Currently in Puerto Rico. My flight today was canceled bc the airspace was closed by US military. Archipelago is highly militarized, with frequent military patrols. Flashback to cold war theater of 1980s.

RFK: “Where did all this autism come from? It never existed when I was a kid!” “A Christmas Story”, a 1983 movie based on a 1971 memoir about a childhood in the 1930s: “This is my brother Ralphie. He has a ton of sensory issues and behaviors we don’t understand. Every family has a child like him.”

Remember the 1920s when nobody was left-handed

Understanding the mind takes many ways of seeing. Faculty at the Wu Tsai Institute are working across neuroscience, engineering, and psychology to study how the mind works. A look inside the institute’s new home shows how shared spaces and new tools are supporting discovery through collaboration.

Yale Law Prof S. Baldwin in 1899: “To give.. the ignorant and lawless brigands that infest Puerto Rico.. the benefit of such immunities .. would be a serious obstacle to the maintenance ..an efficient government”. Today: Dean of Yale Law is of P Rican and Cuban descent. Congratulations Cristina!

This about sums it up, folks. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Remember when Qatar hosted World Cup and everyone was told to be respectful of local customs and culture? Let’s hear that same energy about Seattle culture.

UPDATE: Another Chicago-area church has put up an immigration-themed Nativity scene. A church member at Urban Village Church sent this one along, where Mary, Joseph and Jesus are gone and replaced with a sign that reads: “Due to ICE activity in our community, the Holy Family is in hiding.”

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

Today's NYT front page. A methodical quest and the latest salvo

Honorary PhDs from academic institutions in 3,2,1….

“What have I done!” 🤡

omg they've got me reposting George F Will

This paper was written by my WormAtlas colleagues, Dave and Nate, in addition to 5 Nobel Prize winners. Hopefully more attention and funding will find its way to the invaluable C. elegans resources described in the paper.

"Minority women...have traditionally been excluded [from STEM] because of biases related to both their race or ethnicity and gender, constituting a double bind." 🧪 web.mit.edu/cortiz/www/D...

“Those Muslims must assimilate to our way of life. Like we did when we ‘visited’ other countries.”

Mark Kelly: "This president, when he says things like 'third world countries,' what is he really saying? I think what he's saying is he doesn't want brown people in our country. And that's disturbing. It's un-American."

Columbia and Northwestern are the academic homes to the most prestigious journalism schools in the country and they are the two universities that caved to the Trump administration’s extortion demands that are directly connected to the First Amendment. Just gonna sit with that for a while.

Arden Patapoutian, Immigrant “from third world country” & Nobel Prize Laureate, 2021.

I was one of those immigrants, and we commit fewer crimes than people born here. “Trump says he wants to “permanently pause migration” from poorer nations and is promising to seek to expel millions of immigrants from the US by revoking their legal status.” apnews.com/article/trum...

C. elegans researchers were early adopters of open science: "The development of common resources and the belief that research findings and mutant strains should be freely shared has propelled worm research to the forefront" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

One of our founding directors Anthony Hyman @hymanlab.bsky.social will become @embl.org Director General: www.mpi-cbg.de/news-outreac...

All hail Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most researched organisms on Earth. Collaborative data sharing in the nematode research community led to four Nobel Prize-winning discoveries about human development and disease. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/uNqU50Xyj4e

"a debilitated CDC unable to protect the health of the American people." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... @thelancet.com

🧪 This is what whooping cough looks & sounds like. A baby tragically died of whooping cough today. Dr. Ralph Abraham is the CDC’s new deputy director. He: 1. Halted Louisiana's mass vaccination campaign 2. Promoted ivermectin 3. Delayed public warnings about a deadly whooping cough outbreak

After immigrating to the U.S. from Lebanon, neuroscientist @ardemp.bskyverified.social found belonging in science—and did Nobel-winning work on the sense of touch: buff.ly/boCE6ZY

As we get ready to shop for Thanksgiving remember the farm workers who harvest the food. We wouldn't enjoy a #Thanksgiving dinner without their hard work. #WeFeedYou

“Do not trust the CDC website and quite certainly do not trust anything that RFK says around your own health” Former CDC official @drdemetre.bsky.social says plainly that information coming out of the CDC cannot be trusted under Robert F. Kennedy’s leadership.

In Monrovia, California, protesters are purchasing 17¢ ICE scrapers from Home Depot and immediately returning them to create long lines and slow down the entire store. Their aim is to disrupt sales and convey a message opposing ICE raids occurring in their neighborhood.

More of this, please

A holiday demonstration of the different penetration depths of red and blue light into tissue. #optics

Another—more accurate—description of “scientific orthodoxy” is “fact.” It's shameful that the country’s medical policy is being led by a worm-brained roadkill-eating cook. And it's shameful that the paper of record helps sanitize this.

No single person, especially someone with zero expertise, should be able to just change the CDC website on a whim. The fact that federal health and science pages are no longer trustable is a catastrophe for public health and democracy.

“History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost..ranging from ostracism to death. Those in power recognized that oppression is best maintained by keeping the masses illiterate, and those oppressed recognized that literacy is liberation…Don’t surrender to AI your ability to..think”

Oh no….it has only been 9 months!?

Ed Kravitz was an extraordinary scientist, educator and activist. I had the privilege of getting to know Ed through his work with SPINES, a professional development course at the MBL. His legacy will carry on, not only through his science, but also in the many students he taught and mentored. 🧪

Ballroom 13 is at the end of the row! It's a little walk, but it's worth the schlep for all the outstanding colleagues and our own cash bar!

In his #sfn25 session @dacolon.bsky.social draws lessons from his winding path in science: 1) follow your curiosity, 2) there is not 1 blueprint for being a scientist: learn from the diversity of experiences of others, and (3) to find your path, pay attention to what sparks your interest

A marvelous Meet the Experts talk going on right now at SFN25 from @dacolon.bsky.social !! How can you get a better project than the epic protoplasmic kiss that culminates a love story?!?!

If you are at #sfn2025, please come by tomorrow! I will talk about energy metabolism, neurons and the winding roads of discovery and careers in science

A print of a neuron forest I made during my artist residency at Sitka. Cerebral Wilderness 6” x 8” Intaglio and spit-bite aquatint #printmaking #neurons #sciart

Wut. A.I. is to intelligence what a scarecrow is to a human. Sure, some birds might confuse them, but that does not make them the same.

"If you publish your book now, in the teeth of my opposition, history will condemn you” “the tone used to describe Rosalind's work in the Epilogue is perfectly reasonable, but contrasts ludicrously with the descriptions of her in the text itself.” -Francis Crick Letter criticizing Watson’s book 🧪

Bluetorial-Jim Watson I met Jim Watson a few times but did not know him well. However, I was greatly influenced by his book “The Double Helix”. He was a complicated human being with some very, very bad features, but some good contributions. What follows is my personal perspective. 1/41

Scientific breakthroughs are rarely unique; someone else would’ve made them soon enough. But when prominent scientists cause harm, that harm isn’t inevitable; the world might simply have been better had the harm not been inflicted. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...

1/2 ICE/CPB thugs tackled a nonverbal autistic man outside a Family Dollar in Chicago’s Little Village claiming he was “noncompliant.” Witnesses begged them to stop. “Why they beating up this special boy?” one worker cried. “He comes in every day for a treat. He has the mind of a child.” 🤬🤬🤬

I wrote some reflections this afternoon about how the discovery of the double helix changed the course of science. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qPS3y6