This might play a role in your unhappiness:

Happy New Year #disappointingaffirmations

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

Remember this from the 90s? No??? That's because I woke up with a splitting migraine today, and my malfunctioning synapses invented this abomination. I hyperfixated on it for several terrifying minutes while immobilized in bed. It haunted me all day, so here's my rendition of it.

As is Traditon: Frederick Forsyth's "The Shepherd" as read by the CBC's late host "Fireside" Al Maitland www.cbc.ca/radio/asitha...

This paper is such an incredible read, with beautiful microscopy: -- rare purple sulfur bacterial symbionts in a eukaryotic ciliate (which also has a green algae symbiont) -- a close relative with a 4-way symbiosis with a green algae and 2 nonphotosynthetic gammaproteobacteria

Not that long ago, in vivo mouse enhancer design was a dream. Today, it's a reality! Using transfer deep learning to design de novo synthetic embryonic enhancers active in the heart, limb, and CNS. Great collab with @alex-stark.bsky.social lab! @ucibiosci.bsky.social @impvienna.bsky.social

Fine, whatever, this random cat is your new god of the winter solstice

The French (French Canadian?) term for egg nog (= “chicken milk”) is such a delight.

May I recommend a subscription to @theonion.com print edition as a holiday gift, because their ads continue to rule

Same. I'm glad I got to know some truly awesome people and make some internet friends.

Guys it's only been 5 years. I really don't want another once-in-a-century event again this decade.

For #ArtAdventCalendar day 13, one from my 2018 Turbulent Skies Project. I Can See It…With My Imagination 44x60 112×152cm Oil on Canvas 2018

This giant pinecone belongs to the coulter pine! It can be found in California & Mexico. Nicknamed “the widowmaker,” it produces some of the world's largest pinecones—which can weigh ~11 lbs (5 kg) & plummet to the ground with deadly force! Photo: damontighe, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

Last year it was discovered that a single bacterial NLR-like protein can recognize multiple, structurally unrelated phage proteins (Béchon et al, Kibby et al) Now, a new study shows the same for a plant NLR. Another example how principles of immunity remain conserved from bacteria to eukaryotes

The UCP government has invoked time allocation and on a bill removing Albertans' Charter rights. And they're using the notwithstanding clause to do it. Here's why that is a dangerous precedent. And why real conservatives need to stand up against it. open.substack.com/pub/drjaredw...

Today in accidental data art: selecting the wrong chart type.

If someone wants to write a new article on this, and highlight how current genetics tools have opened the door for many more, I'd be happy to consider it for CSH Protocols.

does anybody know a good history of medicine that covers the era when laboratory tests became more common? specifically i’m looking for something that would cover/go into detail about how reference ranges for “normal” lab results were determined.

🗣Stand with Canada🇨🇦! 🟢Sign📝 the #ForeverCanadian petition to keep Alberta strong✊️, united🫂, and free🕊 from foreign influence. 👍 ✅️Together, we protect🛡 our democracy🕊, our #CharterOfRights📜 & our freedoms.❤️✊ #cdnpoli #cndpoli #CanadaStrong #abpoli #Alberta www.forever-canadian.ca/sign-the-pet...

Erica Lord, the Codes We Carry, beaded DNA #sciart for Indigenous Peoples Day ericalord.com

Thanksgiving in Canada has nothing to do with Columbus! We are a colonial country with a million things to atone for but Thanksgiving is not one of them. Our Thanksgiving is timed with the harvest and it's literally just "Be grateful for harvest" US Imperialism has brain rotted too many of you.

A student on TikTok has been documenting her journey with a professor who “wrote” the anatomy textbook and it’s all a bunch of AI hallucinations. She’s saying that, understandably, the students are doing super poorly! Behold what we’re teaching the healthcare professionals of tomorrow:

Disease prevalence in US states before & after vaccine introduction 🧪 From Edward Tufte & graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d...

In all seriousness, the "LLMs are people and you're racist if you don't like them" shit is the natural endpoint of a consumerist society in which consuming and fandom are the only modes of identity-building many people understand. Finally, a product no one can tell you not to love.

