Working on a grant proposal. Just replaced every occurrence of "cis-SNARE" with "c-SNARE," "trans-SNARE" with "x-SNARE," "cis-Golgi" with "early Golgi," and "trans-Golgi" with "late Golgi," because this is #TheStupidestTimeline and we are governed by idiot arsonists.

Excited to share our latest paper! We found that large pieces of the human genome can transfer between cells upon direct contact, endowing recipient cells with heritable phenotypic changes. @cp-cell.bsky.social (1/7) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

THE ODYSSEY (2026, dir. Christopher Nolan)

introducing barfbow, a little tool that aims to encourage the use of variable brightness to improve effective com, accessibility and scientific accuracy in figures. github.com/evolvwing/ba... If you need palettes with colors that are easy to distinguish on a plot or map, pls check it out!

UBC is at least in the top five world wide for views from a campus. But this also reminds me a bit too much of bleary eyed wanders on campus while waiting for my E. coli to recover after transformation at the end of a twelve hour day.

Wendy Carlos - synth and electronic music pioneer who helped shape the development of the Moog synthesizer, and the first trans woman to win a Grammy for her work on “Switched-On Bach”.

cADPR isn’t the only product. A TIR domain from the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii produces 3′cADPR, a signaling molecule previously known only from bacterial Thoeris defense systems. This is the first eukaryotic TIR shown to produce this bacterial immune signal as its dominant product.

Fine for screening clones, not so good when your experiment depend on purity of plasmid. If you want to try to out-cheap me on labware, I spent my PhD dumpster diving for single-use drosophila vials and scrubbing them out by hand for reuse. May the science gods help you if you run a screen.

TFW: You see Gen-Z SciCommers do a "Day in the Lab" video, but all their protocols are slower and worse than you did 20 years ago and their sterile technique explains the mycoplasma outbreaks and un-repeatable results.

lol. Absolutely not. Goodbye, US products.

we all know I have no life, so:

The serendipity of flipping open the wrong journal in the actual physical stacks is part of the reason why I'm a scientist now.

Every year, staff and students at Australian medical schools compete in the Vampire Cup to donate the most blood and blood products over a 8 week period. And donations from family and friends count too! So, if you know a med schoolie, book yourself in for a good cause. 🩸🤗

Always a banger @jasnah.bsky.social youtu.be/oiyl1XDolg0?...

Y'all there is a woman and a black man circling the moon and NASA's mission control+ science teams are so diverse and people are nerding out about science and exploration this is all a gigantic middle finger to the stupid and hate and grotesque ghouls running our country

This is Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s mission patch for the Artemis II mission, painted by Sagkeeng First Nation artist Henry Guimond. You can read more about it here. In a world full of atrocities I’m moved that Canadians are taking part in science & hope. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

The U.S. Forest Service is closing 57 of its 77 research facilities in 31 states under a reorganization plan announced this week, threatening science that looked at how wildfires, drought, pests and global warming are putting pressure on forests.

2,000 ships unable to move in the Strait of Hormuz, with some 20,000 seafarers on board. Who cares about those people aboard those ships, literally at the centre of a global crisis? “Our company has no advice, for now. We just have to endure...” #journalism www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04...

I got banned from twitter in 2023 for this drawing. They called it "violent speech". It had over 40K likes and too many comments for me to read before my ban, but I still see it floating around here and there. Save a copy, and use it freely. No attribution needed. Love u #transdayofvisibility #tdov

If I could yeet one transgene design style in to the sun, it would be the CAG promoter The number of ways it fucks over honest scientists only rivals the number of people who can't be arsed to do their reading on cis-reg elements and how to get non-shitte expression in their system

Preparations of War, poem by the Hindi poet Kunwar Narayan. I found it in the volume "The Penguin New Writing in India" from 1992. #poetry

Exciting News! Grant-witness.us now has dynamic funding curves like mine for NIH available. grant-witness.us/funding_curv... 1/2

These remarkable women of early electronic music pushed the boundaries of technology and composition, turning circuits, sine waves, and tape loops into music. https://disc.gs/3ZWRk1U

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

indeed, Bluesky's inherent overall hostility to AI means that the AI enthusiasts still willing to hang out here are usually far smarter and more thoughtful than the absolute dribbling freakshow AI cultists who dominate Twitter/X

Mood

Here's my first edit on the March 3rd Lunar Eclipse. 15 moon shots, 1 foreground. Taken over a 3 hourish period.

