@standupforscience.bsky.social #StandWithJenna 2/2

Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.

New student loan limits could change who gets to become a professor, doctor or lawyer

“Private equity billionaire Marc Rowan was revealed last week to be the driving force behind a Trump administration campaign pressuring nine major U.S. universities. Apollo Global Management, which Rowan co-founded in 1990, own[s] the for-profit University of Phoenix.”

Polysaccharide-degrading archaea dominate acidic hot springs: genomic and cultivation insights into a novel Thermoproteota lineage Candidatus Marsarchaeota is now isolated and renamed as Tardisphaerales (phylum Thermoproteota) 🤓 @asm.org journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

~40% of Hepatitis B infections are caught in childhood. It is contagious enough that it can be spread just from sharing common household objects. The chance of chronic infection (ie does not clear, and is associated with high rates of liver failure and cancer) ranges from 50%-90% in this age group.

Lokiarchaea are tricky to work with in the lab: they grow very slowly, exclusively in an oxygen free environment with the presence of symbiotic bacteria. But with careful nurturing, scientists hope to witness their cell division at work.

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N

Extraordinary paper. I LOVE this sentence: “This translates to a net lateral gene transfer rate of ~250 genes L−1 seawater day−1 and involves both “flexible” and “core” genes. “ Must read in detail, but these numbers are amazing. academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

I gave a symposium talk at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 2025 (#eseb2025) meeting last week and this was my title slide showcasing how I was speaking as an independent scientist because @dalhousieu.bsky.social @dalhousie.bsky.social has locked us out.

Saddened to learn of the passing of Moselio "Elio" Schaechter—Distinguished Professor at Tufts, SDSU and UCSD—humanist and visionary leader in the fields of microbiology and scientific communication—mentor, friend, and inspiration to me and so many others Small Things Considered Big Things Achieved

🧪 Update: NSF will *appeal* an earlier court order that blocked 15% indirect rates. I'm mostly surprised it took this long for them to file an appeal. So the fight continues. See: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... Article from June as context: www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Do you love alpine plants, ancient DNA, and/or population genetics? My lab will be hiring a postdoc soon to be based at the University of Maine! We’re looking for someone who uses genetic tools and thinks like a community ecologist. Happy to chat at #ESA2025 if you’re interested.

Latest paper elifesciences.org/articles/107... closes an important cycle in our efforts to study regeneration: week-long recordings allow us to observe the behaviour of cells during the entire course of regeneration in a crustacean leg – bright objects in movie are fluorescent nuclei of cells. 1/6

W T A F This country is a joke. A very, very terrible joke.

Bacteria from a Yellowstone hot spring do something no other organism has been found to do: breathe oxygen and sulfur at the same time. 🧪 It's both aerobic and anaerobic, a beautiful freaky creature from a beautiful freaky place

🦠🧍‍♀️From bacterial to human immunity. We report in @science.org the discovery of a human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins that participates in the TLR pathway of animal innate immunity. Co-led wt @enzopoirier.bsky.social by D. Bonhomme and @hugovaysset.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

it's never been about antisemitism

Terrible Friday news dump.The wealth of expertise. The decades of scientific progress. The emerging and urgent challenges we were focused on tackling. It is all so short-sided and cruel. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

M⃣I⃣S⃣S⃣I⃣N⃣G⃣ L⃣I⃣N⃣K⃣S⃣ 𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 paper by Sikora et al: metagenomic data from 1,313 ancient human remains over 37,000 years Identified >3,000 instances of known human pathogens Zoonotic pathogens begin to appear ~6,500 years ago coinciding with the rise of livestock domestication—major epidemiological shift

apart from its inherent qualities as a comic strip, I really appreciate that Watterson resisted the urge to franchise and merchandise C&H. There's no animated movie, no tv show, no line of toys, no ipad game. it exists in its entirety as a comic strip written and drawn entirely by one man.

Another day testing the limits of resilience. The Alexandria NSF building was designed for the NSF merit review process (gold standard), complete with a floor devoted to panels. Now we aren’t allowed to have in person panels. The loss of US science leadership will haunt this country for decades.

