Sunset in Sandford, Nova Scotia #photography #eastcoast #novascotia #canada

I switched to bluesky with the intent of only posting science. That has switched to mostly posting about politics because my entire life (science and personal) has been under political attack this year. But I'd love to just post about science.

like i was saying

I was Chair of @biologists.bsky.social when we started this initiative, the brainwave of the @stevenkelly.bsky.social It was an imaginative idea and I am thrilled to see this landmark Remember: @biologists.bsky.social are the goodies in scientific publishing!

A tremendous honor! Thrilled & humbled to receive 2025 Keio Medical Science Prize for launching LLPS #phaseseparation field (= #softmatter + #cellbio) w collaborators esp @HymanLab. & Congrats to Akiko Iwasaki @virusesimmunity.bsky.social. www.princeton.edu/news/2025/09... #KeioMedicalSciencePrize

This is the playbook, folks. If you're not paying attention now and doing something about it, then you're going to have to sit down the rest of your life because democracy is being taken away. Do not be quiet in this moment.

Break the ICE Machine www.universalhub.com/2025/no-peac...

“What made you decide to cancel?” Me: Checks “Other.” Writes in box: “Disney treats Freedom of Speech simply as the cost of doing business. I have a problem with those who kowtow to fascists.”

I loved this! Read it if you have time. Read it even if you don’t….

What if you could think of every possible solution to a problem? Then you might be able to simply pick the best one - even if it was highly nonobvious. With the “tiling tree” method, you can learn, and practice, the skill of doing just that: engineeringx.substack.com/p/the-tiling...

Gupta: The impacts of this—H-1B visas—are going to show up once Trump is out of office. If fewer people are able to take those jobs, what happens? We’re just not going to have enough people to meet the demand for medical services.. And the irony here is it’ll probably impact red states more

Both bioRxiv Founders came to the US on H-1Bs

Donald Trump is way less popular than he wants you to believe. And you are significantly more powerful than he wants you to think.

@jenna-m-norton.bsky.social has been doing amazing work speaking out and helping organize others to help protect public health for all...

me, age 15: conservatism seems like a fundamentally evil belief system me, age 21: actually it is more complicated than that, things are very complicated and everyone has their own way of seeing things. i am very smart me, age 3x: no i was right the first time nvm

Did we all take organic chemistry & the MCAT & miss the social part of our early 20’s and work 80 hours a week for 3+ years for the brain worm guy who doesn’t know what a p-value is to destroy our nation’s public health system? No. Time to lean into our expertise and speak up.

This is SUCH a smart thing to do. And technically correct.

Lol, I guess I called this one a few weeks in advance. They just won for physics! arstechnica.com/science/2025...

The chair of the #ACIP is a #COVID-contrarian, Martin Kulldorff, as are others on the committee (i.e., Robert Malone). COVID-contrarians also have hands on the lever of vaccine policy at #FDA (i.e., Vinay Prasad, Tracy Beth Hoeg), at #NIH (i.e., Jay Bhattacharya). 1/

I just called Disney+ to cancel my account and had the most joyful interaction with an operator who was laughing the entire time about how many people had canceled today. I can only imagine how it feels to spend an entire day witnessing how many people want to stop fascism.

All of this has happened before and it will happen again. www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

This is a remarkable declaration and challenge to Congress: "We call on you to pass nothing less than a fighting CR: a funding bill that not only keeps the lights on, but that also includes statutory protections to rein in executive lawlessness." Spread the word.

Please, please read this. Wherever you are. Whoever you are.

Wonderful to see our paper on the #organelle signatures of #neurons and #astrocytes out in final form - congratulations, Shannon Rhoads and team!🎉 t.co/BPxKlbU6Ou

Our democracy is not self-executing. It depends on us all as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations, to stand up and fight for the core values that have made this country the envy of the world.

"Oliver and his writers have built a worldview around the core belief that our government should make sure peoples’ basic needs are met, their rights protected, and their innate value as human beings reaffirmed." I wrote a short piece about an inspiring show. www.vulture.com/article/john...

"Christmas, a single mother of four, decided to enter the political fray in 2024 when she saw an Instagram ad from Run for Something, a progressive organization that backs first-time candidates." A must-read about a deeply inspiring candidate in New Orleans. epaper.bostonglobe.com/infinity/art...

“Perhaps at this moment worth saying” is the understatement of the universe. I’m a straight, cis, white man, and I’ve never been more afraid for all the LGBTQ+ people in this country than right now. It’s here. A reign of terror is emerging, and I’m not sure we can stop it now.

My most successful outreach effort by far is the "Friends Don't Let Friends Made Bad Graphs" repository. It has 6.8 bookmarks on GitHub. That's just people with a GitHub account, not counting those who have used it but don't have a GitHub account. github.com/cxli233/Frie...

It was not luck, but hard work. #7syllablesentence luck

Have you heard the good news? California finished a project that will create tons of clean renewable energy & help prevent evaporation and algae formations while keeping solar panels cooler & more efficient. This article made my day! www.canarymedia.com/articles/sol...

Trying again: instead of awarding 5 grants that spend all of their year 1 money that year, they award only 1 grant which will only spend a 1/5th of its money that year. So the total overhead collected by universities is 1/5th. (Overhead is only collected when universities submit invoices).

@markhisted.org ‘s views are on point. Please read this thread if you care about science. In any way, shape or form.

And what a wonderful story about @docsirianni.bsky.social’s work. “I am one of only a small handful of labs in the country that specializes in drug-delivery barriers in pediatric brain cancer,’ Sirianni told me.”

That view is exceptionally naive. As @narosenblum.bsky.social and I wrote last fall, “basic scientific research [is] a long-term investment, one that only governments have the time horizon to make, and it brings enormous payoffs.” It can’t just be moonshots and looking for unicorn behemoths.

This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress! We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below. Read on for details... 1/x

Everyday I feel grateful to work at UChicago. But lately I’ve been feeling this strongly. And today especially so.

In the South, the elders often say: “Live your life so the preacher doesn’t have to lie at your funeral.” What has become clear to me is that we live among liars.

The metaphor is subtle, but I think the message is clear: “In order to claim that you have a golden goose, you need to make sure that you have laid a few golden eggs. And if you don’t have golden eggs, your golden goose is depreciating very, very quickly”

@UniBasel is setting up a new endowed professorship at the Biozentrum to make fundamental discoveries at the interface between biophysics and climate-relevant environmental biology www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/news/detail/...

You’re think *you’re* depressed? Try being at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association right now with 5,000 political scientists presenting their work on the state of democracy, public opinion, and media. They are also drinking heavily.

Conformity and refusal: a reminder!

One thing I always emphasize to a newer journalist is that there's a balance between speed and accuracy that needs to be found, and the latter always trumps the former. It's better to be fifth to a story and correct than first and wrong. Feels like a lot of media orgs need to relearn that right now.

Lot of unhappy things going on at large and in this article, but one of them is that there a contingent of RW activists searching through social media for comments they can use to get people fired or worse. Be careful. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

I wrote a thing. As someone who survived the 1970s and kept the receipts.

Though it’s traumatic for me to bring this up, I was targeted by a group allied with Turning Point USA in 2018, with the help of Tucker Carlson on Fox. My home address circulated online and I got death threats. 1/

There are so many unforgivable actions of capitulation being taken by the institutions most well-positioned to stand up to Trump’s authoritarianism if they wished to do so. A must-read from @samtlevin.bsky.social:

Feels like the world is burning so time for weird jellyfish facts 🧵

Moraine Lake in Banff for your SkyLine