Biochem tricks are one thing... I've got mentors who were some of the earliest recombinant DNA psuhers but they remind me that there were never "good old days" just lots of logging counts and screening clones Being fluent in your current assembly and expression system, now that takes time and years

"'Paper mill Hairball" Original link: pubpeer.com/publications...

In 2025, GISAID cut off access to many critical SARS-CoV-2 resources, incl. our outbreak.info. A month ago, GISAID leveled accusations against us, Cov-Spectrum, Nextstrain, and members of COG-UK, which are false and misrepresent known facts. Our joint response: blog.outbreak.info/joint-respon...

Scientists have seen Asgard archaea crawling for the first time. When it comes to the origin of eukaryotes, this is like seeing a feathered dinosaur in the wild. (Video courtesy of Philipp Ralder)

JFC I didn't realise it was that bad.

Solidly good science from @merz.bsky.social et al... and the guy obviously appreciates the Canadian Clusterfolk genre, so that's a plus.

There are 13 authors on this paper, including 4 undergrads, 3 grad students, research scientists… I have never had more difficulty assigning author order. But most importantly of all: this was an equal effort between my lab and Courtney Ellison's lab at U. Georgia. ellisonlab.org 19/

I mean we bothered to lay all that track to “build a nation”, displaced Indigenous people and trashed their heritage and outlawed everyone’s future free enjoyment of rail corridors and waterfronts from the Rockies to the Pacific, the very least we can have rn is decent transport. Who’s on this

🦖 Berlin friends, join us for a Plasmidsaurus Happy Hour this Thursday, 6PM! Enjoy a laid-back hangout with great company and chat about all things DNA & RNA - along with an open bar, delicious bites, and exclusive merch. See you there!

#apaperaday TREAT-NMD conference themed still, with a review by Loboda et al from @moltherapy.bsky.social Nucleic Acids on genetic strategies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy anticipating tomorrow’s challenges of gene therapy session and today’s keynote Terry Flotte. Doi 10.1016/j.omtn.2025.102759

No wonder the right wing was so obsessed with woke-scolding.

Just made Excel self aware. This is going to spawn 3,000 articles from terrified journalists about AGI

#ProtistsOnSky no 'swimming' by 𝘝𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘺𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢, definitively no 'staying still'. just a relaxed walk towards the lunch...

Necessary/sufficient, guitar fixing edition - hope y'all get to play this weekend. Be well, guitar friends! 🎸 @slewzeus.bsky.social @benoitbruneau.bsky.social @docdellaire.bsky.social @wbderry.bsky.social @fish4walking.bsky.social @thelovelylab.bsky.social @lucksmith.bsky.social

Seeing HKers go out of their way to communicate lessons learned in a much more aggressive surveillance state where civil rights were already much more curtailed is both warming and cold sobering at the same time. I hope Americans are paying attention.

youtu.be/X4kR70jFG_8 Just some Canadian hipsters in a field. obligatory tagging of @jasnah.bsky.social

TFW you dial in the chemistry and automation _just_ right and the process objectively looks better than the past iteration.

Timeline Cleanse: Please enjoy this photo of a praying mantis that was sitting on top of my car windshield, but the angling and lighting were so weird it looks like a giant praying mantis wandering a corn field in Iowa.

This might play a role in your unhappiness:

Happy New Year #disappointingaffirmations

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over