Reading “the stardust grail” and (as a prof) the bit at the beginning about the protagonist being a grad student in poor standing is making me tense 😂

Reading “the stardust grail” and (as a prof) the bit at the beginning about the protagonist being a grad student in poor standing is making me tense 😂

It’s #MythBustingMonday. Today’s myth: “Multiple vaccines at once will overload a child’s immune system.” This idea is popular with anti-vaccine groups and also POTUS. But immunology, decades of research, and real-world data all say the same thing: it’s false. 🧵

that's right that's why i freely admit: i'm not nice. "nice" is a social strategy.

The essential failure of LLMs in the smart home - where natural language processing should shine - is the best evidence that LLMs as a technology simply may not be able to do the things they’re promised www.theverge.com/report/78717...

Really appreciating this paper that thinks about survey respondents as a potentially over-extracted common pool resource. "It may be time to think about just how many respondents we have eaten and about how we might work together to sustain future populations." academic.oup.com/poq/article/...

“We don’t want clever people. We want mediocrities.” —Officer, Greek Military Police Ungated link. Click away!

This is Portland right now. We’re“under siege” by pollen and potholes, that’s about it. We have a ton of live webcams if you want to watch us go to the farmers markets or walking our dogs, we love dogs. Release the Epstein files. www.camscape.com/webcam/pione...

OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

Another reminder that these people are all venal cowards and can be forced into doing the right thing, which means we can take that lesson and *Apply It Elsewhere* apnews.com/article/jimm...

Enhancing genome recovery across metagenomic samples using MAGmax academic.oup.com/bioinformati... #jcampubs

Delighted to see our paper studying the evolution of plasmids over the last 100 years, now out! Years of work by Adrian Cazares, also Nick Thomson @sangerinstitute.bsky.social - this version much improved over the preprint. Final version should be open access, apols. Thread 1/n

New Preprint out! In this short and sweet article, we showcase how management practices (antibiotic treatment) has impacted the AMR profiles associated with bee microbiomes. The take home? More management = more plasmid-borne resistance! doi.org/10.1101/2025... #microbiome 🧪 🐝

I feel like it's impossible to do this to a person unless you don't really see them as a person.

Again Bouie from the top rope

OK, this is amazing. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Ric Grenell, Kennedy Center president, organized a claque of Republicans to heckle a musician critical of Trump. It's like junior high school www.washingtonian.com/2025/09/23/l...

From 2017, Ellen Ullman’s book is a good companion to @grimalkina.bsky.social ‘s extraordinary essay, Why I Cannot Be Technical.

Preview of an important slide:

"But it exposed how the system works: extract specialist knowledge at low cost and mostly without giving credit, repackage it into global claims and call it collaboration. I declined." @darmenteras.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How much of selection in human microbiomes is driven by phage? Excited to share our latest, led by A. Delphine Tripp, showing a case where phage is just not that important: Phage-mediated lysis does not determine Cutibacterium acnes colonization on human skin www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

I try to remember that while they were fighting the ban on gender affirming care for minors here, one of the (trans) lawyers did a thread reminding folks that they're really good at making this feel like an overwhelming groundswell, but it is one clown car of debunked experts on a road trip.

I started writing (or at least officially publishing) about the prevalence of & ills associated with gatekeeping in academia in 2020 [ scholar.valpo.edu/jvbl/vol13/i... ]. I proposed an alternative of Groundskeeping. One day I need to share how much gatekeeping I've experienced in these efforts! 😭😂

Gritty help us, it gets worse:

"Reader, be honest: Do you know what the N.I.H. does, beyond, well, health stuff?" Both @markhisted.org and I, along with many people on this site, know what NIH does–and with far more accuracy than the author (read the 🧵). I'll just add to the 🧵 that every problem…

Join us! workflows.community/talks/2025_0...