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

Of course, of COURSE, Danielle Smith blamed Ottawa for Imperial Oil's plan to lay off 20 per cent of its employees by 2027.

2/

It's just I've seen ppl bemoan "the state state of science" here and there, and what they actually mean is "I only read the 'science' headlines on CNN." Like, no. Amazing things are happening. And I mean straight sci-fi shit. "We could conclusively prove extraterrestrial life exists in 2040" shit.

After 10 years of work, a complete telomere-to-telomere gap-free genome for C. elegans finally exists: it has 106 Mb rather than the textbook 100.3 Mb, and up to 366 additional genes. genome.cshlp.org/content/35/8...

Super excited that this story by @borissieber.bsky.social is now on BioRxiv! For decades, we thought there was no MAPK scaffold for the ERK-like cascade that promotes sexual reproduction in fission yeast ... until Boris found it ! See the thread 👇 and enjoy the paper! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Every year my mom gets us each a bird ornament, she texted us all today asking which we each want My siblings never indulge in text conversations, but we’ve been chatting in that text chain for over an hour now. Thoughts and prayers for my mother, who’ll wake up to 105 increasingly unhinged texts

Yes. But seeing how many professors were silent or neutered when it came of field-known assholes/bullies/abusers/sex-pests/rapists, I'm expecting absolutely nothing.

Let's talk about root beer & why you've probably never tasted real sassafras OR sarsaparilla. Root beer was originally made by adding yeast to a syrup made from the pulverized root bark of a sassafras tree. Sassafras produces SAFROLE, a compound that deters animals from eating the bark or leaves.

I’m not the first person to make this observation, but this being the biggest story in the world at present really speaks to how much Twitter still serves as a universal assignments editor for English-language journalists.

With iNaturalist, GBIF, and an increasing amount of scientific literature online, it is now possible to identify many bugs from all over the world without having to get physical specimens in front of an expert. Last 5 years especially.

Sedation dentistry is no longer weird. Phone cameras are really good. The price of solar panels has dropped by tens of thousands. Southern white rhinos, giant pandas, Arabian oryx and Stellar sea lions are no longer endangered. And, I can testify, modern cancer treatments are fucking amazing.

#Perspective A discussion on virus-encoded auxiliary metabolic genes and a framework for the biological interpretation of these genes. #MicroSky 🦠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Much like "crab", industrial music is constantly re-evolving from first principles basically anywhere where there's a bunch of metal and plastic laying about

Thank you. To be clear, I did not merely “dismiss” AI as mid. My argument is that LLMs 1) are not intelligent 2) average textual responses in a way that is mid 3) most generous use cases are a revolution of middle skills that don’t produce anything ergo LLMs are in every demonstrable way mid.

I love our town fair day, but there's always one violent idiot who has to ruin it for everyone, trundling around making threats.

Collective cell motion has many forms, but rotation is the coolest of them all. I'm @onenimesa.bsky.social , and in this short🧵, I'll highlight some instances of global tissue rotation like this one from @BauschLab

If you've read the recent BMJ feature about #SARS-CoV-2 and its potential effects on immunity, please consider reading the article below. Just to better understand what really happened with #Mycoplasma pneumoniae. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Rest in peace, Jim. The father of mechanotransduction. This photo is from the April @hhmi.org meeting. Despite battling aggressive cancer, all he wanted to do was talk about science.

As someone who ended up using non-model systems after doing his PhD with Drosophila, you don't realise just how amazing FlyBase or WormBase are until you try to genetics without them.

Social media destroyed the incentives to have well-cultivated and policed specialist comment sections

Just read ALGOSPEAK by Adam Aleksic and this bit, while not new, still hit hard. "my videos will only go viral if I present things through cohesive, confident narratives. The trial-and-error process has repeatedly taught me that simple stories do better numbers than complex ones." Pretty bad!

An anti-zohran A.I. bot run by this Canadian dude attacks Zohran thousands of times a day. ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-...

A remarkable paper. Davisson and colleagues describe an in vitro reaction running under plausible prebiotic conditions that efficiently and stereoselectively aminoacylates a model tRNA. This suggests a path through which nature may have chosen L vs. D amino acids! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...