Every decade, we hear "the kids can't read or write!" Interventions that don't work are proposed. Those that do work are ignored: reducing class sizes, making kids & families feel safe at school and welcome, becoming a community resource. When their expensive reform fails, they yell at us again.

By the end of this year I will have had two MRIs. I know exactly which parts of my body they are analyzing & why.

I work with eDNA and I am still constantly surprised that this shit works.

it'd be really great if the NYT could muster like 10% of the empathy for your average trans person as it can for wealthy cis people who grossly violate their profession's ethical standards

The RNA in our lab degrades if you look at it wrong and there are others out here extracting 40,000 year old RNA. Teach me your ways.

I need to watch Frankenstein this weekend so I can talk about it with my tattoo artist on Monday.

My lab is learning how to run R Studio on the HPC and my life will never be the same.

Reading these emails should cure all imposter syndrome.

Big big thanks to all the program officers and scientific review officers coming back online and managing to instill positivity and we-can-do-this attitudes in emails out to applicants & reviewers who might have wondered: What will happen to all of this good work? Answer: let's do this.

New profile picture from my friend's 50th birthday, where we did a 'witchy' photoshoot. 😁

NSF is open again! A few comments: *Please be patient. During a shutdown NSF employees cannot open computers or respond to emails. *Merit review will continue. However panels won’t resume until after Dec 8th. *POs remain excited and committed to advancing science and the scientific workforce.

OMG. I just looked at the subject of the email and it is 'radical breakthrough'. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Did women ruin the workplace because they insisted on grammatically correct emails? Or at least coherent emails?

As someone mentioned earlier, maybe this is the reason why billionaire tech bros need AI to summarize emails. What does this even mean?

Can you identify transposable element from low-coverage whole genome sequencing? Asking for a friend.

Trying to make our R markdown file legible for literally anyone outside of our lab is going about as well as you would expect.

This trailer has a hold of my soul and I may have watched it on a continual loop last night.

TEs aren’t just genomic parasites, they’re also engines of genomic novelty. Our new study with ~2,000 Z. tritici genomes shows repeated TE mobilization waves during global expansion. With @danielcroll.bsky.social & @guidopuccetti.bsky.social 🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #TEworldwide

I literally just threw a grape at my computer screen. Why is this shit so complex?

This comic is becoming increasingly realistic. m.xkcd.com/3056/

I have a hard enough time teaching students not to add spaces to their file names. This is going to be a new level of hell.

Me responding to the 'breaking news'.

The fact that this, and every other Trump pardonee who has subsequently broken the law, has not ended Trump's political career, that it barely even registers on the national discourse, underlines just how far we are from a functioning democracy that values accountability.

Holy bejesus, I suck at my job.

I was told today that tech leaders are saying that our students need to learn how to use AI tools to be productive in the workforce. My question is exactly how hard is it to use AI tools? Almost all of the ones embedded into my software just require someone to press a button.

I just met our VP of Information Technology and got to tell him how awesome his HPC team is. 😀 @bellmore.bsky.social

For those using BOLDSystems, how do we download sequence files in version 4 or 5? Version 3 used to have a fasta button, but I can no longer find it!

Looking for a PhD opportunity? I'm hoping to recruit someone to my group at Durham University to work on a project combining fieldwork and labwork to study speciation in rubyspot damselflies: iapetus.ac.uk/studentships... Get in touch if you want to chat!

Reposting for the afternoon/early evening scientists

Finally accepting perhaps I am the problem....

I guess I can't be surprised when my computer does not want to open the files that are 200,000,000 rows long.

Number of times I've cried today: 3

Abraham: “God, you can’t wipe out an entire city if there’s even a few innocents, I will literally fight you!” Senate Democrats: “Well, I guess if it doesn’t impact me, I’m okay with all the poor dying.”

Honestly primary every Dem senator then? None of them deserve this power.

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Democrats better never ask me for another penny.

Let me get this right… a sufficient number Senate Democrats appear to be willing to reopen government to alleviate air travel for upper & upper-middle income people at the expense of access to healthcare for lower income people. Yes?

How about...no

Starving your citizens doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. 🤔

I often think about how the government hounded Aaron Swartz to death for scraping Jstor, yet all these AI companies scraped almost literally all of human knowledge (and continue to do so even when they're told to stop) and have had no criminal consequences.

I get my tattoo in a little over a week which means I will spend the next 8 days looking at every aged manga tattoo in existence.

Um, @variety.com? That’s…not what that means. 😳 variety.com/2025/music/n...

Maths... If you make $100,000 a year (not bad), it will take you 10 MILLION years to earn a trillion dollars. If you make a million dollars a year (wow!), it'll still take you a million years to earn a trillion dollars. Tax the rich.

Panera’s moderately caffeinated lemonade was loosely associated with 2 deaths before it was taken off market. This article alone has 4 examples of ChatGPT encouraging young people to commit suicide, and OpenAI’s own public stats estimate over a million users discuss suicide with ChatGPT each week.

the only "honor" Watson's getting from me is that i've built a lab full of outstanding students who are everything he hated: Black, Indigenous, female, trans, queer, neurodivergent, disabled, immigrant, and beyond. he might be what the past of our field looks like- but the future looks like my lab.

Thinking only of Rosalind Franklin today, and what was stolen from her (and so many other female scientists alongside her).