Tomorrow: NIEHS to fund studies on the benefits of sun tanning your asshole and drinking bleach

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

This. Science and democracy are linked. We can’t put science advocacy in a bubble and do it alone— the fascism, division, and attack on experts and trust are *the reason* science is under attack. Plus the inside advocacy alone does not work! Just look at what happened with MYF this year.

If you have the privilege of living in a democracy, it is your civic duty to protect democracy when it’s in peril. If you have the privilege of being a scientist, you have the civic duty of protecting science. So yeah, scientists in America: ITS TIME TO BE YELLIN.

Tulsa stands with you, Minneapolis. More than 100 people showed up to a vigil Tuesday evening at LaFortune Park in Tulsa, OK to remember people murdered by federal officers of the Trump regime. Photos by Mike Simmons, Tulsa World.

Is he dead yet

This administration is cooked. Literally no one is scared of them.

As we prepare for the coming weeks and think about how we will choose to face this moment, remember that in his last few minutes alive, Alex Pretti was rendering aid.

This is Alex Pretti. This morning he was murdered by ICE. Six ICE agents held him down and shot him at point blank range. Alex was a nurse and researcher at the VA. Our thoughts are with his loved ones and we stand united in action calling for the abolishment of ICE. #ScientistsAgainstICE

We should be doing this in every state.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

“heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.”

“Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.”

I’m seeing posts from people (outside of MN) about how US citizens should carry their passports. And let me say that *inside* MN, we are calmly responding to requests with: “No, I don’t have to show you any documentation.” Because that’s how you protect everyone, regardless of immigration status.

I'm delighted to release the first half of my new textbook in human genetics: web.stanford.edu/group/pritch... "An Owner's Guide to the Human Genome: an introduction to human population genetics, variation and disease"

To be clear, they're play-fighting and also: this video improved my day measurably and I wish I'd've watched it earlier. If you haven't, fix that now.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom now i can’t believe— that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”

Having a 🍺 with Mr PEG tomorrow who wants to join

In 2025, I learned a lot about chronic illness as my spouse and I navigated the US healthcare system to get diagnoses and options for managing symptoms. 1/

Happy new year! Sharing a 🧬🚨REVISED PREPRINT🚨 with major updates to our placental long-read transcriptome paper! Thanks to thorough reviewer feedback, we've strengthened the manuscript with new analyses & clarifications. Key figures in this thread 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking into industry bioinformatics / comp bio / data science careers. If you have any leads, message me! CV is in bio. Currently a postdoc data scientist at @mdanderson.bsky.social, have published work in both wet + dry lab multi-omics of non-model organisms & humans. 🧪🧬🖥️

@pravrutharaman.bsky.social got super intrigued about EZHIP/CATACOMB, previously identified as a histone H3K27M mimic of PRC2. You can read about her efforts here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We hope these analyses will help spur more analyses in this very cool gene! 1/

delighted to share our review, out today in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social! check it out if you're curious about how recent advances in technology & biology have contributed to our understanding of how alternative isoforms diversify the proteome.

Another day, another day dragging NIH into areas where it doesn't belong and demeaning himself and the agency...

Lovely new review on H3K27me3 dynamics and potential functions in #plantscience by @drosborneplantsci.bsky.social nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I'm increasingly interested in race science as a form of cultivated, weaponized statistical illiteracy. Take this figure, one of the most common propaganda plots, plotting national IQ data against education polygenic scores. "The correlation is so high! Clearly IQ differences are genetic!" Oops!

Happy to share that my PhD project is finally published!🪱✨ Selfish genes are found across the tree of life. They can disrupt inheritance patterns and at the same time act as units for molecular innovation. Here we tried to answer one big question: how do selfish genes emerge in the first place?

I am procrastinating on writing by reading this interview of one of the true pioneers in evolutionary biology (and one of the nicest people I have ever met in my life) Why we should be thinking of Welwitschia. What is Welwitschia you might ask (I did!)? Read on. www.edge.org/conversation...

The Zohran press conference is your regular reminder that the entire administration folds like tissue paper at the slightest hint of confidence and conviction, and thus the fact that national democrats are playing a game of capitulation and weakness is exactly why they're all getting away with it

It only took us several decades and dozens Nature/Nature Genetics papers but we finally got to the conclusion that plant and animal breeders (and Lewontin) arrived at from the start: twin studies suck!

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

On this Trans Day of Remembrance, we remember the bright and courageous trans people whose lives were stolen by hatred. Their absence is felt across our city. We will honor them by building a New York where every trans person can live safely, fully and freely.

TE x ZFP = Evolution! Writing this with Olga @orpsf.bsky.social & Didier @trono-lab.bsky.social was a major highlight of my 🇨🇭sabbatical. Such a treat! 🍫Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoy piecing it together.

Important new analysis identifying the scope of clinical trials disrupted because of NIH shenanigans. > 74 thousand trial participants affected jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... 1/4

“Housing shortage – Jews to blame," letter sticker, German Reich, 1938 zwangsraeume.berlin/en/context

Nice! Whole-genome heritability estimates in the UK Biobank. Average WGS-h2 was 26%, with 21% common and 5% rare. Broadly aligns with recent sib-reg and RDR estimates.

Absolutely top notch preprint which has it all - a large effect mutation causing iridescence polymorphism, active TE as the basis of the mutation, AND ecological context for the phenotype. Cant wait for more on this!!!!

The PIP of remembering my keys with and without adjusting for the ADHD covariate: a memoir

New paper from the lab: we’re using long-read sequencing to disentangle isoform complexity at allele-specific loci 🧬💡 Here, we combine the PacBio Iso-Seq workflow with the established WhatsHap phasing approach to assign long reads to the correct allele in polymorphic F1 mouse hybrids.

Because it feels good

ICYMI: New online! Convergent evolution of a conserved molecular network underlies parenting and sociality

IMO reviewing grants and papers is only a nuisance if you’re doing science wrong. I have the same sentiment about “getting scooped.”

I would rather starve than capitulate to fascists and fund a government that does this:

Autumn in Oklahoma 🍂

My prediction is that LLM peer review will slow down science. It will do this for precisely the same reasons that contemporary peer review does and some extra ones. Start by reading @hansonmark.bsky.social thread below, then read on. 🧵

Great work. Also fundamental, we find reference annotation and read mapping strategy influence these results: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do GWAS and rare variant burden tests rank gene signals? In new work @nature.com with @hakha.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and our wonderful coauthors we find that the key factors are what we call Specificity, Length, and Luck! 🧬🧪🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

word on the street says this year the (fewer) assistant prof posts are averaging 800 applicants... pray for us friendly neighborhood senior postdocs: doing it all despite the bleak reality that the academic system as we know it is going to have to shrink, and we'll bear (a lot of) the brunt.