Kennedy provides a bunch of references for his claim that thimerosal in vaccines (barely used anymore) is harmful. If a high-school student submitted this as their reference list, they would fail. I will do what Kennedy didn’t - actually look at them. 🧵

Alright fellas. Come one come all, #amateurbiology poster presentation at #asmicrobe on our first set of methylation screening results on Halococcus. Come ask about an exciting new finding I couldn't put on the poster! #archaeasky EEB 1147 🧪🧫🦠

Tardidoc and What the Microbe! with @markowenmartin.bsky.social and @binomicalabs.org #ASMmicrobe2025

My lab studies bacterial infections. We spend a lot of time looking at (or for) species-specific genetic and genomic databases for hosts and microbes. FlyBase is the best of all—there is literally no comparison. Its existence is under threat. Please donate. www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

This is the most deranged Dear Leader shit. Also likely a violation of the Hatch Act and political discrimination proscriptions.

"Kennedy said in the video announcement that there was no clinical data to support additional shots for healthy children" LIES. Examining more than 386,219 kids and teens, scientists have shown that #COVID vaccine reduces the chances of developing #LongCovid by 20% www.thelancet.com/journals/ecl...

Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege, but the current attacks from the federal government raise a new level of alarm. nyer.cm/u405qvQ

👋 Hi, we’re Unbreaking, a volunteer-run collective working to document our current moment of institutional collapse and its human costs—as well as the pushback and resilience work already underway. We believe this is critical work for building and retaining political agency.

I knew the U.S. higher education system was a massive draw for foreigners, but I did not know the U.S. sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it did natural gas and coal combined. Great piece by @crampell.bsky.social

UW faculty join the call for a Big 10 Mutual Defense Compact “An attack on one is an attack on all,” [me] says, quoting the core premise of the military alliance that formed in the aftermath of World War II. “That’s what this is — a NATO for higher education.” www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Come and work with me! The Nature Micro team is expanding and we're looking for someone to champion microbial ecology, plant micro & related areas for the journal Knowledge of microbial ecology/plant micro is desirable but we're open to applications from all microbiologists Link below 👇

Measles likely came from cows (via rinderpest) around the 6th century BCE. For 2,500 years, we didn’t evolve superhuman resistance—children just died. Real protection only came in the 1960s, with vaccines. Our superpower isn’t evolving into superhumans. It’s outthinking pathogens.

That specifically right there is the sound of science in the US dying

magnetosomes 🧲 - *surprise*: not always in chains! 👀 #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Jawdropping. You would expect this in a dictatorship, not the United States. This country is unrecognizable.

5. But right now my job doesn't feel like the best job in the world. 

Targeted attacks on university funding have put every US institution into a severe crisis. As of now, there is no way we will be able to continue doing the biomedical research, the conversation science, etc. that we always have.

This is exactly what they're trying to achieve by destroying government services that benefit the public. A VC-backed startup intervenes to gather data that the National Weather Service was previously collecting, and before we know it, we will be paying them for what was once funded by our taxes.

Roche's new high-throughput sequencing technology. Wow 😍https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8ECt04qPos

"downsizes" is a weak way of saying "forced to cancel dozens of programs, which jeopardizes future STEM careers of talented undergrads" @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

41/47 (87%) of NIH study sections are cancelled this week Frustrating to see all this good research stalled (& not funded) You can search for study sections that ‘did not meet as scheduled’ here with ones with * ⤵️ www.csr.nih.gov/RevPanelsAnd...

The global South is leading in keeping us all safe. 1.Rwanda &Tanzania contained marburg outbreaks 2.Uganda is fighting Ebola 3. DRC is fighting #mpox Knowledge can flow from the global South to North. With CDC EIS gutted, consider Africa CDC's AES www.globalsouthopportunities.com/2025/02/17/a...

American institutions—from the media to Congress—continue to underreact to the unraveling of our democracy. Overseas our media would not hesitate to call what we’re living through a full-blown autocratic coup. Here's my attempt at the story they should write: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/musk-trump...

Did anyone attend the @asm.org Town Hall? I was unable to, and would like to hear how it went.

The legendary Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) gone, just like that. Since 1951, these disease detectives have hit the pavement and secured vital information needed to face emerging threats to our lives.

USDA firing the newest hires across the board means they are purging experts relevant to new and emerging threats; e.g., people who combat the Citrus Greening disease that's collapsing Florida's citrus industry. Just the dumbest strategy imaginable. Unless the goal is to collapse the US.

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore public health webpages it abruptly deleted last month until further litigation plays out. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...