A study of Mexican citizens shows that dissatisfaction with democracy predicts low engagement with voting, both as voters and as poll workers. According to the authors, the global decline in satisfaction with democracy is cause for concern. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/9k9X50YIlVP

Excellent post from @caseynewton.bsky.social on Sam Altman, the attacks on his home, Altman’s own words, and OpenAI lobbying www.platformer.news/sam-altman-a...

Despite the obvious superiority of fresh-frozen material for genomics, many samples are still stored in FFPE and remain challenging to characterize with Whole-genome sequencing. But here comes our solution:

"All of these things frighten me, and they should frighten you as well. I made the decision to create a life for myself here, because I viewed this as a place that rewarded determination, hard work, and integrity. It still has a chance to be that place again." open.substack.com/pub/ofthebra...

"Jay Bhattacharya is a lying sack of shit" is an evergreen statement

Who had “US threatening to invade Vatican City” on the Bingo Cards??

Deadline for abstracts for a chance of a talk at #HiTSeq26 and #ISMB26 is tomorrow- please send your abstracts!

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 🧵👇

Graph transformer for ancient ancestry inference https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.05.714076v1

Submit via the ISMB 2026 system and select HiTSeq as the track. More info at hitseq.org.

#HitSeq is the annual ISCB gathering focused on high-throughput sequencing algorithms, and about 50% of talks are selected from submitted abstracts. This year’s keynote speakers are Christopher Mason, Mihaela Pertea, and Andre Kahles 🤖

Abstract deadline approaching for #HitSeq26 at #ISMB2026: April 9 ⏰🧬💻 If you are developing new algorithms, methods, or tools for high-throughput sequencing data, please submit an abstract for a chance to present a talk or poster at the meeting in Washington, DC, July 12-16.

Five Reasons Why It Still Wasn't a Lab Leak Time for some of that civil disagreement that the NIH Director can't get enough of rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/five-reaso... Dr. A. Rasmussen took the time to put this together, to set the record straight. @angierasmussen.bsky.social Worth reading!

Point cloud local ancestry inference (PCLAI): continuous coordinate-based ancestry along the genome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.23.713813v1

Matt Ridley gave the inaugural "NIH Scientific Freedom Lecture Series" earlier today and I just wanted to run through some of the main claims he made - you'll be unsurprised to learn that almost all of them are false. Here's his summary slide - let's start there. 🧵👇

Current rules for medical devices are a poor fit for GenAI’s flexible nature. It’s not just about accuracy; 70% of AI datasets have license issues, and hallucinations make automated monitoring a mess. The authors here call for an adaptive, global frameworks to keep clinical AI safe. #MedSky #MedAI

Seen outside the Baltimore Convention Center during ACMG 2026

NIH/NSF funding is, for all intents and purposes, frozen again. This somehow almost feels worse than last year. They are running out the clock on biomedical science and all PIs can do is scramble to finish projects before our resources dry up. www.science.org/content/arti...

Read @flodebarre.bsky.social's original analysis: pandemonium.hypotheses.org/898. While the original WeChat post is bonkers, it points to unreleased data from the market, including: 1️⃣ Potentially infected animals in "Stall A" - the hot-spot inside the market. 2️⃣ +Serology of vendor from Stall A.

Favorite Line of the Night because the truth... matters. #PedoPrez

Read why NIH colleagues resigned. Brave writing from Sylvia Chou, Alexa Romberg, Paul Grothaus and Vani Pariyadath. 🧪 #science #standupforscience #integrity www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n...

EXCLUSIVE: Military leaders warned Hegseth not to gut the offices that limit risk to civilians. He ignored them. The decision faces renewed attention as the Pentagon investigates a strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed hundreds of children.

New paper showing that much of the apparent success of protein language models in predicting mutational effects is a mirage: These models mostly memorize sites. 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Trump Administration is waging war on universities by suspending their funds. N.I.H. grants to universities are down by more than 90 per cent in the current fiscal year; so far in 2026, the National Cancer Institute hasn’t made a single grant. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/oxA7Ey

"No stupid rules of engagement"

Vinay Prasad has been an a noxious influence on public health and drug regulation. Good riddance. UCSF should not take him back. He should wander in the wilderness forever. www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/h...

There Is No Plan

🧬 New Review from Cromer et al! 📄 Incorporating polygenic risk scores and social determinants of health across populations: Considerations and best practices in research #PRS #SDoH

84% of the time, “ChatGPT Health” killed a customer using their paid service as advertised

David Botstein has passed away. A true pioneer in the genetics and biotechnology industry, known methods to map genes. While at Stanford he collaborated with Pat Brown in microarrays, co-founded the Gene Ontology and became the CSO of Calico. He worked again with Pat Brown at Impossible Foods. RIP.

Here is my opening statement to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today.

After the arrests of powerful men across the world, you might be asking why the US has so much trouble holding its leaders accountable for lawbreaking. Since Nixon, all three branches of government have worked hard to ensure they can break the law with impunity www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Rare disease piece in @theatlantic.com, how carriers of recessive conditions can have medical problems, making them more than 'carriers'. Gift link below. www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

I regularly post updates on this story because it's an atrocity on an incomprehensible scale but people don't really talk about it www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Democracy is when voters choose their leaders. Autocracy is when leaders choose their voters.

So now the US is spending the enormous sum of $38 billion to build concentration camps? ICE is calling them "detention centers" but we know what they really are. I cannot believe my country would do this. Everyone should speak out against it wapo.st/3OfarSk

WSJ editorial board hits FDA: It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as Vinay Prasad who rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine without even a cursory review. www.wsj.com/opinion/vina...

Happy #DarwinDay! 🎉We celebrate Darwin’s insight into evolution by natural selection—a reminder that science education helps us question, explore, & understand the world around us. Honor Darwin’s curiosity & learn fast genetics facts at Discover Genetics: bit.ly/4rqaDwN

"We should be skeptical of any people who sell themselves as singularly capable of giving health advice on the internet and should always follow the money and connections where they lead." gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/o...

Attendance plummets at some science meetings. Travel bans. Gov Shutdowns. Funding. www.science.org/content/arti...

RFK Jr said during his Senate confirmation hearings that his trip to Samoa in 2019 ahead of a devastating measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines." Documents obtained by @us.theguardian.com and @apnews.com undermine that testimony. Details here, by me and @aliswenson.bsky.social ⬇️

Excited to share my first preprint on federated conditional analysis of rare single variant and aggregate association tests across six genetically-inferred ancestry groups in All of Us and UK Biobank doi.org/10.64898/202...

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Surprised (but also not that surprised) that the AlphaGenome paper didn't officially cite any of the primary data used for training their model (see Fig. 1, thousands of datasets made with tremendous time and effort over >15yrs). What's up with that @nature.com ? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wrote today about AlphaGenome, Google DeepMind's AI for DNA. It's powerful, experts told me, but it won't solve the mysteries of the genome overnight. Gift link: nyti.ms/4k5NFIl

more details and sharp analysis from @willoremus.com and @aaronschaffer.com here is a gift link wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

some of my favorite snippets from newly released court docs in the Anthropic copyright book case. eye-opening stuff on Project Panama, their plan to "destructively scan all the books in the world" in order to train AI

Not only was DOGE illegally accessing your Social Security information, but it was also illegally offering to share it with third-party political groups working to overturn elections. This is a deep betrayal of the public trust and must be fully investigated. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/u...