Remember when they fired the president of Harvard for… two inadequate citations in her 30yo dissertation?

"We’re pleased to introduce some cutting-edge yet profoundly user-unfriendly technology."

Anyway, if you want to follow people like me who are actively confronting racist pseudoscience and want to hound them into starting a nonprofit that can structure and support this vital work, check out this starter pack from my friend @jowiph.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/jowi...

bro are you fucking kidding me

The world

Men

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

I’m so glad to hear that Molly and Sandy heading up Amplify Legal, powerful storytelling org Abortion in America’s legal arm! Both are great leaders in the fight for reproductive rights, including supporting people in telling their stories (1/2) www.morningstar.com/news/pr-news...

If our university system emails me about joining weight watchers one more time I’m going to blow my lid. Multiple times this week (open enrollment). It’s a) none of their business b) not a good program c) doesn’t even work d) could be wildly triggering to someone with disordered eating. (1/2)

And for the trainees and scientific staff in their labs.......

Super cool new use of single gamete (single molecule!) genome sequencing - catching de novo mobile element insertions! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

From recombination superstars Payseur and Otto: new preprint "Elevated mutation near crossovers inhibits the evolution of recombination" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My take on the transformative gift that is MacKenzie Scott and her almost $1Billion in giving to HBCUs since 2020, and why what she is doing goes far beyond philanthropy--it is protecting the future of Academic Freedom, and Diversity. READ: www.forbes.com/sites/sophia... @forbes.com #HBCUs

Did you know that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences? I didn't until we did this project! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

Open letter from many #Emory faculty re the firing of a med school colleague. We asked that only tenured faculty who are citizens sign it. Many people worked hard on our Open Expression Policy, only to have it violated at least 3x in less than 3 yrs. www.emorywheel.com/article/2025...

This is a bad idea. Recruiting talented people from other countries is a good thing. American universities have been very good at it in particular. Recruiting talented people tends to benefit everyone. We should keep doing it. I am speaking in short sentences for the benefit of the Governor.

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

12/12

Free, professional illustrations of research organisms! 🎨🐁🪼🧪 We compiled original vector/raster graphics of 70+ organisms & viruses into a CC0 library. All by @arcadiascience.com's Audrey Bell Check it out & show us how you use them! research.arcadiascience.com/pub/resource... #SciArt #OpenScience

I call it “joyful rigor” when I explain this effort to my students. I don’t believe in or rather, I’m not a “suffering poet.” I’m a writer who enjoys writing. The work works on me and I’m grateful for the opportunity to delve into the process at my own pace and to be changed by it.

THIS. I already missed a study section where I review grants two weeks ago due to the shutdown and the study section that was slated to review my grant that will decide if I get to keep my lab open or not ... was supposed to meet this week. Neither is happening and that is destructive to science.

Did you know that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences? I didn't until we did this project! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

The knowledge was already free!! Open textbooks and libraries exist!! The benefit of a professor is having an expert teach it to you in a structured manner with assignments for practice and assessments to keep you accountable. Profs aren't keepers of secret knowledge. We are essentially tutors.

I just emailed my "Silence" essay to the Presidents/Chancellors and Provosts of the 9 Compact universities as well as those from the 4 orgs with which I have been formally affiliated. The essay can be found here: jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g... and here: www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremy...

Everybody makes money out of academic authors except the authors...News. Wiley is the latest academic publisher to reach a multi-million deal to allow access to its content to AI developers, with no opt out, let alone payment, for the authors who created that content.

These three figures get me every time: Our conceptualization of heredity; the explanations which have the most explanatory force. I cannot overstate the importance of this book to #DevoEvo; it wrote us back into evolution; archetypes and all. (Re-reading for my foundations of DevoEvo class)....

