Cambridge → Boston → Cambridge again: I’m thrilled to return to Cambridge(UK) to open my lab at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge!🥳 (mzhulab.com) We study how dev timing shapes and being shaped by plasticity, evolution & ageing. 🚩Hiring at all levels: pls email me if interested!📩

Forget skeleton evo devo we’re an algal ecology lab now

What a weekend!! Capel Lab trainees past and present gathered to celebrate Blanche’s incredible career. We danced, we laughed, we cried, and marveled over so many shared memories of the beach, working in the lab, and all the incredible science we accomplished with Blanche’s mentorship and guidance.

The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈 Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."

New preprint!! 🚨 Did you know that many vertebrate species determine sex based on environmental conditions rather than chromosomes? Some turtles, like Trachemys scripta, rely on temperature. We learned more about how this happen molecularly.👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

I love a winter holiday project (e.g. NYT mega crossword) and this year's activity was measuring and analyzing the measurements my Dad took of my height from age 6 to 19! My max growth marked in red.

guess the bones!!!

Look at those tail crescendos!! Another amazing example of disproportionate elongation of mid-tail vertebrae, and they note it is distal to the more functionally-constrained proximal tail.

The regulation and evolution of proportion is a classic challenge in biology. This is exciting work into the genetic and developmental basis of proportionality using a very cool model. Congrats Ceri! 👏🧪🧬🐭

Vertebral skeletal diversity in mammals is remarkable. How do the differences between vertebral size and shape develop and evolve? See how we tackled this question in our paper published in @natcomms.nature.com today!

Bsky brainstorm! I'm looking for a short(er)-tailed rodent amenable to embryological research (timed pregnancies, decent litter size, easy to get/breed enough to sacrifice dams, etc).

Out today. 🙏 again to everyone for this wonderful piece of work, in particular to Aurelie @aurhin.bsky.social Chase @chasebolt.bsky.social and Brent @homeobox.bsky.social. 🙏 also to the Harris lab @fish4walking.bsky.social and @neilshubin.bsky.social @biology-unige.bsky.social @college-de-france.fr

This is SO cool and was such a fun read this morning. Congrats to the whole team!!!

Side hustle level-up! My book, IN THE BEGINNING, will be published by @harperonebooks.bsky.social in 2027! It's about the human embryo, how it gets built, and what it means for where we come from and where we're going. @harpercollins.bsky.social (1/2) @socdevbio.bsky.social #devbiol #scicomm

It's chilling to hear my Dad's voice in Eric Dane's, knowing that ALS has reached his respiratory muscles and how heartbreaking it must be for his loved ones to watch the disease progress. I admire how @iamals.bsky.social approaches ALS research, treatment access, and outreach, so please amplify:

1) I am delighted to present this terrific tour de force research conducted by my post-doc Dr. Gayani Senevirathne @gayani.bsky.social and published today in Nature - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I think we have a new celebratory lab prosecco @ceriweber.bsky.social

We take for granted that our hands have two sides and can articulate in an endless number of ways. But what about a fish’s fin? Can a fish know something “like the back of its fin,” or have its future told with a fin palm reading? Check out this bluetorial to find out 👇🧪🧬🐟 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

This is insane and so wrong. This cohort of 2020 postdocs, who are now largely also job search ready in this market(?), keep getting screwed.

NIAMS just announced K99/R00 extensions, which is fantastic for trainees impacted right now, BUT I’d like to point out that the *only* postdocs who did not benefit from COVID extensions and are ineligible for the new extensions are those who started in 2020 lockdowns.

Extremely honored to receive this prize from @socdevbio.bsky.social, which recognizes not only my love for developmental biology, but the extremely online I am 🧪 (protect science, protect people, viva la dev bio!)

Love my #DevBio community! Congratulations on an amazing meeting! #2025ICDB @socdevbio.bsky.social @uribelab.bsky.social @mikepiacentino.bsky.social @ceriweber.bsky.social

Congratulations to @evodevodiva.bsky.social on her lifetime achievement award! Undergrad research in the Swalla lab helped make me into the evodevo scientist I am today.

