Can't fathom @genetics-gsa.bsky.social putting a question like this on a questionnaire for #PEQG26 - it is like asking me who my favorite F1 is. (btw looking forward to learning about ALL of these topics from ECR posters - especially if the computational/stat geneticists take it easy on me!)

Seattle-area folks: @uwgenome.bsky.social is doing a "Sunday Science Party" at the Southwest Library branch tomorrow! 2:00-3:30, activities for all ages including a model organism petting zoo, cat genetics mystery to solve, giant DNA mapping puzzles, make DNA (from strawberries or candy), and more.

HELP! Does anyone know how to find who was the “firsts” to sit on nih study section? I can find lit with current levels of representation but I’m trying to learn about initial not-a-white-guy folks who broke in and the surrounding circumstances. Thank youuuuu

The Canvas (Instructure) hacking debacle is awful - & especially bad timing for those of us heading into finals next week, as our Canvas instance is down right now! I will choose to focus on the silver lining: that I have been advising students for years NOT to use the Canvas messaging tool. 1/2

Am I the only biologist who sees Manduka Yoga ads and thinks their campaign needs an edit? Fixed it for them… 📷 Garrett Hargiss

Wow - the Weather Underground hazard statements make really precise measurements!

I'm an optimist, and one of my hopes is that our elected officials are all watching this and thinking: we should do better funding STEM (and not for military purposes…)!

For your viewing pleasure: this absolute unit of a carpenter bee on my pomelo tree's blossoms

Kinda bummed @xkcd.com didn't somehow magically convert all the past comics in the Greyscale Mode option. Imperial system wins again, even in the absence of colour.

The science world can be a small place. As a grad student, I used the CHORI-213 bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library to identify Y chromosome-specific parts of threespine stickleback genome. Membranes the BAC clones were hybridized to used + control clones from the RPCI-94 BAC library… 1/3

Attention #CalState and other students. #CSUBIOTECH @csubiotech.bsky.social is hosting the Career Webinar Series this April. Register: forms.gle/RHSmezbAyS29... SPEAKER: Tali Tuchin, Partner @ Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C DATE/TIME: April 6, 2026; 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PST

From NSF, about the NSF AI-Ready America initiative: “Winning the AI race is vital to ensuring continued American dominance in defense, innovation, and economic strength.” I didn't know AI was a race? How does a country know if it has won the race? What's the prize?

🚨 NEW deadline, March 30, 5:00 pm EDT: Submit an abstract for poster presentation at #PEQG26: buff.ly/21BQsPh Presenting a poster allows you to get direct feedback, with ample time to chat about your work with potential collaborators, mentors, & employers, while polishing your presentation skills.

Applications to the Gordon Research Seminar in Speciation are now open! We encourage PhD students & postdocs from all geographies, backgrounds, disciplines to APPLY! This 2d seminar in beautiful Lucca 🇮🇹 will be followed by a 5d conference open to the broader community. www.grc.org/speciation-g...

I am absolutely holding Fisher Scientific to what is printed on this order.

Publication of Bohemian Grove membership roll thebohemiangrove.info : Robert Tjian, Stanley Prusiner, Deepak Srivistava among scientist members. Cal State Uni system has representation: Dennis Desjardin, Aaron Lington, Irving Santana, Cyrus Ginwala, Ravinder Seghal, Thomas Cropper

Saw this earlier in the responses & I want to re-up the idea of filling one's calendar with a recurring 24/7 event. I don't use my Google Calendar, so my event reads "My schedule is not up to date - please contact me for availability." Nobody has scheduled events for me on top of it so far (5+ yrs)

Ok preprint aficionados, what are your experiences with manuscript formatting requirements (e.g. biorxiv) - strict or relaxed? If I wanted, can I preprint laid out as a journal article (inline figures, multicolumn, etc.)?

I've been wondering about this since a post that said authors have something to hide if they don't preprint. I have nothing to hide & don't preprint bc I'm always the one writing the paper, and by the time I get it done I submit it to a journal, when I see no benefit of preprinting. Change my mind?

To: or Cc: on email? TIL: though nobody looks to see if they were a To or Cc recipient, some set up filters to handle Cc differently (e.g. send to trash!) & on Gmail at least, multiple To: recipients all receive a Reply w/o using Reply All (but to include Ccs you must use Reply All). TMYK.

Look, these are the sorts of manuscript titles we just can't be using anymore. Imagine what all the billionaire right-wingers are going to be doing next? Either complaining this got funded or starting to look into whether this also works in humans!

I would like to think @wyomingwormboy.bsky.social for describing the Sledgehammer Approach (to research) in WormBook. It is invaluable advice that I share with every trainee.

This paper raises a question for me: how short can a Discussion be? One 1 hand, the Intro is full of citations & this is a description of novel gene. On the other, I've never seen a Discussion w/only 2 citations. There must be more context to explore?

Editing my "Image manipulation" slides for research ethics class. Here's my AI-generated (Firefly) cover image, since it will be Groundhog's Day. Crowdsourcing what I should add to this topic in the AI era: I've got the famous rat phallus from a couple(?) of years ago; other egregious examples?

