dissertation this past year? The current (virtual) session (not competing with any other talks) are the two winners.

New online! Revisiting the life cycle of temperate phages

Okay Jalen Brunson is giving a perfect interview right now. “How did you mount that 4th quarter comeback? What changed?” “I… <shakes head, dumbfounded> I have no idea.”

Six Flags ass chart

tough to overstate how quickly science funding in New Zealand has been blown to pieces - on Friday the NZ govt straight up disbanded the Marsden fund (our version of the NSF) it'll be replaced by a 'transition fund' with less money and zero information, as of yet, about what it will support #nzpol

If I was ever in The Terminator movies, I would simply order the Terminators to stop killing people. Problem solved.