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 Root beer was originally made by adding yeast to a syrup made from the pulverized root bark of a sassafras tree.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...

How many #plasmids can #bacteria carry? royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Wild side note on medical research: 1 million people is a lot of people to have in a study. Denmark can do it because, more than a country, it's a continuous natural experiment of every healthcare issue. The public healthcare system keeps unusually easy to cross reference databases of its users.

thanks, I hate it

'In Oct 2020, Mr Lehrer announced on his website that “all the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded & used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else”

lol

Wow - an important component of a central human innate immune pathway was discovered based on homology to a bacterial anti-phage defense system A beautiful example showing how new knowledge on bacterial immunity translates to discoveries important for human health

🦠🧍‍♀️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/...

An alternate receptor for AAV (AAVR2, carboxypeptidase D) distinct from the multi-serotype AAV receptor (AAVR) @cellcellpress.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Did you know I still cannot get anyone on my #MattersMicrobial podcast to talk about the Rhizobium - legume symbiosis? I have asked several people. Please ask around? It's a fabulous system.

Ex-farm worker here. We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing. Not true AT ALL. Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are. The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour. At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.

Pressure-washed the bronze tree, clipped off the pieces, pressure-washed again, now into the burnishing tumbler to remove the surface crud… 🛠️

Four flasks of arthropod parts ready to invest (cover with special plaster) for bronze and silver casting tomorrow. Wings, eyes, and inside the metal flask, a spider butt to replace the one that broke. Send good vibes please… 🛠️

I love him

Very happy to contribute to this CTCF-nucleosone paper in @narjournal.bsky.social, which was featured on the journal cover. This is mainly the work of @elenapugacheva.bsky.social. Exciting research and such a cool cover art!

If you are interested on "viking" art I really recommend this website. It talks about about the different styles of medieval nordic and germanic art, and lets you explore actual artifacts on that style, which is great for finding gems as these: gelmir.com

the thing that kills me about “people in red states deserve to suffer” is we live in a red country under that definition and none of these people think that they themselves deserve suffering just because they live here

Great Horned Owl on Saguaro at dusk (1/125, f/6.3, ISO 1400, handheld) 🪶🦉🌵🌙

It's Canada Day, so I give you Michael Burnyeat's breakdown of Canadian Regional Fiddle Styles youtu.be/2LBOUB2PWfo

< twitchy phycologist sounds >

I've been experimenting with AI-proof assignments for a long time. Last semester, that meant Soviet video games and sci-fi short stories --and it worked pretty well. My latest Substack essay below. "Teaching in the Age of AI: How I avoided a shitty semester" hegemon.substack.com/p/teaching-i...

The trigger mechanism of the Ram Mountain bighorn sheep trap involves extremely advanced technology.

(Longish thread. Apologies) I have met many inspiring colleagues over the past few months, many of whom are in academic institutions targeted by the current administration, and many others who are about to be (the analogy to the ‘eye of Sauron’ has been invoked many times; gallows humor). 1/

What’s also implicit in the move was that the authorities knew Beijing units could have disobeyed. Because their conscience would not have allowed them to kill fellow Beijingers.

1) Good on Queens 2) They're all just going to go to Harvard/MIT/Stanford/Berkeley for a quick postdoc then never return to Canada. That's the pipeline. This is a bit of a wasted effort.

the fun version of this is when you’re posting about some nerd shit and someone pops up in the comments like “actually I am a world renowned expert in this field and here’s how this works” easily the best thing that happens on social media