The DevoWorm meeting (🪱🧬🐣🔬🧠) for January 12 is now available on YouTube youtu.be/3CZUZt2_Acs

How does a uniform zygote reliably break symmetry? How do initially identical cells diverge in cell-cycle timing and transcriptional state? In our new paper in Nature Physics, we show that embryo geometry itself is sufficient to pattern early development. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

AOC: I want everybody to understand that the cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this. You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.

Too many significance tests!! Made this little graphic for my #stats class, showing the various kinds of (N)HST and how interpreting confidence intervals can replace all of them. Made with #rstats #ggplot (duh)

This is the sort of statement that was expected from every university president and law firm partner over the last year. That those statements weren’t made played a huge part in where we are now and people will remember.

Been working on this one for a while — it's a little bit of history of a key foundation of internet technology, and a little bit of an explainer about how people _actually_ invent things. This is the amazing (true!) story of how Markdown took over the world. www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/h...

This review summarized possible roles of pulsatile actomyosin in different model systems and highlighted mechanisms that drive the formation of pulsatile actomyosin. doi.org/10.1016/j.tc...

How can embryos use pulsatile contraction to shape tissue development during morphogenesis? I'm @weiyiqian.bsky.social and with this thread I want to introduce the roles of pulsatile actomyosin in animal development and the mechanisms that drive actomyosin to pulse

Quick, get this shit into the Taino hall of fame.....

NEW: Data released by ICE shows that virtually the entire growth of detention in the last few months has been among people with no criminal record at all - no prior convictions (no matter how minor) and no pending criminal charges.

How Lime increased ridership over 60% by letting people sit down

ICE has murdered THIRTY TWO PEOPLE in detention centers. Four in the last week. www.msn.com/en-us/news/c...

You can’t "lone wolf" your way to 93%.

1/ We found that deep sequence models memorize atomic facts "geometrically" -- not as an associative lookup table as often imagined. This opens up practical questions on reasoning/memory/discovery, and also poses a theoretical "memorization puzzle."

Alfred Russel Wallace born OTD in 1823. He said he shared with Darwin “an intense interest in … the variety [of living things] that catches the eye of the observer even among those which are very much alike, but which are soon found to differ in several distinct characters.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

08-Jan: Born on this day in 1823, the man who independently of Darwin came up with the idea of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. Here’s a post I wrote about Darwin’s and Wallace’s friendship… friendsofdarwin.com/articles/dar... #HistSci

This is the equivalent of Jesus on a toast for developmental biologists 🧪

Our paper on tissue stress measurements is now out in Eur. Phys. J. E. rdcu.be/eX59E. Great work from @luanger.bsky.social and @andreasschoenit.bsky.social and collaboration with P. Marcq @pmmh-lab.bsky.social Code: github.com/pmarcq/BISM/ and Examples on github.com/ASmushyCell/...

Our "Roadmap for Condensates in Cell Biology" is now available on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2601.03677 🎉 This article summarizes the interdisciplinary weekly discussions we had at our condensate workshop at KITP in the summer of 2025. Feedback is very welcome!

Coravos, J. S., Mason, F. M., & Martin, A. C. (2017). Actomyosin Pulsing in Tissue Integrity Maintenance during Morphogenesis. Trends in cell biology #EpithelialMechanicsReview doi.org/10.1016/j.tc...

I'm sorry, but I just think it's very telling when we differentiate between ICE's killing of American citizens versus undocumented immigrants. And I'm seeing that a lot right now.

"When I came out, I probably seemed unsavory compared to the competitors. But that was when academic research happened in libraries and George W. Bush was considered the stupidest president. Tell me, how have you guardians of facts been doing recently?" #McSweeneysTop25of2025

The DevoWorm meeting (🧠🪱🐣🥚🧬) for January 5 is now available on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxpM...

An excellent post by William, who is a Master's graduate of the Economics of Sustainability program. scotonomics.org/mmt-work-in-...

we had for a very long time bipartisan support for white supremacy. when that bipartisan support lapses, when there's a partisan party who embraces antiracism to one extent or another—that's when we have constitutional crises.

