Congratulations @karalmckinley.bsky.social & lab on their groundbreaking recent preprint establishing + characterizing a chemically inducible model of menstruation in mouse: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... My jaw dropped when I heard this presented earlier this year. Incredible.

“A study, published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that last season’s 2024–2025 mRNA COVID vaccines reduced people’s risk of emergency department visits by 29%, their risk of hospitalizations by 39% & their risk of death by 64%” Benefits were seen even if 0 risk factors

One of the great advantages of biology is that you can write HELLO WORLD in amino acids since PROTEINS ARE AMAZING

Only being able to say HELL WRLD seems apt somehow

Variants on Hello that work: * Salam * Tere * Hei * Lakwe * Namaste * Akkam * Vanakkam

one of the great tragedies of biology is that you can't write "HELLO WORLD" in amino acids since there is no O

More are united around a simple message: RFK Jr should not be HHS Sec. His decisions undermine our public health capacity and put lives and health at risk. As 6 former Surgeon Generals argue: "He has rejected science, misled the public and compromised the health of Americans." 🎁 wapo.st/3VTALll

An update from Jessie Fuentes

Celebrating our move to a new lab building! And two years of the Bartman lab!

It's pronounced "bouquet"

So if there’s no portal to submit the NSF GRFP yet and the government is shut down…..

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

Announcing such a major change to NSF GRFP this late in the cycle is incredibly cruel. 2nd yr students (mine included) have been working so hard on their proposals despite ongoing uncertainty. They are driven and passionate about being outstanding scientists and helping those coming up behind them.

Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment. The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

The year 1984 is unfairly maligned. Have we considered changing the title of George Orwell’s classic to 2025?

I often think it would be great to have chloroplasts, do photosynthesis, and live off the sun.

Do you ever wish you could digest cellulose so you could eat the lollipop AND its stick

After the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral, they replaced much of the original wood framing with iron. So now, it has apse of steel

Florence, which machine is it?? WHICH MACHINE?

insideclimatenews.org/news/2409202...

"When American historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the rise of our off-brand fascism. When world historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the passing of technological, and hence economic, and hence political leadership from the U.S. to China, in the span of eight months"

Being a PI really enriches for situations where you meet someone for an hour and then you don’t see them till a year later and they’re like “remember me? From our very important meeting?”

This is not how you do policy, unless your goal is to just terrorize people.

Asking BlueSky for help: For a review, I am trying to accurately credit the first paper that measured pairwise 3D distances between 2 pieces of DNA on the same chromosome (or cosmid). Is Trask 1989 the first? I know of earlier single-locus papers (1982). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Executive orders cannot supersede federal law or the constitution. Federal law sets visa fees, including for H-1B visas. And the maximum fee is $4,500, according to the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 (Public Law 114-113). Current State Dept. site: travel.state.gov/content/trav...

To recap, Trump signed a proclamation saying that after midnight tonight, no one with an H-1B visa may enter the US unless they have paid $100,000. However, anonymous White House officials are saying it doesn't apply to people with current H-1B visas — yet there is NO official guidance! None!

To my H-1B friends, I am so fucking sorry. This all sucks so much.

random lab question: our water-jacket incubator says it has rust inhibitor in the water jacket. we're about to replace the water. how important is this, does anyone know? the only item i can find so far doesn't ship for a month....

i never appreciate Powerpoint more than when i have to prepare a chalk talk

On the Trump administration's cruel disbanding of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium: my op-ed @statnews.com My 12-year-old son died from brain cancer. This research would have helped children like him www.statnews.com/2025/09/15/p...

“Sen. Bill Cassidy said Friday that Louisiana is undergoing its worst whooping cough outbreak since 1990 and called on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to promote vaccinations.” This outbreak has already killed two babies. @jackiantonovich.bsky.social

If you run a life science lab where research has either significantly slowed or shut down completely due to Trump administration policies, I’d like to hear your story. I'm a biotech and life sciences reporter for @statnews.com, and you can reach me at [email protected] #journorequest

An excellent visual on this from @origamiorganelles.bsky.social 🧪

This child was infected with measles before they were able to be vaccinated (under 12 months), likely from someone unvaccinated. They survived the infection but years later they’re dead. The risk of SSPE for an infant infected with measles is 1 in 600, & it’s 95% fatal. Your vaccine protects others

for future reference, the secret to easy folded fitted sheets lies this how-to (with pictures!) that I found on tumblr back in college 😂 I still reference it every time I fold a fitted sheet hahaha aqua-harry.tumblr.com/post/1621713...

As a parent there are certain things I’m just not looking forward to teaching my daughter. Like racism obviously, a lot of US history. But today I thought of another one: how to fold a fitted sheet

ok are they called covalent bonds because the two atoms are sharing a valence electron. surely i should have realized this before.

Here is a word cloud of the words that were missing from the noncompetitive renewal awards but had been present in the parent award. 3/4

Funniest possible person to say nothing bad happened when he was a kid as a result of everyone having guns

“This isn’t just about 211 missing R01 grants. This is about the 211 PIs (or multi-PI groups) that are not getting a new grant. This is about at least 422-844 non-PI level investigators who are not having their salaries covered.”

Just finished reading Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, highly recommend. In a way very little happens but the images and scenes are so vividly and so succinctly described it’s really striking. It’s about a translator in The Hague for the international criminal court.

Updated update I downloaded the data from NIH Reporter too soon. The large end of the month update had not occurred. Here are the results as of this morning. NIH grants management staff have been busy making awards. 1/2

NSF GRFP announcement was posted! Have not read the details to see if any changes from previous years... www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

It's incredibly weird that folks have convinced themselves that the Covid vaccines - which had an ~82^% take up rate - were unpopular.

Co-discoverer of reverse transcriptase at 32, Nobel Prize at 37, played a key role at the 1975 Asilomar comference.

For those who doubted where this was headed, this is what dictatorship looks like — declaring war against an American city. It is not a joke. We must all stand against this lawless regime.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career relying on American science and engineering to keep me alive. Yesterday, RFK Jr. testified at the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. It was sad to see him try to destroy the life’s work of so many American scientists. He shouldn’t be in this job.

The fact that you can have all of these organizations calling for Kennedy's resignation (or the NYTimes op-ed by 9 former CDC directors) and it having so little discernible impact is a sign of how far the US has moved from valuing scientific advice and expertise and how big a challenge it faces...