Because of technical issues with the SciENcv website, NIH is extending a period of leniency accepting old format biosketches through May 2026 (see FAQ #5): grants.nih.gov/faqs#/common...

I have so many questions…"Columbia [Sportswear] sent people into the woods to collect American Black Bear scat, which was then introduced to brewing water at Breakside Brewing. Breakside then made the water safe to drink and turned it into a beer." www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/u-s-wor...

Just submitted my lab's abstract to #PEQG26 @genetics-gsa.bsky.social "Increased male frequency in C. briggsae intra-species hybrids occurs by genetic incompatibility that produces X nondisjunction" - & we're abstract #72, which means I hope many more will be submitting by the 2/5 deadline!

This is cool, & I 🫶 Micropubs & their use as a way to get course-based research out into the world! When the one allowed figure has 13 panels, is it really a Micropublication? Quick review and short format is nice, & there's also something to be said for expansive written support for this much data.

Super excited to discover what's up (genetically) with the multigenerational hybrid replicate lines that undergrad Alyssa cryopreserved Friday & will be isolating DNA from soon! Long time since the lab used this many cryovials at once. 5 vials/line: 1 to test thaw, 2 for -80 and 2 for liquid N.

Wish me luck - time to SciENcv…

Cold carpenter bee in the backyard yesterday. These big ones are fun to watch lumbering (ha!) around in the air - though I don't appreciate their boring into timber that is part of my house…

A 2025 Christmas nematOde: Twas the night before Christmas, and up in my lab I propagated some worms by moving a slab of NGM agar from one plate to another and set up some crosses between a herm and its brother (1/9)

In 2011, I penned a Christmas nematOde, reproduced here. A 2025 version follows in my next post. On the day before Christmas, twixt my house and the lab not a creature was stirring, not even a cab; I was heading in early to make preparations so I could enjoy the next day's celebrations (1/8)

Not often you see (almost) the entire state of California under some sort of severe weather advisory/watch/warning. Merry Christmas and stay safe out there!

Further, the Tuskegee study is often not referred to as an experiment for ethical reasons…same as the current situation

Very excited to share this work led by Austin Link, a graduate student in our lab. We have discovered a novel, fig-associated microbe that promotes reproductive success via variable life history mechanisms in two nematode species. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

13 years in & proctoring exams is still one of my least favorite parts of professing. I get so nervous for the students, remembering how stressful it is to take undergrad final exams, however long ago that was for me… Maybe someday when I don't have a class of 105 I'll do an alternative exam

Cool stuff! (& also no citations of my group's work on mitonuclear epistasis in C. briggsae…)

It has been a really remarkable couple of weeks. Central CA barely ever seeing the sun is shocking. My drives over Pacheco Pass have also been through pretty dense clouds.

Last yr I nominated a staff member for a univ-wide award & she got it. This yr I nominated a jr prof for a college award & she got it. Now thinking about who to nominate for what next year. Peers: please make time to make nominations. Great for them; good for you too - shine a light on great people!

If you don't think peer review is worth doing, don't give it to AI; just decline to review. I'd rather not publish than have anonymous scientists feed my work to brain-atrophying ecological disasters. I'm happily declining reviews from journals that allow AI review. AI is a slippery slope here!

Some days have great highs & unexpected lows. The low: an incubator malfunctioned overnight & cooled too much (hope the worms survived!) & then it defrosted onto the lab floor. Thanks Facilities for moving it outside! & congrats to former undergrad Adrianna who was accepted into med school! 🎉🎉🎉

A toxic professor trait is my undying hope/belief that I can use exams to reinforce important connections & essential conclusions. But, if my students are like I was, they're just stressed & trying to get through the test - & not thinking that they can actually be learning during an exam. Can they?

Not claiming to be a great P0, but when F1.2 browses the CD collection and asks to borrow OK Computer, I feel very happy

Also not a fan of using the phrase "beliefs of language models" - language models don't have "beliefs" do they? Even AI knows that AI can't have beliefs:

This sums up the 2000s quite nicely IMO (& sorry to hear about your woes Dana!)

Fun to see @ericshaag.bsky.social quoted in a CNN piece on exactly what I was hoping to see about the concept of "reverse evolution" - it is problematic language to use, and I hope science educators will grab this research paper & CNN story to help spread the word! www.cnn.com/2025/10/30/s...

Had an advising appointment with the parent of a toddler today, so I rolled out the handy dandy cart of kid entertainments. (It could be a basic backpack or duffel in the department office, too.)

New preprint! We unexpectedly discovered that some Caenorhabditis species delete parts of their somatic genome early in development, which fragments their chromosomes and eliminates key germline genes. Multiple lines of evidence suggest this bizarre process was present in the ancestors of C. elegans

Anyone looking for an undergrad research assistant this coming summer? I have a truly phenomenal undergrad with expertise in genetic mapping, long read sequencing & bioinformatics who wants experience in another lab before grad school. She has been in our lab for 3 years & writing her first paper!