Too lazy for 2 clicks, here you go: tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-i...

🎉 New year, NEW PREPRINT! Bacteria exhibit astonishing genetic diversity, but where do new genes come from? My best friend Arya Kaul (/labmate in the @baym lab) investigates how advantageous deletions can spawn new genes - "deletion-born fusions." 🧵:

7/ Here's the bottom line: This is an unprecedented shift that risks weakening protection against preventable diseases at a time when outbreaks are rising and children are already being hospitalized. Vaccines don’t work without strong supporting systems...and the U.S. doesn’t have Denmark’s.

Hello moths, The harvest has arrived: anisota.net/harvest It's like Spotify Wrapped, but for Bluesky and the ATmosphere. 🌾 See your most-used words, discover who you interact with most, explore your posting patterns, and find all sorts of fun insights.

If you are a resident of California, the state now has a portal where you can demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers with a single request form, for free. consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov

New record year for renewable electricity in Britain - thanks especially to strong solar output. Read our analysis of 2025 here www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

#MLCB2025 proceedings are up at proceedings.mlr.press/v311/ !

This exists 😁

App idea: rover, but for sourdough starters and leivito madre. it will be called doughver

See 👇 our new manuscript introducing SpaCEy, an explainable method for predicting clinical outcomes from spatial omics data 🧬 📄 Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 💻 Code repo: github.com/saezlab/SpaCEy

The structure of the bacterial genotoxin colibactin bound to DNA shows how it might contribute to cancer risk. Learn more in a new #SciencePerspective: https://scim.ag/4iJPFVS

GLASHEEN: Antifa is our primary concern right now. That's the most immediate violent threat we're facing BENNIE THOMPSON: Where is antifa headquartered? GLASHEEN: ... ... ... we are building out the infrastructure right now THOMPSON: What does that mean?

MAGAZINER: How many veterans have you deported? NOEM: We haven't deported veterans MAGAZINER: We are now joined on Zoom by a combat veteran you deported to Korea

Massive single-cell study by Kanai et al (www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...): - Once statistical power is high, constrained genes have more (though weaker) eQTLs. - Chromatin-QTLs near constrained genes have "normal" effect sizes, colocalize more with disease, but exhibit attenuated peak-gene effects.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

When reading a long stream-of-consciousness-type message on github or slack

My paper "Examining the Interface Design of Tidyverse" is now published in ANZJS. This paper calls attention to the importance of UI/UX principles & approaches to statisiticians and #rstats developers. Many thanks to reviewers who made this paper better! 🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

Many people hours, calls and messages later: OSTA is now “in (pre)print”, though the real thing lives at bioconductor.org/books/OSTA. Check it out, get in touch. We welcome any feedback, suggestions, wishes (& contributions). It’s been a joy working with you @estellayixingdong.bsky.social!

Do not use density-based visual encodings for non-density-preserving embeddings/dimensionality-reductions

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage

Trump administration demands states "undo" efforts to provide full SNAP payouts for November amid court battle

The Mamdani political sign generator is kinda fun https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/ccshan/for/for.html

Peer review seems like one of the last places AI should be used. The main args in-favor seem related to volume and bad-faith submissions of non-science content. More transparent approaches such as AbstractExplorer from @elglassman.bsky.social should be preferred doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747773

Now this is how you detect whether an election was stolen. Humans choose rounder numbers. by @TheEconomist

BREAKING: JUSTICE DEPARTMENT EATS A LOSS IN 'SANDWICH GUY' CASE AS JURORS FIND DEFENDANT NOT GUILTY www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

Your cat when you're choking to death in your apartment

Do we think the developers of the various 2FA apps put the "Yes" and "No" buttons on different sides on purpose

[corrected link] LLMs are often used for text annotation in social science. In some cases, this involves placing text items on a scale: eg, 1 for liberal and 9 for conservative There are a few ways to handle this task. Which work best? Our new EMNLP paper has some answers🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2509.03116

It really is amazing that when a popular young Democratic politician who wants to solve real problems for people beats an old-guard institutionalist Democrat in a primary, the institutionalist Democrat just stays in the race and basically runs as a Republican.

... they are ultimately models of text. Although they can do super-human text manipulation tasks, that doesn't mean they have concepts and understanding - the chain of thought looks cute, but I am not convinced it is working at a conceptual level - rather it is working at text reporting level

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

German study shows how far right sets agenda thanks to mainstream parties reshaping their communications to respond to what are initially fringe issues, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate shorturl.at/OFfig

PREACH! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Spatial architecture of development and disease go.nature.com/477Dmxs #Review by Enikő Lázár & Joakim Lundeberg Free to read here: rdcu.be/eJ9E4

Today was a hard day for Ph.D. students who found out that they can no longer apply for NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. "Devastating“ was how one student described it to me. #GradSchool #NSFGRFP www.science.org/content/arti...

Happy to share the Biodiversity Cell Atlas white paper, out today in @nature.com. We look at the possibilities, challenges, and potential impacts of molecularly mapping cells across the tree of life. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For the past five years, Kyle K. Courtney, who directs copyright and information policy for Harvard’s libraries, has fought to make e-books more accessible to public libraries across the United States. Sophie Gao and Alexandra M. Kluzak report. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

I am QT dunking but I think this is a case where it is warranted: Science is political and "not wanting to see politics" as a scientist is a political choice. You may decide it's what works for you, but you need to decide how that fits with the fact your (diverse) colleagues still exist 🧪

Happy to share that ShapeEmbed has been accepted at @neuripsconf.bsky.social 🎉 SE is self-supervised framework to encode 2D contours from microscopy & natural images into a latent representation invariant to translation, scaling, rotation, reflection & point indexing 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01009 (1/N)

Immigrants, particularly on H1Bs, are the lifeblood of American innovation. If you wanted to hurt US competitiveness in the next century, I can think of few more effective ways than a move like this Even when found illegal, the mere intent will have irreparably harmed our future

If only we’d elected Kamala.

The H1-B visa thing is, like everything else in the Trump administration, set up to carve up exceptions for friends and punish enemies. It’s the authoritarian thru-line that stitches everything together.

alert to all H1B holders, please share: Trump just banned H-1B employees from reentering US unless employer pays $100,000 "fee". Proclamation applies to both new H-1B entrants and current H-1B employees who are abroad. set to take effect tmrw sun sept 21. please return if you can. i am so sorry. 😢

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

In June, an ACIP member said that 250 pediatric flu deaths were no big deal. Maybe today we will find out that a handful of hepatitis B related cancers, transplants, and deaths are also not a big deal to them either. Welcome to the new public health. We are aligned to a manifesto, not science.

Measles cases hit record highs with RFK Jr. in charge. Now, his hand-picked vaccine panel just voted to make it harder for little babies to get vaccinated for measles and other diseases. How does that keep our kids safe?

wish everyone could agree not to bump requires-python if not actually using the new language features

Really insightful post from Julie Tibshirani (spotted in LinkedIn, can't find on Bsky) reflecting on #rstats 's unique governance structure and what can be learned for other languages jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the...

I stand by my claim that peak iPhone was the 2016 og iPhone SE. <4oz. Fits in the palm of my hand. I can reach all four corners with my thumb. With Touch ID I can have it already unlocked before it comes out of my pocket. At $399 I could buy several for the price of one iPhone 17.

The new ggplot2 4.0.0 now supports absolute plot dimensions 🤩 #rstats #dataviz #phd