Celebrating Blanche Capel with fellow Capel Lab alum Lindsey Barske at #2025ICDB #2025SDB @socdevbio.bsky.social

Great dinner with current and former members of the lab, as well as current and former Duke members and friends of the lab. Great to catch up with @ceriweber.bsky.social ,Ben, @woonyunghur.bsky.social and share stories. Great @socdevbio.bsky.social meeting!

Coming soon to a webinar format in your vicinity....more tk! #zebrafish #devbio #ShareYourTools 🐽

Great news!!! 🤩🙌 We are excited to announce the availability of travel funds to trainees that present at our #PASEDB25 meeting This funding was made possible by a new NSF grant to #PASEDB ✨ Apply for travel assistance here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I went with @ceriweber.bsky.social to the Puerto Rico Museum of Art and it is pretty neat

I'll be presenting my jerboa and mouse tail research at #ICDB2025 @socdevbio.bsky.social this week during the 'Role of Scaling in Development and Evolution' session on Friday. Hope to see you there!!

I'll be presenting my jerboa and mouse tail research at #ICDB2025 @socdevbio.bsky.social this week during the 'Role of Scaling in Development and Evolution' session on Friday. Hope to see you there!!

Can’t wait for #ICDB2025 next week! I’m arriving a day early to explore San Juan a bit - anyone else getting in early and want to join? I’m looking into food tours…

Blanche Capel receives the SDB Edwin G. Conklin Medal Award for her crucial work on Sex Determination, Testis and Ovary Development, and Germ Cell Biology #ICDB2025 🧪🧬

🚨 NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya is testifying before the US Senate Appropriations Committee today. The hearing is bound to be spicy, after more than 300 agency staff wrote him a letter decrying his leadership and actions as director. 🔥 I'll be live-posting the hearing, so follow along here.

We’re committed to making *all* of our published data available, but how do folks deal with huge image data sets? I have 10TB of uCT data and have no idea where to begin! Over 70 whole mouse and jerboa scanned at 9um3 from birth to 6wks of age.

New NIH Notice rescinding the no DEI, no Israeli boycott term and condition added to NIH grants (covers the whole university) This is what Williams refused to sign and declined all federal funding. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... 1/2

🚨BREAKING: 300+ NIH employees call out the harm of censorship & politicized science in scathing email to Bhattacharya, demanding an end to political interference, a lift on funding freezes, & rehiring of fired staff whose work saves lives. This is historic - insiders are blowing the whistle. 🧵(1/5)

gift link wapo.st/3ZGoHpS

Universities are not passive beneficiaries of government largesse. It is the federal government that depends on universities to conduct the research that keeps our nation healthy, safe and economically competitive.I discuss in the Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Flybase lost all of the NIH support overnight - it is a disaster for the community. Please consider donating. I just did! www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

How it felt submitting a manuscript yesterday as a senior postdoc who started during covid and is facing an uncertain future amid historic hiring freezes and funding cuts

Finishing the final figures for a paper is exhilarating 🤩

The Napoleon metaphor is extra spot-on because Napoleon was not actually all that short, but Colossal is similarly selling a version of what they envision dire wolves as instead of what they actually were.

In LA today - love the La Brea Tar Pits shade:

Harvard redid its whole homepage to push back against the administration’s demands. I mean, this is just a website but I think it’s kind of a great PR move: www.harvard.edu

alright i have my laptop, guess i'm livetweeting the dire wolf preprint. so a quick reminder: this is not yet peer-reviewed, so there's some different expectations re: quality. also let's be clear, i'm a hella biased reader, bc i don't trust the hype they're courting

Briefly read through this and...hmm. I have thoughts that may merit a deeper dive. One big concern: while their reference method seems reasonable for research uses, I'm thinking that if you want to claim you're cloning one, I'm sorry but you've actually gotta de novo that.

"Dire wolves paleogenomes were unexpectedly more similar to extant Canina genomes than anticipated" i'll fucking bet

Assuming it’s the dire wolf lineage that is admixed and not every other lineage or all. It’d be such a cool evolutionary mystery on its own if they hadn’t poisoned the well with their outrageous bias towards flashy news releases