Israel's army issues 'final warning' for hundreds of thousands of people to flee main urban centre as attacks escalate.

Interested in aligning your long sequences or small genomes against huge reference databases containing millions of prokaryotic genomes ? A new tool has been released that can do this efficiently - LexicMap - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Crown Fountain is a wonderful installation in which water from two large columns which show faces of Chicagoans floods a court with an inch of so of water. When it opened, the city was surprised by how many families would come to let their kids splash in it. Including mine.

The continued presence of National Guard in DC, the hundreds remaining in California, and whatever the hell this is are all, independently, reasons why Trump should not be in office. Trump is an essential element of all this, obviously. But that alone is not why we are here.

Comment period ends on Monday for a proposed rule change that would terminate student visas after 4 years. It also puts limits on exchange visitors and reps of foreign media, and shortens the length of time at the end of the visa from 60 days to 30 days. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

New from #SCIMaP - analysis of the White House’s Proposed FY 2026 National Science Foundation Budget. Take-home: Slashing NSF by >50% will lead to ~$11 billion in economic loss and extensive job loss and reduced training opportunities in communities nationwide. Report: osf.io/e8rnc a 🧵

ADD YOUR THOUGHTS ON LIMITING STUDENT VISA TO FOUR YEARS Comment period ends September 29th www.federalregister.gov/documents/20... 1/2

Universities. Rural hospitals. Tech companies. Several sectors are going to be profoundly hurt by this. Not to mention the chaos of the moment as current H1-B owners scramble to get back to the U.S., cancel travel, etc. due to the uncertainty. An absolute mess. As intended.

“In some cases, the government appeared to rely on unverified tabloid reports about Khalil. In others, its claims were factually incorrect because of inconsistent timelines and mischaracterizations of his work history.”

I want our young people to know that there is a path forward, that a better world is possible. I don't want them to give up, to become cynical. They deserve to be young and full of optimism. They are owed a world that supports and sustains optimism.

Such a delight to share our work on the evolution of a cheese rind fungus in @currentbiology.bsky.social. This is the fantastic PhD work of @nicolasleonlouw.bsky.social and resulted from amazing collaborations, a wedding proposal(!), an undergrad course, & more! 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Happy Pythagorean Triple Square Day!

🚨 Today is the LAST DAY you can leave a public comment for the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, which meets Sep 18. Reports suggest they may falsely link vaccines to child deaths and restrict vaccines to ages 75 and up. You can submit a written comment here: www.regulations.gov/document/CDC...

It's like you can see the interaction between ecology and evolution happening right in front of you. 💚🦠🧬 #mevosky #bluesci www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I think it's terrible that Gen Z and Gen Alpha continue to live in a world where K-12 and college campus shootings are a normal part of life and that's all they've ever known and I think we should arrange things so that any kind of school or university shooting is impossible

News in the history of molecular biology. The Science History Institute in Philadelphia has acquired a huge archive of correspondence and other scientific material from the pioneers of molecular biology (Franklin, Klug, Perutz, Delbrück etc, with items from Crick and Watson, too). 1/n

For people in a state that is asking for a prescription, try a CVS MinuteClinic. Some MinuteClinic’s are getting around restrictions by having nurses on site who will give you a prescription during a visit. They ask to confirm if you are high risk but don’t ask for proof.

🐥If this Senate hearing with Bobby "The Quack" Jr pissed you off, send a message: Quack-O-Gram delivery begins on 9/15🐥 🐥 $3. Man in a duck suit. Rubber duck with "impeach the quack" message to YOUR Rep🐥 Link: www.standupforscience.net/quack-o-grams #ImpeachTheQuack @standupforscience.bsky.social

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.

gift link to dr. susan monarez’s piece in the wall street journal this morning.

9 former directors of the CDC penned an op-ed stating that what Robert F. Kennedy has done to the nation's public health system is "unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced" www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

I’ve spent two weeks thinking carefully about this, and I’m going to do my best to explain the theory of change for RFK’s removal, as I see it. That includes where impeachment fits, what to ask from House vs Senate, etc.

Here is a script. Please, please call. We cannot sit by and we cannot let our representatives sit by as our nation’s public health infrastructure is destroyed.

Updates on the pharmacy vaccine situation today: CVS is now requiring a prescription in 13 states and not offering shots at all in three others; Walgreens appears to be requiring prescriptions in 16 states, but not all the same ones as CVS. The lists of states are in the article. Gift link:

Very few PhD students finish within 4 years. But international students will need to do that if US proposed visa rules change go through. Sound reasonable to you? Fed register is accepting comments for next month. Details at the link & comment button www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

“Do not offer thoughts and prayers as you systemically enable such tragedies. Do not claim prayers are sufficient when children die as they pray. Do not pretend you do not understand.” — Lydia, 16, Minneapolis

Massive walkout at #CDC. Tick tock. Tick tock. RFK Jr. your time is up. (typo fixed). Spread the word. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ7Q...

