6yo has been singing this song nonstop and I'm ok with that youtu.be/RvgYOIHtWDA?...

Man, what a heinous piece of shit.

I've become convinced my kids schools principal is either in completely their head, a liar, or both. Fun times!

Vermuuuuut

Lauren continues to write fabulous papers a lot this. This was the other week arxiv.org/abs/2603.29134

Or, if you'd like to make a one time donation to help keep the ship afloat, you can do so right here! Every single dollar *directly* helps support all the writers, artists, and editors who help make each new issue possible 🖤 www.paypal.com/donate/?host...

So... this takes a whole lot longer to climb out of than you might imagine. We've managed to keep things going for the time being—thanks to so many of you!—but we're definitely not out of the woods yet. Every subscription helps! Less than $2.50/month! www.brightwalldarkroom.com/subscribe/

Garden update

there's enough fixings to make a ginormous sandwich estimator

New preprint @cxqiu.bsky.social @jshendure.bsky.social ! Can we learn regulatory grammars of human cell types — by training on mouse development and transferring across 241 mammalian genomes? Introducing STEAM & a whole-organism scATAC-seq atlas from E10 to birth. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Latest from Shendure & Qiu labs (@cxqiu.bsky.social) )! We combined a new 4M cell mouse whole embryo scATAC-seq atlas (E10-P0), millions of 'evolutionarily coherent' orthologs from 241 mammalian genomes (Zoonomia), and the CREsted CNN framework (@steinaerts.bsky.social).

From Dr. Scientific Freedom himself. The integrity meter hits negative 10.

@ajhgnews.bsky.social's latest article addresses an important GWAS consideration: moving from variants to mechanism. This study reveals biological pathways shaping immune trait associations: https://bit.ly/3PZwPzQ #ASHG #HumanGenetics

any mapping from funk -> R is one I support

A foundation model trained on 36M cells across 8 species creates a universal embedding space for cell types—no fine-tuning needed for new data. It recovers developmental lineages and cell functions it was never explicitly trained on. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.28.568918

Were you inspired by our paper on the genetics of GLP-1 drug response? www.nature.com/articles/s41... Want to make impactful discoveries with the world's best genetic dataset? We're hiring! StatGen: tinyurl.com/ys4mvhej Risk Prediction: tinyurl.com/psamt294 Data Products: tinyurl.com/2ff7eavb

"sorry I can't come to your once-in-250-years party. I'll be busy doing something it would actually make much more logical sense to do four days later. I bumped it up on purpose so I could throw it in your face. eat shit forever, amen" there is no hater on earth like a hater from Chicago

A movie couple who would definitely have a podcast

The new LACMA is divisive. It's also ambitious, disorienting — and radically alive

This time we found variants in both GLP1R and GIPR associated with nausea and vomiting. Interestingly, the GIPR association was specific to patients taking tirzepatide (aka Mounjaro or Zepbound)... this also makes sense; tirzepatide targets both GLP1R and GIPR!

By running a GWAS on data we collected from an online survey about GLP-1 medication, we found a missense variant in GLP1R that predicts treatment success. This makes sense! GLP1R is the target of the GLP-1 medications!

Delighted to share our latest research from the 23andMe Research Team, just published in @nature.com ! We looked at data from >27,000 participants to uncover how human genetics influences weight loss efficacy and side effects of GLP-1 medications like semaglutide. A short thread 🧵👇

I built an agent (XXYYZZ) that excels at answering scientific questions. XXYYZZ was benchmarked against HLE-gold (149 human-verified questions from HLE). Totally at a loss for what to do with it. Any recommendations?

i don't think it's true that this is all netanyahu's fault, trump has his own agency and exercised it based on netanyahu's assurances, though i'm not sure this should matter very much to the next democratic administration when it comes to reevaluating our relationship with israel

Unwinding by chilling with my large adult son

No one made Donald Trump do this. No one made his administration support him in lockstep. This doesn't even have the excuse of defending Israel from a gruesome attack. This was wholly a war of choice, designed to maximize suffering & ruin a country. They all deserve to be tried & sentenced.

25th amendment. Impeachment. I will support any avenue to remove Donald Trump from office. We cannot leave this man in charge of America’s nuclear weapons as he threatens to end an entire civilization. And Congress must not fund this reckless administration.

This account does not cover anyone in glory but if it's even close to accurate the President entirely disregarded warnings from American military and intelligence as well as his cabinet in favor of the Netanyahu pitch.

Register for next week's webinar featuring @dnalawyer.bsky.social, one of our amazing Associate Editors!

Many knew what we were getting into when we signed up for soft money positions. With fewer obligations, we could prioritize the research we valued. Precarity for relative freedom. But now the system has changed, even actively targeted some, and there is no safety net. What a loss for us all.

Happy to see multiple optimizations to the edgePython codebase, with more on the way: github.com/pachterlab/e... I have already experimented with porting to Rust, and have it mostly done (with some extra speedup); useful to complete an end-to-end single-cell Rust ecosystem.

Brian and I were grad students together. He's a mensch, and the goons who torpedoed his funding and his livelihood are contemptible.

I don't know how to get through to these people that they should not fear being seen in opposition to this war. They should fear not being seen in opposition. They will live in regret of everything they did not do.

Analysis finds geometric thinking may come from wandering, not a human-only math module Interaction between mental navigation and natural language may support human capacities for Euclidean reasoning. The cognitive origins of geometry 🏺🧪 www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Some slides from a recent talk on missing heritability. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/kvogj...

Super excited to be launching two things today: #RustQC 🦀🧬 and rewrites.bio 🚀 I used AI to rewrite 15 RNA-seq QC tools into a single Rust binary (I've never written any Rust). It ended up being over 60x faster. Here's the story 🧵 seqeralabs.github.io/RustQC/

Your science matters—and it belongs in the global conversation. Abstract submissions for the ASHG Annual Meeting are now open. Share your discoveries, connect across borders, and help shape the future of human genetics and genomics. Submit by May 18. https://bit.ly/3PKPMpZ #ASHG26

Deadline is earlier this year! Make sure to get your abstracts in by May 18th and join us in Montreal this fall!

🧵 illustrating the laughably bad argumentation of the hereditarian crowd 👇 no one would take the slightest notice of these incompetent academics if their claims weren’t politically useful

In case a story sweetens the deal:

The Dodgers need to release a jacaranda-blue City Connect jersey

Watching To Live and Die in LA and they give you the Wang Chung song straight out the gate, this movie is NOT fucking around

yes we can — and yes we have

Mfw I figure out why I feel terrible

A little widget to play around with the various inputs and outputs that go into soft money research lab finances on a 10-year outlook. sashagusev.github.io/PISim/

Ah the age old question: should I beautify the front facade by planting bougainvilleas, or should I keep means for rodents to scurry up to the roof to a minimum?

In about an hour using Claude Code (see disclaimer in repo) I put together code to do something that is a pain in the ass to do manually - find a good genome in NCBI then see what decent population level WGS data exist for that genome assembly in NCBI SRA: github.com/brantfairclo.... I'm impressed.

The only acceptable remedy is Hegseth’s immediate removal from office. Anything else and it’s clear the entire administration is endorsing an American society operated by and for white men only. Yes, I also have my suspicions about that, but it should be made as explicit as possible.

The news needs to stop mincing words about what Hegseth is doing: restoring racial segregation to the US military by preventing anyone but white men from advancing