I resigned from the National Science Board in May when meaningful oversight became untenable. I respect colleagues who stayed to serve the NSB's mission. Today's news clarifies that was an erosion of oversight and function has become open elimination of the Board itself. 🧵 time.com/7285045/resi...

Come join us in Ann Arbor for the mid-west hub! We'll have keynote talks from Will Harcombe, @beabasel.bsky.social, and @relenski.bsky.social on site, and many others on simulcast. Abstracts are due next week! We'll have a bit of travel funds for students that need them.

Come join us in Ann Arbor, MI for the MEEHubs26 meeting!

REMINDER - Abstract submission deadline for MEEHubs2026 is April 19! Get you abstract in and present at one of the hubs August 3-5, 2026✨You'll be in great company! We have a fantastic lineup of speakers‼️ Links and more info here: meehubs.org

My lab at Pitt is looking for a Research Scientist to help us make phage therapy for patients with antibiotic-resistant infections. Please share and apply! cfopitt.taleo.net/careersectio...

The fact that nobody seriously believes there is an institution in this country that will check the president—that we’re all just sitting here hoping that he gets distracted and fails to follow through on his genocidal threats—is the most damning indictment of our political system I’ve seen yet.

BERMAN: Do you think Congress should have a vote if the United States is going to make a whole civilization die? MIKE LAWLER: John, you are parsing here BERMAN: I was quoting

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

the trump administration is selling this country wholesale to rapacious, extractive industries that will destroy our collective resources for private profit morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...

Listening to law students talk about their use of AI and lack of desire to “do any work” is making me seriously terrified about the future.

Today I'm teaching about responsible AI usage in my Computer Science capstone class. I regularly emphasize the need to understand code and to cite anything AI generated. But how can I make the point that AI is reducing depth of understanding because students no longer have to dig for answers? (1/6)

Happy to share the final version of @oliviamghosh.bsky.social's paper on inferring low dimensional phenotype-fitness maps from high-throughput fitness measurements across environments. Fun collaboration with @oliviamghosh.bsky.social, @grantkinsler.bsky.social, & @petrovadmitri.bsky.social

57 of my fellow students were arrested, academically disciplined, and barred from campus 2 weeks before finals. And then the visas of some of those students were quietly revoked. And then the DEI office was killed. And then we watched our mentors’ grants evaporate over “woke”.

I guess with race science discourse still percolating, I should re-up my starter pack for people who work on the topic

Madness. A bacterium with a 10kb genome, lost replication initiation, translation.., relies on symbiotic host. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share this review🔔, we spent sometime thinking about phage–microbiome–immune–oncology axis for phage therapy in cancer! #phage #phagesky Phage therapy in oncology: opportunities for cancer prevention and treatment: Trends in Molecular Medicine www.cell.com/trends/molec...

If you're a senior PhD student or recent graduate interested in doing work at the intersection of AI and microbial genomics and/or microbiomes, please feel free to reach out to discuss the possibility of applying together for an MIT Novo Nordisk Fellowship engineering.mit.edu/novo-nordisk

Paul Ehrlich has died. Most will remember him for "The Population Bomb." But for many of us, Ehrlich and Raven 1964 was a foundational read that influenced our careers. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country. The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: www.pewresearch.org/...

The FDA “has increasingly issued drug rejections or refusals — about 20 in the last eight months — that underscore a break from decades of general stability… It has advised companies to launch costly and complex studies that could add years to finding treatments for rare diseases with no cure”

New paper showing that bacteria with more genes for cooperation can live in a broader range of habitats and that genes for cooperation are more more likely to be in the accessory genome www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @lauriebelch.bsky.social

Having to negotiate with an AI host agent on Airbnb to adjust a reservation is the worst fucking version of the future I could imagine. Can we make this illegal ASAP.

Thank you again @michaeldgreen.phd for speaking out. I don't know what bothers me more: Director Bhattacharya's callousness that damaging the careers of talented young scientists is "the cost of doing business" for his politics or His ignorance and lack of imagination about experimental design.

I don’t repost CATO lightly…

There’s always a post indeed. Again, with alt text.

This whole Anthropic vs OpenAI shit feels a lot like an elaborate excuse to give OpenAI a bailout (while testing their limits).