The importance of BOTH "carrot" AND "stick" (and the role of both demand-side and supply-side incentives) is discussed at length in The #NewClimateWar (bookshop.org/p/books/the-...) Here's a short excerpt:

It’s darkly funny—in the “OMG if I don’t laugh I’ll cry” sense—that the same technology that’s leading to an across-the-board decline in the quality of machine translation is also being hyped as a full replacement for human translators

For researchers interested in semantic change over years and decades... I've created a toolkit — lexichron — for measuring long-term shifts in word meanings using Google Ngrams and other corpora (e.g., COHA, COCA). Here's the public GitHub repo: github.com/eric-d-knowl... 🧵

Remember when Republicans got suspiciously upset about Democrats reminding the troops of their responsibility to not follow illegal orders? Hmmm.

Very sincerely, every bit of travel we do in an EV, on a train, on a bus, on a bike/e-bike, by walking or rolling, or by other active transport, helps the climate, helps air quality, and helps national & economic security. We should fund these as national security infrastructure.

thankfully donald trump is speedrunning administration and political movement suicide. this should be extremely bad for him and his movement long term. democrats please stand against this the world is begging for you to stand strong against imperialism

Furious all over again at the credulous Gen Z rubes who insisted Harris would get them killed in conflict.

When I explain to people what is involved with writing a successful grant, they simply don’t believe me. I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!

Humans have emitted 2750 gigatons of CO2 since the industrial revolution from burning fossil fuels and land use change. To put this in perspective, this is more than the (dry) mass of all living things on earth and everything humans have ever built combined:

Here is our introductory paper to the Paleobiology special volume @paleosoc.bsky.social celebrating the 50th anniversary of #punctuatedequilibria #macroevolution #paleobiology #palaeontology #paleontology @nilese.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I will never apologize for a post

During this time, he published a more detailed table of zebrafish cleavage and also studied karyokinesis. But that’s not all: in a collaboration with Warren Harmon Lewis, then at Wistar, they produced what is probably the first “motion picture" of zebrafish development. (6/7)

In the same year (1936) a short publication in the Anatomischer Anzeiger he presented what is probably first ever microfilm-record of zebrafish development. He was able to follow development from fertilization to the end of epiboly. Clearly, there was much to be done, but history intervene. (4/7)

He received his doctorate in 1936 from the University of Hamburg, and while his dissertation was on the characterisation of iron in serum, he was already in love with early zebrafish development. (3/7)

Over the past weeks I have been reading the earliest papers on zebrafish development, and came to realize that in the “canonized" version of zebrafish history we neglect some important people pre-Streisinger. I will try to correct here the record. Let’s start with Edward C. Roosen-Runge. (1/7)

Welcome to the Science Fight Club - Science Fight Club

This is a great short paper for these “page-turning” Janus days, reflecting on systems work, and discussing experiences, connections to other work, and approaches to the challenges. @johncutle.fish has also written an extended version: cutlefish.substack.com/p/20-things-...

Just published my annual predictions update, tracking from Jan 1st 2018, with new commentary and new ten year predictions. It is long. rodneybrooks.com/predictions-...

“By eliminating entry-level jobs, AI may destroy the ladder of apprenticeship necessary to develop artists, and it could leave behind a culture driven by nepo babies and chatbots,” Nick Geisler argues.

Why read past headlines: It may not initially seem obvious why Mar-a-Lago face, incels, Elon's pregnancy fetish or the Epstein files are linked. But this is a year in which MAGA showed they are very weird about sex. And it's hurting them. www.salon.com/2025/12/31/t...

Our 2nd most-read piece of 2025 is by the forever funny @mikedrucker.bsky.social, and we have no idea what he was getting at here, but it seemed to have struck a nerve with many, many readers.

forget drugs, who gonna start smuggling affordable EVs over the border?

A study in Science reveals an extensive precolonial agricultural landscape in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, suggesting Indigenous American communities cultivated maize intensively between 1000 and 1600 CE, despite a cold climate and marginal growing conditions. https://scim.ag/49voBGO