On our 250th birthday, celebrating the contribution of immigrants and international collaboration —46% of people with doctoral-level degrees working in US science and engineering fields are foreign-born

Big kudos to Fernando Racimo, Diego Harta, and Audrey Bras on hosting the polycrisis workshop - what an excellent end to #SMBE2026, but with a call for action across our societies.

With two of my fav CSU colleagues - @cegamorim.bsky.social and @pleunipennings.bsky.social at #SMBE2026. California misses you!

Easily my fav lecture this year at #SMBE2026. See y’all next year!

Hi #SMBE2026! We have a new preprint out today - we wrote a decision tree based random coalescent model generator to work with fastsimcoal2, called CoalMiner! Do check out the preprint, and give CoalMiner a try!

We did good no? 20+ years later. #SMBE2026

Blargh jet lag hitting me bad today - what was supposed to be a 10 minute nap became a 2 hour nap. I’m running back to the conference, I promise! #SMBE2026

🚨New paper🚨 For decades, it was widely assumed tropical species would be hit hardest by #ClimateChange. Turns out climate-related local #extinctions are already more frequent among temperate species. Read our new study 🧵 @natclimate.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415... #BiodiversityLoss #SciSky

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

Scalable ARG-free Detection of Denisovan-mediated Superarchaic Introgression Reveals Heterogeneous Patterns across Populations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.25.734355v1

Terrific resource, now on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social: The Vertebrate Genomes Project Phase I: A global reference genome resource 🧪🧬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

minibwa v0.3 released with a few minor bug fixes and two missing bwa-mem features (XA tag for secondary hits and option -H to inject header lines). Also added the "mem" subcommand to mimic "bwa mem" CLI to some extent. github.com/lh3/minibwa/...

Hey #SMBE2026! My amazing postdoc advisor and former @official-smbe.bsky.social President, Jody Hey is retiring and we’re celebrating JodyFest 9/25-9/26 in Philly! I am so honored to give a talk on how Jody has shaped my science. Other speakers include John Wakeley, Alivia Dey, Andrew Webb, etc.

Couldn’t be a hop evolutionary genomicist and not visit the Home of Carlsberg on this gorg evening for a classic Danish pilsner. See ya all soon at #SMBE2026!

Ick! Folks flying into CPH for #SMBE2026 - please give yourselves plentiful time for immigration (especially around gates D/E). Lines are a mile long, and it looks like it’s gonna take a few hours at this rate.

Gotta love random white folks staring at you on European flights. Ya okay hun - deal with your internalized xenophobia. Baaaiii.

kmerRRR: A k-mer based tool for functional genomics in Repeat Rich Regions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.21.732238v1

Headed to #SMBE2026? Come chat with me about an open postdoc/programmer position in my lab! See y’all in Copenhagen!

Bit late posting this... MicroFinder is now published in GigaScience: academic.oup.com/gigascience/....

❤️🌈

As everyone's winding down on #evol2026 we want to share our survey link with you again. Whether you work in reproductive biology specifically or not, please take a minute to help us understand how the scientific community uses reproductive terms in research! And hope to see you at #SMBE!

This is a cool paper! Late Neanderthals in NW Europe had interconnected populations, were not inbred like Siberian Neanderthals, and didn't admix with humans - and yet they still go extinct a few thousands of years later. Something other than mutation meltdown was responsible for their extinction!

Meanwhile the paper on the benefits of the COVID vaccine that Bhattacharya censored as Interim Director of the CDC is now out in JAMA Network Open. This is a paper he really didn't want people to view and download. You know what to do.

I’m recruiting a PhD student to join our lab in the fall of 2027. If you’re excited about phylogenetics, comp bio, paleobiology, stats theory, macroevolution, etc. please get in touch! Folks at #Evol2026, you can talk to @brpetrucci.bsky.social & @sigournie.bsky.social to learn more about our lab

New research from #BiologyLetters: Song but not colour divergence constrains hybridization in birds doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... | #Evolution #Birdsong #Colouration

Job ad is not out yet, but we're going to be hiring an Asst Prof at Cal State Northridge who works on either birds or mammals (area of research is broadly defined). Track down @jbyoder.org, @mutualismecology.bsky.social, or me at #Evol2026 with questions!

www.fredhutch.org/content/www/... Ladies and gentlemen... the amazing @irinakitop.bsky.social !

In today’s news…😢

Hey #Evol2026 - while I am not in Cleveland this year (hope to be in San Juan next year!), I would love to connect with folks who might be interested in this open position in my lab. DM me for deets!

POV: The caffeine just hit

So true - getting so tired of Ad*be’s AI bs features. What do folks use these days to just open a PDF? No ‘reader environment’ plzzzzz.

Blargh. Another grant rejected - on a Thursday now (usually these things show up on Friday’s, but tomorrow is Juneteenth).

Back to see Dr. Sawyer with tummywummy issues 😿

❤️❤️❤️

Great op-ed from my former colleagues and fellow Bethesda Declaration signers, Sylvia Chou and Alexa Romberg, on how censorship is becoming insidious at NIH and across the scientific community. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

A 20 year study on 2 NIH diversity programs in Science Advances shows they doubled undergrads' odds of getting a Ph.D. That is, before the funding for those programs and for the study itself was terminated last year: www.statnews.com/2026/06/17/n...

@trevormugoya.bsky.social did a quick test on indexing a large plant genome: minibwa: real    8m59.243s user    20m16.834s sys     1m18.394s bwa-mem2: real    30m33.378s user    28m13.661s sys     2m10.261s Well dang! Life changing - thank you, @lh3lh3.bsky.social!

Minibwa is a hybrid of bwa-mem and minimap2 and the successor of bwa-mem for short-read mapping. ~4X/2.5X as fast as bwa-mem/bwa-mem2 for WGS reads at comparable accuracy. Native support of directional bisulfite-seq. Applicable to long reads. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2606.15357

Very excited to finally have this out in the world! The first paper from my PhD (and my first first-author publication) makes the case for a new entrant to the world of long-lived animal models: Heliconius butterflies. Out now in @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... (1/10)

Heartbreaking stuff. Unhoused people are not trash or disposable.

"Whose Larva Is This?" A quick guide to figure out what you're looking at when you find something that resembles a worm or a Zerg unit crawling around. #insect #bug #education #SciArt

Reminds me of the time in Puerto Vallarta that someone 💩 in a pool, and they just shocked it with people still in it. Nice. Endless dumbassery.

Hey peeps - I am organizing our Fall @calstate.bsky.social bioinformatics webinar series (Friday's at noon PST) for the 3rd year. Are you a faculty/postdoc/grad student working in any bioinformatics field, affiliated with/alma mater of the CSU, & would like to give a lecture? DM me, & let's connect!

People. @ksamuk.bsky.social and others have made this argument before. There’s good software to do this right. Here’s the argument again: Invariant sites matter! They’re not in your standard vcf and many programs pretend they are anyway. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

The @nejm.org is very clear - proposed OMB changes to federal funding of research grants would be very bad for science and public health. dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJM...

I feel like this is me most of the time. 😑

Had the best time at #PEQG26 with my lab - thanks to @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for making it so special. Until next time ❤️