Thank you to everyone reading my new memoir - you’ve made it an instant Sunday Times bestseller 🗞️ This Is for Everyone is available now from thisisforeveryone.timbl.com @thetimes.com

MMseqs2-GPU sets new standards in single query search speed, allows near instant search of big databases, scales to multiple GPUs and is fast beyond VRAM. It enables ColabFold MSA generation in seconds and sub-second Foldseek search against AFDB50. 1/n 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💿 mmseqs.com

You look at every culture that's ever existed and the running theme is everyone pretty much just wants to play/dance to music, make art, eat stewed meat wrapped in flat bread, and tell stories about the shapes we find in the stars. Somehow we turned that into wars and overtime and profit margins.

Thank you! Yes, it uses DP to compute the maximal ungapped score, followed by a GPU-based Gotoh–Smith–Waterman, so no k-mer index is required. The drawback is that you can’t trade sensitivity for speed, but full DP searches against UniProt in milliseconds open up many exciting applications.

Just throw the majority of Democratic voters who are women (and others who believe women are people endowed with certain inalienable rights) under the bus = lose all principle in order to pursue a losing winning strategy?

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written the best yet commentary on last week's events, while pundits, politicians and others have disgraced themselves in their whitewashing of of this man's legacy. www.vanityfair.com/news/story/c...

bioRxiv partners with Dryad to enable easier, better linking to curated datasets connect.biorxiv.org/news/2025/09...

TIL about Code Golf, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf - "achieve the shortest possible source code to solve a problem". Eeks.

Many of my Jewish friends have expressed alarm about the Trump administration doing horrible shit in the name of stopping antisemitism. But if you're one of the people saying "there is no antisemitism crisis at all, it's all made up," your Jewish colleagues notice, and we are talking about you.

weird that neither of these articles two main stories decrying censorship mention WaPo's firing of @karenattiah.bsky.social I guess democracy really does die in darkness

Have you ever looked at some differentially occurring gene clusters in a microbial #pangenome and thought to yourself "I wonder if they contribute to any metabolic modules"? With the most recent changes, the answer is a few clicks away in #anvio 😇

The Secondary Metabolism feed is really seeing a significant uptick. More views/day, and climbing, + a lot more useful posts with moderation. Nice to see others are finding the new server useful, too! If you do research in this area, follow and keep an eye on it! 🧪🖥️🦠🧬 bsky.app/profile/danu...

Excited to share our latest preprint on agtools, an open-source Python framework for analysing and manipulating assembly graphs. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #Bioinformatics #genomics #assembly #assemblygraphs #software

One Workflow to rule them all, One Workflow to find them, One Workflow to gather them all and in the darkness execute them.

🎯"In 2024, he launched a campaign attacking the legacy of revered civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Kirk said King was '[a] myth has been created and it has grown totally out of control.' At a conference he held the previous year, Kirk said King was 'awful' and 'not a good person.'”

New Tyler Robinson posts leaked to me tell a very different story than you've heard before: www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-...

The shape of politics in the US right now is increasingly that the media, political and economic elites are allied with the Trump regime against the actual people of the country who hate it

Open science orgs are stronger together 💪 @carpentries.carpentries.org, OLS, @ropensci.org, @pyopensci.org & @prereview.bsky.social are convening to move from surviving → thriving. Read how we’re charting a sustainable, collective path forward: www.pyopensci.org/blog/pyopens... #OpenScience #FOSS

“Women’s intelligence and competence isn’t a problem as long as it is used to support men and remains safely contained in dependent roles,” Beth Allison Barr of Baylor University, told Salon. “It only becomes a problem when it threatens male authority.” www.salon.com/2025/09/15/p...

Since we’re talking about political violence, know this: “The murder rate for Black politicians in Reconstruction was 2,317 per 100,000. This rate is 20 times greater than *any* *other* demographic in the United States as of 2020, where the highest homicide rate was less than 105 per 100,000.”

Posted by an electronic friend of mine. It resonates with many folk, including me.

Hydrogen sulfide production distinguishes Salmonella from close relatives, but its biological significance remains obscure. This study uncovers the secret: Salmonella uses hydrogen sulfide production as a weapon to outcompete E. coli and gain a foothold in the gut. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Fellow Cal alums: I just sent an email to UC President James Milliken expressing my outrage at this decision to capitulate and "name names." Feel free to use any copy and paste any part of it to send your own letter.

But don’t call them Nazis.