I come not to praise Claude or whatever but giving unaccountable robot decisionmaking to thundering dipshits who just shot down their own drone with a laser does seem like wrong side of history business

This week's cover @thelancet.com

In case you missed it: our review titled "Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities" is out! 🚨 Let me hit you with some highlights on why spatial structure matters. (and why you should care!) Sharing is appreciated 🙏 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1093/fems...

Happy 38th birthday to the #LTEE! #BOTD in 1988. Keep on evolving! #science #evolution #microbiology

Provocative? This sounds dangerous. “With a provocative new proposal, an AI company has offered regulators a way to let a broad swath of potentially risky AI devices flood the market… “You run the risk of, proverbially, a Trojan horse,” said oncologist Ravi Parikh”

Spoken like a man who would use you as a battery if he could

Alita Burmeister (@aburmeister.bsky.social) is looking to hire a postdoc (or potentially a PhD student) for projects on phage resistance and evolution. The position description is posted to the Eco-Evo Jobs wiki and also available on her lab's website (arburmeister.weebly.com).

I am looking for wide-ranging mammalian DNA samples for a class I am developing. Especially sought-after would be parent-offspring paired samples. Please retweet (re-skeet?), thank you!

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15 csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

SFI’s Santiago Elena has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. He joins 62 fellows in the 2026 class. His work explores how RNA viruses adapt to hosts and manipulate cellular resources. Since joining SFI in 2008, he has organized several working groups on virus evolution.

I’m really honoured to receive the Stevenson Award! I’m grateful for the support of my colleagues, mentors, and everyone who makes this work possible. I’m lucky to be surrounded by incredible people from whom I get to learn and with whom I get to work every day 🧪✨ @uofgcbs.bsky.social

Abstracts are due on Wednesday y'all. Lots of cool phage work at this year's meeting. Submit your abstracts soon and come hang out with us! asm.org/events/asm-m...

The host range of generalist and specialist phages in capsule-diverse Klebsiella hosts is driven by the evolvability of receptor-binding proteins @plosbiology.org from @pilardomingoc.bsky.social journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Some fantastic sessions being planned for ASM Microbe 2026, including "Long-term Dynamics of Environmental Microbiomes", and "Eco-evolutionary Dynamics of Phages and Their Roles in Horizontal Gene Transfer". Get your abstract(s) ready, and join us June 4–7, 2026 in D.C. ! asm.org/events/asm-m...

3. While big oil, big tobacco, etc. serve as well-known cautionary tales, social media research poses novel challenges for independent researchers—perhaps most notably, access to the study system itself. It's like trying to study climate change if Exxon-Mobile owned all the world's thermometers.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has been at agencies protecting public health this year (eg CDC, HHS, HRSA, HUD, NIH, OSHA). Privacy respected. Signal is AmyMaxmen.25 🧵Here's a thread of some of my stories this year on the impact of the Trump administration on America's public health.

If I have any credibility with you from 20 years of reporting on rightwing & fascist movements, please listen when I beg you not to celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot. Leave aside morality: this isn’t a match in dry grass, it’s a torch. We do not want what this could ignite & we would not win.

“That kind of quiet, behind-the-scenes expertise happens every day across health systems in America. Most people never notice, because the system works. Outbreaks are tracked, food borne infections contained, environmental hazards investigated, long before headlines appear.”

This is an incredible visualization, not only about shoddy vaccine-autism studies, but about how to read and understand every research manuscript like a reviewer would

In authoritarian crackdowns, it’s important to randomly ensnare some people whom one would think would be safe, so that everyone is at least a little bit afraid that something could happen to them. The regime scales up its power of intimidation over a much larger group than those directly affected.

It takes a lot of chutzpah for the Director to claim: "[A]s a vaccine intended for broad public use, especially during a public health emergency, the platform has failed a crucial test: earning public trust." when it is precisely this kind of OpEd that has reduced trust. We have a long road ahead.

During COVID, people like the current head of the NIH and the head of FDA's CBER division accused me to an audience of millions of committing "child abuse" for simply creating mathematical models of school closures and childhood vaccination. This was concerning. IMO they knew what they were doing.