-- New Open Research Game -- I reached the rank of Asst. Prof in #TenureRun! 🎓 I published 98 papers and paid $115.000 in APCs to publishers. My grant money is gone and I am exhausted. 💸 How far can you make it? Play now at forrt.org/TenureRun/

It's very sad to learn of David Botstein's passing. I worked in David's lab as an undergraduate--one of the most formative periods of my academic life and probably the biggest reason I work in biology today. I vividly remember my first meeting with David. I was a 3rd year engineering student,

Very cool!

We found 24 neuron classes that are excited or inhibited by environmental H2O2, spread across the nose, mouth, and inner pharynx. Different neurons trigger at different H2O2 levels (from 1 µM early warning to >1 mM lethal), and many adapt, so responses encode dose + recent history. 7/

I was today years old when I discovered that "npj Aging" and "Nature Aging" are separate journals, despite being published with identical titles by Springer Nature!

Please consider joining us--the new restrictions on academic freedom are coupled with a move to make all syllabi public and secretly record our classes--UNC's status as a top public university is at stake

I knew about the downward part, but not the upward part, and now I'm not okay.

Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science! 🧪 Don't forget to send in your nominations for the FEBS | EMBO #WomenInScience Award. Deadline: 15 May Read more: https://www.embo.org/the-embo-communities/febsembo-women-in-science-awardees/nominate-for-the-women-in-science-award/#WomenInScience#award

sunday afternoon family collaboration

📣 Please spread: we’re hiring a Lab Manager! It is a critical position in our new lab. As our lab moves to Barcelona and joins the @crg.eu, we’re looking for a Lab Manager to help build the lab and set the lab atmosphere. 🔗 Apply here 👉 recruitment.crg.eu/content/jobs...

This was a lovely first read of 2026

"Results from experiments with N = 4 or less are shown to be highly misleading (...). For a cut-off of 2-fold expression differences, we find an N of 6-7 mice is required to consistently decrease the false positive rate to below 50%, and the detection sensitivity to above 50%"

Yet one more reason we cannot allow LLMs to serve as epistemic grounding is that we cannot triangulate among them the way you can among reasonable independent sources. They bullshit in the same way and end up agreeing with one other about things that are completely false.

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH. And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you. A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

What tools do we need to start engineering #aging and #longevity ? A🧵about something we've been cooking up in lab with Jeremy Vicencio at the @crg.eu : technology that lets us reach inside living animals and precisely dial multiple proteins' levels up and down. 1/10

Multi-lingual children can end up with very random gaps in their vocab. I've asked my 4 y/o daughter every day after school *for years* what she ate for lunch. She would never tell me and I always wondered why. Today just before bedtime, we were talking and she asked me: baba, what is "lunch"?

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

Doing non-causal inference (and being explicit about it), yet using a causal word as second word in the title. If you pay Nature € 10.690, they will publish this in Nature Ageing. I can tell you what I think of that for free. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Today we had a great EvoMG Seminar by Dario Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social from FLI, who told us about some of their recent aging work using the fascinating short-lived killifish. Hosted by @mirimiam.bsky.social evomedgenomics.com/events/exter...

What is the origin of diversity in allometric laws scaling across species? Check our new paper led by Andrea Tabi where we propose a new theory of metabolic scaling grounded in thermodynamics and stochastic fluctuations at the cellular level. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A detIled account of all the characters involved. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Come hear us talk about causality in biology, next Monday and Tuesday!

Are you looking for a PhD? Join us in Barcelona! You'll dive into a community of >100 PhD students from 30 countries exploring the frontiers of biology. You can also join an online workshop on 6 November (15:00 CET) to learn how to find the right lab for you. More info: www.crg.eu/en/content/t...

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

A response from MIT rejecting "The Compact"... orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

moonbow last night over our neighborhood

Thrilled to hear that our BBVA fundamentos grant was funded. Thanks to @bbvaenespana.bsky.social for their support of new causal methods in aging. With only 4 of these awarded each year in the life sciences, a special congrats to our post-doc Jeremy Vicencio for teaming up to make it happen!

There's some super interesting nemography going on these days!

All my emails to Director Bhattacharya now available... jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g...

OH NO! "The White House issued a proclamation today, Sept. 19, 2025, around 4:36 PM PDT imposing a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa holder who enters the U.S. after Sept. 21, 2025, 12:01 AM EDT. In CA, this will take effect tomorrow, Sept. 20, 2025, at 9:01 PM PDT." Emergency notice at Stanford.

Ups!

Extraordinary paper. I LOVE this sentence: “This translates to a net lateral gene transfer rate of ~250 genes L−1 seawater day−1 and involves both “flexible” and “core” genes. “ Must read in detail, but these numbers are amazing. academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

Será posible vivir 150 años como dicen Putin y Xi Jinping? www.lavanguardia.com/ciencia/2025...

If you think AI is cool, wait until you learn about regression analysis

DOUBLE PELICAN DIVE AFTER SUNSET!!!! wooooo! What a way to end the week! time to sleep and prepare for the horrors and joys of the next one 🪶

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

‘Congress has your back’: US senators tell scientists they want to protect NIH budget www.nature.com/articles/d41...

And here I was thinking the way to solve hunger was food.

New blog article on Statistical Thinking: confidence limits for bootstrap overfitting-corrected predictive performance measures for regression models, useful for strong internal validations including confidence bands for debiased calibration curves: fharrell.com/post/bootcal #statistics #StatsSky

🚨🚨🚨 Please RT! We're looking for a postdoc to join an exciting joint project between our lab @upf.edu & @crg.eu (Barcelona) and the Sander lab @mdc-berlin.bsky.social (Berlin) investigating how alternative splicing and microexons influences the maturation of pancreatic islets. Deadline: 30/09/25👇

The proteostatic landscape of healthy human oocytes Elvan Böke and colleagues @bokelab.bsky.social find that mature human oocytes show reduced activity of lysosomes, proteasomes and mitochondria, highlighting reproductive differences between humans and mouse www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

People say “look we automated science” then show you a machine that does a 30-year-old method efficiently That’s cool! But to me, the heart of science is the 0-to-1 moment. You automated the 100-to-1000 stage

My group's paper about lifespan variability is a long read, www.cell.com/cell/abstrac..., but now you can learn about our work in a more accessible way, from a talk I gave at ARDD 2024 available on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lfw...

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose. www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

After the latest round of grading papers, I wrote about AI, ChatGPT, the death of the student essay, and what it means for the future of human cognition.

This is such a great development. So much work is put into these referee reports and everyone--trainees, team leaders, journalists--has something to learn from them.