I know there's a lot happening today, but this is sneaking in under the radar. This proposed new rule would absolutely crush foreign PhD students, potentially making it impossible for them to enroll with any certainty of their ability to finish www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

Full resignation letter from Demetre C. Daskalakis, a CDC leader, does not hold back. "The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud."

"There are more than 19 million college students in the US. Most are well removed from corridors of wealth+power..43% of undergrads attend community college. 25% live with their parents." a listicle for everyone, especially for the NYT editors themselves to learn www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/u...

This is horrible. Attacks on the humanities are another way to destroy our future. Now is when we need the humanities the most.

I'm super bummed to be missing #ESEB2025 @eseb2025.bsky.social due to a cancelled flight! Here's a quick overview of my talk "Gene- and genome-focused perspectives on microbial pangenomes" slated to be part of The Evolution of Microbial Pangenomes -- which I recommend you attend tomorrow (Fri) ! 1/n

🔥 CDC staff have something to say: "Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health." From an anonymous letter posted by current & former staffers www.savehhs.org/read-the-let...

Our high-precision metagenomic strain caller, PHLAME, is now published in Cell Reports!! www.cell.com/cell-reports... PHLAME works on tough sample types -- including those with coexisting strains of a species and low depth.

NIH will no longer list NIH grant opportunities through the NIH Guide. Sure, grants.gov was duplicative. But grants.gov is shitty. And NIH's Guide was less shitty. Not a huge deal. But just one more example of exec branch consolidation and NIH enshittification grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Manually curated and harmonized metadata for over 110k metagenomic samples! (58k samples from the human gut alone!)🦠 Proud to have contributed to Metalog, the latest @borklab.bsky.social resource: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #microsky #microbiome

This first-author publication is my… first! Archaea kill bacteria by targeting their Achilles’ heel: peptidoglycan. Big shoutout to @ahocher.bsky.social‬, @valeriesoo.bsky.social‬, Pauline Misson, @tobiaswarnecke.bsky.social‬ and MRC LMS Proteomics. A thread 🔽 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

🚨🚨ACTION OF THE DAY🚨🚨 @standupforscience.bsky.social Day 14! WE ARE LAUNCHING A CAMPAIGN TO IMPEACH AND REMOVE BOBBY “The Quack” JR. 🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆SIGN AND SHARE OUR PETITION: www.standupforscience.net/rfk-impeachm... We will hand deliver to Congress in Sept! #31doa #imoeachthequack #signandshare

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

If you ever find yourself needing evidence for ‘Plasmids are just as common in microbes without resistance genes,’ we’ve got you covered! Check our new paper, out today: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

2020-2024: Jay Bhattacharya says mRNA vaccines are inferior to “natural immunity,” encourages everyone to get Covid, and cashes in by implying vaccines are dangerous & don’t work 2025: Jay Bhattacharya says the public doesn’t trust mRNA vaccines because of all the lies he told them

Not sure how many scientists here have tried Claude Code or similar command line coding assistants. I had a complicated family property tax problem that was best solved by a brute force Monte Carlo simulation approach, so I spent a few days coding up and analyzing a model with Claude Code.

This is maybe the worst part about being an educator in the AI era. AI companies are *stealing your time* by making you work around it/find it/adjudicate it. Time that, 4 years ago, you would have used to improve your materials, or stay up-to-date on some area of research.

We just published: Why you should sequence your plasmids (and how to do it for free) Through @GetGenome scientists in 100 countries can access free whole-plasmid sequencing —giving researchers the confidence to move their experiments forward. medium.com/p/why-you-sh...

RFK Jr. must resign.

everyone assumes that doing a phd makes you know lots of things but really what it does is make you terribly aware of how many things you just don’t know and will probably never have enough time to learn

Don’t let this die. Keep elevating this.

Michael is right to raise concerns about this rule, which seeks to force around half of international students to renew their student visa at least once during the time they’re studying. But the “good” news is that it’ll be a proposed rule, so there will be notice and comment and time to oppose.

💥Personalized C. difficile colonization risk prediction and probiotic therapy assessment in the human gut💥 I'm very excited about this work, driven by Alex Carr & co-supervised by @cdiener.com @cp-cellsystems.bsky.social @isbscience.org @nitinbaliga.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-systems... 🧵...