An ICE agent shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen and San Antonio resident, in March 2025. Then ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety covered it up. He was 23 years old. I am calling for a full investigation into this shooting, including why there was an 8-month cover up.

There’s a term for this experience (which I imagine many of us are having): Moral injury. Moral injury is the distress that occurs in response to betrayal by authority structures and being unable to prevent acts that go against one’s deeply held values and moral beliefs.

Applications are open for PREP Bio at the University of Oregon! A great opportunity for postbacs looking for additional research experience while preparing for graduate school. More here: cas.uoregon.edu/UO-PREP-Bio

Friends, please help spread the word about our microbiology REU program at Montana State University. www.montana.edu/mbi/reu/ Each student receives a stipend ($7000 for 10 wks). Travel compensation, room, and board are also provided. Details in the attached pic--Feb 14 deadline 🧫🧪🦠#microsky

Can’t do good science in an unfree country. Defund ICE.

A nurse. A researcher. A helper.

one thing i am going to do is every time i wanna post something that could get me in trouble i will post some mutual aid links instead so please know every time you see a link it is because i am keeping an inside thought inside www.standwithminnesota.com

What we are watching is a paramilitary force learning that they can kill with impunity, that the regime will smear the victim and defend them. Unless politicians and the legal system exerts accountability, it will not stop. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/past-the-b...

Candida albicans is usually hanging out with bacterial neighbors, so what happens to the fungus during co-culture? The bacteria secrete metabolites that induce massive cell wall remodeling that change immune recognition and drug resistance. Read more in our new paper: www.cell.com/current-biol...

It's worth your time to call Hilton to cancel your account with them. 1-800-446-6677. Here's why: They asked me if it was because of the ICE thing. I said it was. Then they suggested I wait a couple days to see if they were going to change course. The pressure is getting to them. Let's keep it up.

I think, every so often, about how the student protesters in South Korea figured out there was a finite supply of tear gas, and then staged retreating marches that caused police to burn off most of it, before the big "bring your auntie and kids" marches that ultimately toppled the dictatorship.

"People who understand, deeply and instinctively, that community is something you practice, not something you simply inherit. In their willingness to roll up their sleeves — sometimes literally between scenes — I saw a truth we often forget: we are strongest when we take care of one another."

The CDC is funding a profoundly unethical study in Guinea-Bissua.

Growth phase influences virulence in Candidozyma auris systemic infection models journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @teresaomeara.bsky.social These results will be instrumental in the future development of standardized animal models to study C. auris pathogenesis.

The Henry Ford Museum will offer free admission and free parking on December 1 to honor the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ brave choice to stay seated on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Story from Jackson Coleman

A great intro to academic conferencing. Not sure how I missed this one. scienceforeveryone.science/getting-the-...

Institutions are failing us, including universities that, in principle, ought to be standing up for academic freedom. Academic friends, if you want to survive this moment, join the AAUP. Help yourself and colleagues at other institutions.

"Trump canceled your flight" is about as easy as messaging gets.

Your attorney general determines whether there is pushback against antitrust conglomeration in your state, whether your state fights back against Trump’s illegal use of the power of the purse, whether your wage laws are enforced.

A very small group of conservative attorneys general (and solicitors general) have personally contributed to the erosion of our rights. The fastest way to shut off the federal judicial shitty case pipeline is to NOT ELECT conservative AGs (or SGs).

Here’s my my pitch for why you care about your state attorney general. The entire conservative judicial machine *depends* on conservative state attorney generals. John Roberts can’t take a case asking to destroy voting rights if a state attorney generals doesn’t bring it.

Your state attorney general is probably one of THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT elections you have on your ballot, and most people simply do not understand that who you elect will directly determine your rights—and has in the past.

The implicit assumption that white rural voters are the *real* voice of the masses, while the people who live around the major population centers (ie the majority of the country) are out of touch degenerates remains an unshakable feature of punditry. Truly nasty work

www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fu... @teresaomeara.bsky.social Review highlights the critical role of stress adaptation in pathogenicity and potential avenues for further research and therapeutic intervention.

🚨NEWS: Two federal judges just ruled the Trump Admin MUST use emergency funds to continue providing SNAP benefits during the shutdown. They tried to use hungry kids as political pawns instead of coming to the table to reopen the government. Shameful.

The New England Journal of Medicine and the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy will be publishing regular public health alerts to replace the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which has been paused due to the federal government shutdown.

Registration open for #Fungal26 genetics-gsa.org/fungal-2026/ at Asilomar.

Fungal #GenomeSize variation is largely driven by TEs & lineage-specific genome defenses. @tbadet.bsky.social & @danielcroll.bsky.social show that presence/absence of RIP mutation systems influences #genome architecture, identifying a likely novel defense mechanism @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4hcC5tx

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Job alert ‼️ UChicago Micro is hiring! Open to tenured/tenure track faculty at all levels in any area of microbiology. Come join our amazing and growing department. apply.interfolio.com/174404

Despite These Times...my department is hiring! I really like my department, we have a good mix of disciplines and organisms and we're really low-drama. We also get pizza at faculty meeting. So if you're a computational and structural biologist, join us! 🧪 jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/260...

Hey remember when the CDC dropped 6 of the 8 foodborne illnesses from the nationwide monitoring system in July and one of them was listeria? Mentioning for no particular reason www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

In any other country, if federal agents fired upon journalists when unprovoked — what would we call it? If federal agents marched down streets demanding papers — what would we say? Authoritarianism — let’s not pretend it’s something else when it happens in our American cities.

Pregnant women can't access the #COVID vaccine. If they get #COVID and develop a fever, they can't take Tylenol? 🫠. Both COVID infection and untreated maternal fever increase the risk of bad outcomes for both fetus and mother ranging from preterm delivery to death. None of this is pro-life.

Please repost -- The Univ. California Davis dept of Plant Pathology is hiring a Fungal biologist / Mycologist Applications due Dec 1 Application portal: recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07339 Screenshot shows part of the job posting (with alt-text of the same text)

it's so funny to see America's health insurance companies be like "look. If there's one thing we love it's denying you care. but we ran the numbers - and we cannot BELIEVE we're saying this - and it's cheaper for us to just pay for the vaccines than deal with you going to the ER."

I know I’m naive but it is pretty wild that the president of the United States just publicly declares he and the military killed some guys on a boat, multiple times, and the entirety of Congress doesn’t immediately hit a giant red IMPEACH button

toddlers everywhere:

Can’t express in words how big this rally in Chicago is. The president’s fascist goon squad is not welcome here.

Okay now this is impressive! Sound on!

It didn’t “leave them dead.” Navy SEALs slaughtered three innocent people.

Nobody who voted to confirm RFK is fit to hold public office

Tomorrow, when you call your senators and representatives again to demand RFK's resignation, remind them that the nation's major medical societies (and our largest nurses union! @nationalnurses.bsky.social) demand it, too.

If your state has elections this month, this would be a good time to make a plan to get out and vote. Every election, little to big - including recall elections, matter a lot.

As a lawyer, I'll tell you that there's nobody who knows this law better than Ryan and Brian. Sure looks like murder or war crime to me. But as a human, I'll tell you that the Rubio statement -- we could have stopped the boat but we blew it up to send a message -- is sickening and depraved.

Excited to share our new publication, out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41.... @kanchanj.bsky.social led this fascinating fungal-bacterial interaction project. We are grateful for our wonderful collaborators Brian Peters and David Underhill.

Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be

No one is acting as if this in an emergency, except those of us who work in these fields. But we see the tsunami approaching--a wave of sickness and death that will wash over us all in growing numbers down the months, down the years. 15/