Here is the link for Helene's preferred charity. Family requests donations to the fight against pancreatic cancer in lieu of flowers letswinpc.kindful.com

Helene was so giving to others about her battle, and went through to make it into maybe the top 1% of survivors of pancreatic cancer, before succumbing Dec 19, 2025 all while losing her father to it. She supported @letswinpc.org and the family asks for you to consider supporting them as well.💔

Helene was *truly* special. She was an outstanding scientist, colleague, friend, spouse, and mom. Many of you know that Helene had been battling pancreatic cancer for ~7 years and shared her courageous fight. My thoughts are with her husband, Michael Polymenis, and their two children.

Looks awesome and makes a huge amount of sense

When it comes to the national security implications of windmills, the military has of course a long history of rational suspicion and justified aggression.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

🫴🏻🌞⬆️

@peterfineran.bsky.social and colleagues develop Tn-seq for phages by leveraging anti-CRISPR (Acr) as a positive selectable marker in the presence of CRISPR-Cas counter-selection, and identify essential genes in phage from non model orgs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I do love this one #TCMbanger

The taste of American rich people never fails to amaze, but this is really something. Like Ellen says, make sure you check out the interior photos.

A Safdie cast is something like Adrien Brody, Jennifer Lopez, the Rent Is Too Damn High guy, Maurice Dubois, Charles Oakley and the guy who did the whistle on the PC Richards commercials

❤️

I’ve spent the past two days as pediatric ward attending and frankly we need both more and even better vaccines not fewer

2025

This looks interesting but I will need to read it carefully to really understand the method!

Never gets old.

Congratulations to everyone who wrote an op-ed about how he just wants americans to eat better

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Hey all, I reached out to the PO of my NIGMS MIRA to ask if the gov't shut down, and rescheduling of study sections, might allow for some accommodation to the standard rule that PIs cannot resubmit a MIRA while their MIRA (or other RPG) is under review (waiting in scores or summary statements) 🧪

HHS is reportedly planning to adopt Denmark’s vaccine schedule. The comparison driving this policy is totally misguided, and the consequences for American children would be severe. open.substack.com/pub/jakescot...

Based again on zero evidence of harm and no public discussion, they want to take away protections for our kids.

If you are in the US and you would like to send a message to your elected representative about the proposed dissolution of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, @agu.org makes it easy with a template here: agu.quorum.us/campaign/151... #AGU25

Please consider attending and RT. Great lineup of speakers!

kids, this is what you call a perfectly baited hook [utterly sincere/complimentary]

This is really cool!

Wirecutter | Looking for some last minute gifts? Here are four cryptocurrencies that shouldn’t lose more than 80% of their value within a year of purchase.

The executive order from January already took away medications (hormone therapy, puberty blockers, oral contraceptives for gender affirming uses). The only things that our local pediatric gender care clinic can still do for minors is counseling. RFKj wants to get rid of counseling.

I’ve been wondering more and more if TADs are about limiting recombination search and less about gene expression?

This is so gross - it’s a joke to be honest. Also though I would use A’ B’ before AA BB

"(Memoli's) actions look like those of a leader who has been given broad discretion to shrink down the agencys infectious-disease work—an area where he may have a few personal grievances. “People are afraid of him,” one official said, pausing. “I’m afraid of him.” www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

Amazon claims that running a marketplace gives access to "competitive bidding" all at their website. In reality, Amazon controls what buyers see and how they shop, and reacts to spending habits by maximizing prices. prospect.org/2025/12/17/a...

I remember writing years ago about a then-new initiative by Amazon to disrupt local government procurement of things like office and school supplies. Turns out Amazon's become very popular with school districts, and it's using dynamic pricing to rip those schools off. prospect.org/2025/12/17/a...

Biochemistry fam, help a sleep-deprived reporter out. Let's say you wanted to explain the GPCR/G protein cycle to someone who hadn't heard of it. Would you call GTP and GDP ligands? Cofactors? Small-molecule buddies?

This is very bad!!

A Nature study uses #PacBio long-read sequencing to map chromatin architecture in single cells with DAF-seq, extending Fiber-seq and showing multiomic HiFi reads capture chromatin features and sequence, revealing haplotype-specific regulatory variation across cells. Details: go.nature.com/4pODNVl

New preprint🚨 Imagine (re)designing a protein via inverse folding. AF2 predicts the designed sequence to a structure with pLDDT 94 & you get 1.8 Å RMSD to the input. Perfect design? What if I told u that the structure has 4 solvent-exposed Trp and 3 Pro where a Gly should be? Why to be wary🧵👇

Sure. Why not

Me walking away and leaving 2025 behind...

New online: Evolution of promoter-proximal pausing enabled a new layer of transcription control

This is a disaster. I would not be where I am today without the constructive (and yes, sometimes frustrating) reviews my NSF proposals received as a young investigator. This feedback didn't come from the POs but rather the peer reviewers and panelists who saw how I was trying to enter the field

Big retailers didn’t pull ByHeart baby formula fast enough apnews.com/article/byhe...

Feel like they should be fined millions of dollars??

A while back I found this clip of the SEINFELD cast paying tribute to Rob Reiner as part of an American Cinematheque honor he received in 1994. Its a rare bit of Castle Rock meta celebration.

This vaccine shows strong signal for reducing or delaying dementia! And who wants to get shingles? Get this vaccine!

There's always one detail that will crack your heart entirely open.

Remembering all the great needle drops in HOMICIDE LIFE ON THE STREET