Prediction markets turn out to be another way to skim money from typical people and into the pockets of elites (in this case, those with inside info or bots that exploit statistically detectable biases). flowingdata.com/2026/05/14/m...

SCOOP: The F.D.A. blocked the release of studies finding that Covid and shingles vaccines were safe. In the case of Covid, FDA staff had to withdraw studies heading toward publication: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/u...

Rapid-PFP: Accelerating Prefix-Free Parsing with GPU Parallelism https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.28.721411v1

Celebrate the last day of finals by joining us for the last CS seminar of the semester @sergek.bsky.social! Learn more here: www.cs.jhu.edu/event/cs-sem...

Congrats to our faculty & students who won this year’s Joel Dean Excellence in Teaching Awards—including @ziangxiao.bsky.social, @enalisnick.bsky.social, @janemilym.bsky.social & more—who have exhibited extraordinary performance in teaching undergrads! Learn more here: www.cs.jhu.edu/news/faculty...

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

Over the last 30 years, RECOMB Proceedings were published by Springer and ACM. On the other hand, full versions of selected papers appeared in various journals. This caused confusion in locating RECOMB publications.

Trump fires the entire National Science Board

Reminder: The Trump regime cancelled nearly $500 million in federal contracts for mRNA vaccine development last year.

We are proud to be a part of this coalition suing to stop the Trump administration from stripping federal contracts from colleges & universities over their diversity, equity & inclusion efforts. We shouldn’t be here, but here we are.

The number of NIH competitive awards is down 50% from 2025, and down ~70% from prior years. Even if they catch up by the end of the year, only wealthy institutions can bridge these huge funding gaps.They're killing science-and violating the constitution-by weaponizing the bureaucracy

The acting head of the CDC has canceled the publication of a study that found that the Covid vaccine sharply cut the odds of hospitalizations and emergency visits last winter www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/u...

Superb list of new Fellows. Very excited to see colleague Ela Pertea there. Also very glad to see Gonzalo Navarro recognized; a wise move by ISCB recognizing how computer science theory (pattern matching, text indexing) has supercharged progress in genomics and pangenomics. Congrats, Fellows!

Excited to be inducted as Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering! Advocacy for the #medical and #biological #engineering #sciences is more important now than ever. Thank you #AIMBE! 🧬 🧪 🖥️ @aimbe-official.bsky.social www.bme.jhu.edu/news-events/...

In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH. But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔 NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards. Here are funding curves for each.🧵

It's a very happy day indeed when I can welcome such a superb scientist and good friend to the JHU family. Adam & @mikeschatz.bsky.social were TAs for the first genomics course I took, taught by @stevensalzberg.bsky.social, and they've been role models since. JHU students: take Adam's courses!

Friday was my last day at NHGRI. After 10 wonderful years, my lab is headed to Johns Hopkins University genomeinformatics.github.io/movingday/

Blog post on "The AI Rewrite Dilemma": lh3.github.io/2026/04/17/t...

This program transformed my career! Please apply. @hhmi-science.bsky.social's #FreemanHrabowski Scholars Program offers early career faculty up to $10M over 10 yrs, plus salary & benefits. Postdoc? This year's competition has a program for you too. Applications open 11/3! bit.ly/4vhC0LA

Katalin Karikó will be @jhu.edu's 2026 commencement speaker. Excellent choice! www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2026...

The civilization that would die if such threats were carried out is our own.

For almost a century generations of scholars and thinkers have tried to understand why the Germans sleepwalked into disaster. Future generations will focus on a different case.

The administration's budget request would cut research funding for the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency by more than 50%. It's hard to imagine an external enemy causing more long-term damage to this country. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A run-length-compressed skiplist data structure for dynamic GBWTs supports time and space efficient pangenome operations over syncmers doi.org/10.64898/202...

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗱𝗼𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗣𝗵𝗗 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 / 𝗔𝗹𝗴𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 I am currently recruiting for both: 🔹 Postdoc position su.varbi.com/what:job/job... 🔹 PhD position su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Please share with anyone who might be interested!

Congratulations, @vikramshivakumar.bsky.social!

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.

They won’t stop until the National Institutes of Health is a hollowed out RFK Jr. echo chamber and revenue generation machine for snake oil peddlers.

Moderna is at least the ninth company to have received a surprise rejection from Vinay Prasad and his team.

If you were online last weekend, you probably caught some clips from Jon Ossoff’s speech. It’s worth watching the whole thing because it’s an object lesson in how Democrats should communicate in the upcoming midterms. messagebox.substack.com/p/a-speech-e...

The flu and pneumonia kill over 45,000 people a year. Moderna developed a new mRNA flu vaccine for people 50 and older--who are most at risk. Prasad, unilaterally, against the recommendation of experts within the agency, denied Moderna's appplication. www.statnews.com/2026/02/11/m...

This is a powerful message from Freeman Hrabowski. 🧵 1/12

Reminder that the abstract deadline for the Biology of Genomes meeting at CSHL is on Feb 13! We have a fantastic lineup of keynote speakers (Janet Kelso and Jonathan Pritchard) and session chairs. Submit your best science to this exciting and engaged meeting! meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

Time for a thread on our Christmas preprint “Origin and evolution of acrocentric chromosomes in human and great apes”. I had so much fun with this project and paper. It will be hard to summarize in a thread, but I’ll try www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... [1/21]

New tool from @alexsweeten.bsky.social to find and classify all your satellites: "AniAnn's: alignment-free annotation of tandem repeat arrays using fast average nucleotide identity estimates" 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 📦 github.com/marbl/anianns

Announcing a new tool for "denoising" long-read amplicon sequences: savont. Savont enables amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) directly from nanopore (or HiFi) long reads. Tested on 16S nanopore amplicons -- seems to work okay. 1/4 github.com/bluenote-157...

RFKJr's principal accomplishment as the nation's health guardian.

Congratulations to @hopkinsengineer.bsky.social undergrads Arda Uzunoğlu, Steven Tan, Suyu Ye, and Alvin Zhang on their Honorable Mentions for the Computing Research Association’s 2026 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards!

Wow. This is devastating. www.science.org/content/arti...

A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.

We have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves. The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. snyder.substack.com/p/lies-and-l...

RLBWT-Based LCP Computation in Compressed Space for Terabase-Scale Pangenome Analysis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.23.701410v1

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

A powerful piece by M. Gessen I can't do it justice by excerpt go read it (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/o...

“Students and scholars shouldn’t have to live in fear that ICE agents could seize them from their homes merely for engaging in political expression. Today’s judgment makes emphatically clear that the administration’s campaign of intimidation must end.” —Ramya Krishnan, @knightcolumbia.org

Optimizing sparse and skew hashing: faster k-mer dictionaries https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.21.700884v1

If you / your lab / your institution rely on NIH funding, you need to read this and understand how this is one of many changes affecting you. www.nature.com/articles/d41...