Nature has published an article on the crisis facing MODs Model organism databases face budget cuts and closures www.nature.com/articles/d41... @zfinmod.bsky.social @xenbase.bsky.social @yeastgenome.bsky.social @mousegenome.bsky.social @ratgenome.bsky.social @geneontology.bsky.social @nature.com

There's an update on the state of FlyBase on the FlyBase.org front page. You can contribute to FlyBase at this link wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase... We express enormous gratitude to the people, labs, groups, and foundations who have already helped us. #FlyBase #Drosophila

For more detail on my experience: A thorough article and interview www.cnn.com/2024/11/11/h... Me two weeks post loss on Morning Joe youtu.be/JAmSk3Y9G38?... Article based on interview I gave 5 days after my loss/abortion www.usatoday.com/story/news/h... (1/2)

Hospital policies absolutely matter. And. The laws that cause hospital policies to matter this much are the problem! The policy at the hospital where I had to wait for lifesaving abortion care last year has been updated since (hurrah!) - but that does not help all or fix the underlying issue.

😳

Appreciate the framing of caution, but having seen vibe coded analysis routines the publication pressures that create them, this is candy flavored poison. The cited paper demonstrates the value of human labor in the training set, and required expert intervention in simply loading 8/12 datasets

Would love to see this using up to date models (because I know a lot of people will just not this its relevant given using Dec 2023 tools). For what it’s worth I find the newer tools still have some of the same problems, also some improvements.

As anyone who writes critically about medical research like this should take pains to note, “cancer” is a diverse set of different diseases with different genetic bases and different treatments. (Alzheimer’s likely is like this too.) And he’s wrong: NIH has developed cures for some cancers.

Since apparently this needs to be stated again, a reminder that TWO THIRDS OF THE US VOTERS believe abortions should be legal in all or most cases, making it FAR more popular or unifying than Ezra Klein....

This entire article was a really good read for this Monday morning www.thenation.com/article/acti...

In Small Things, our university email has reached a new low/peak of hilarity: it has flagged an email *sent by me to me via a listserv* as 'from outside your organization'. (Nudging out the previous top contender, flagging an email from the chair of my department as from outside the organization)

Here is a word cloud of the words that were missing from the noncompetitive renewal awards but had been present in the parent award. 3/4

Nominations for the 2026 IDEA award are now open! Deadline Oct. 15. www.evolutionmeetings.org/diversity-at...

"We’re currently at about 54% of last year’s total [of funded R01s]...Another way to look at this is that we’re missing 1,809 new R01s."

This is cool! Thanks GSA!

"The fact that a concept as tepid as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” caused our nation’s racists to become so enraged that the backlash to it threatens to end the American democratic experiment once and for all has made me reassess the virtues of the term." www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/more-dei-l...

That's bc it doesn't "know" they've been retracted. Bc it cannot think, analyze, or evaluate.

Today 14 scientific societies in #ecology #evolution and #marineScience are publishing the results of a survey that finds negative impacts of federal policies on food security, flood mitigation, infectious disease preparedness, and wildlife conservation: 🧪👩‍🔬 www.firsthandaccounts.org/impacts/2025...

Because it already being very dangerous to be pregnant in FL and TX (and GA where I am/was when I had to wait for life saving abortion care during a harrowing late miscarriage)...wasn't enough?

Reading the article, it appears the plan is as the headline says, changing staffers' titles, not their support roles. Clearly trying to evade accusations that identity-focused services are "exclusionary"—makes some sense, but risks making those services less likely to reach students who need them.

She was never apolitical, she just took aim at fat people, which people thought was acceptable and therefore they misinterpreted her as apolitical.

Here's the letter, and the signatures www.savehhs.org/read-the-let...

Over 750 HHS current and former employees are *on the record* criticizing RFK Jr in the aftermath of the CDC shooting. They call him “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure ... by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Really excited to share my first PhD paper about fitness effects of chromosomal inversions! Using an experimental approach we explored if inversions involved in ecotype divergence in threespine stickleback affect fitness-proxies 1/🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... @heredityjournal.bsky.social