Nightfall at the edge of Audubon Park, New Orleans

You know what we’re truly the good old days? When decency was a celebrated virtue and vulgarity was frowned upon. Those weee the days!

Is a tight race for the mental gymnastics gold medal.

Is my opinion that social media has a net negative impact on humanity. Yes. I am posting this on social media because I am not a Luddite.

New Orleans watercolor

They pick on the weak. They pick on the vulnerable. They want it to look like an intimidating show of force. There’s also something more nefarious behind it…. Which is that they’re counting on society to not care if a disabled person gets *more* disabled. We need you to care.

ICE agents in Chicago violently detain a non verbal autistic man for being “non compliant” He couldn’t “comply” because of his disability…they don’t care This is not the first time they’ve gone after a disabled person They target the most vulnerable because it’s an easy way to meet their quota

Oh, I am so angry right now that I don’t have words.

1/2 ICE/CPB thugs tackled a nonverbal autistic man outside a Family Dollar in Chicago’s Little Village claiming he was “noncompliant.” Witnesses begged them to stop. “Why they beating up this special boy?” one worker cried. “He comes in every day for a treat. He has the mind of a child.” 🤬🤬🤬

My ask of any science enthusiasts who tell the story of Rosalind Franklin: Don't make her life be about the DNA debacle. She died far too young, but she was a promising scientist in her own right, a mentor and scientific author. Not for Watson or Crick, but for her legacy.

James Watson the perverted racist is dead?! Well that means it's time to celebrate the true hero of DNA discovery: Rosalind Franklin www.nature.com/articles/d41...

conversations about Watson's death rn are a potent reminder that racism and/or misogyny have RARELY been professionally disqualifying, especially in this country

James Watson, the sexist racist who stole Rosalind Franklin’s ground breaking research on DNA, created his own (sadly widely believed) genius mythology with a popular book, is dead.

'Now a new study with an unusually long follow-up period has found that radiation to the chest wall made absolutely no difference in survival among women with early-stage breast cancer who had been treated with mastectomy, lymph-node surgery and advanced anti-cancer drugs.'

So pleased to see the mRNA platform being used to develop new vaccines against tuberculosis!!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New Orleans moonrise (long-lens view from Westwego)

"The ability of humans to think rationally and weigh the evidence when making a choice is well known."

A miniature Crescent City Connection rests inside the cross of St Stephen Basilica, Napoleon avenue, New Orleans

The FPbase spectra viewer just had it's biggest software refactor in 6 years. It *should* be largely invisible to the end user (hopefully just faster and less buggy). Please let me know if you find any issues as you use it! www.fpbase.org/spectra/

Jaegermeister and Absinthe. Both taste like ass.

PSA: It is very difficult to do chest auscultation when the stethoscope earpieces are not in your ears.

is that time of the year when I have to complete my annual mandatory lab safety training. I am nailing this!

The result of this trial will have consequences in the rating of movies with food fight scenes. The 3 stooges might become rater R for depictions of food gore violence. The hunt for red october 2 will be about a LEO searching for a sub with too much marinara before it explodes.

En mi reciente columna, "Nombrar a la naturaleza", hablo sobre las palabras en desuso para nombrar a la naturaleza y lo que eso refleja sobre el ser humano.

Discovery of a way to regenerate the thymus gland through mesenchymal cells, with implications for enhancing the T cell immune response in multiple medical conditions and with aging www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

CHECK IT OUT Nat Comm study UCLA team gut 🦠 <-> brain 🧠 axis Internalizing symptoms—anxiety, sadness, withdrawal—in childhood link to early gut microbiome patterns ⬆️ Clostridiales / Lachnospiraceae at age 2 predict later changes in emotion-related brain network connectivity and symptom levels

@cp-trendsimmuno.bsky.social Essay: Immunology as a guide to human relationships www.cell.com/trends/immun...

This morning's walk around Marigny and Bywater.

How old is Garliath, the massive Alligator Gar? It’s difficult to say with +accuracy without lethal sampling and extracting otoliths (ear stones with annual rings like a tree). Growth is very slow after 6 feet long. Given locality, morphology, I’d guess at least 50, but could be over 90 years old!

Some slick mito gear hand made by one of our lab alums!

In 1519, the year Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the population there was between 15 - 30 million. By 1600, that dwindled to 2 million. For lots of reasons, but as much as 70% of those deaths were the result of an UNKNOWN hemorrhagic fever. Let's talk about the mystery of the COCOLIZTLI epidemics.

Cytochrome P450 enzymes, including Cyp2s1, metabolize xenobiotics and environmental factors and regulate the intestinal metabolome and microbiome. It could be a useful target for IBD: www.mucosalimmunology.org/article/S193...

Important update (in case this was posted before the update): According to Tulane officials, the non-human primates involved in this incident were *NOT* infected.

But the Mayans were the ones who needed to be “civilized” 🙄

Breaking the publication bias against null results requires authors to submit the manuscript, sure, but also requires reviewers to tell the Editor why it is important to publish.

For series, I really think that the "Them" series (season 1 and 2) are really good and not as popular as they should.

Krewe of Boo!

A short walk by Audubon Park (by the Fly) and saw these bones and some skin. Bones size of a medium-large dog. Alligator?? WTF?! Now I want to know the whole story behind this.

Rain puddle reflection, 4th street, Garden District, New Orleans

The Orator, by Magnus Zeller, 1920, 📸 by @powersimagery @ESPNImages

I will try to do a tweetorial about this paper when I have more energy but this is really important data. It looks (tentatively, preliminarily) that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines might significantly enhance the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy (subject to many caveats).

Okay so as promised... let's go through this paper and why it matters 🧵 #medsky #immunosky #idsky

Arai, Kawakami, Sakaguchi (2025 #Nobel laureate) and colleagues show that oral antigen exposure combined with CD28 costimulation blockade generates functionally stable antigen-specific CD101⁺ pTreg cells even in previously antigen-sensitized hosts. rupress.org/jem/article/...

I painted a Golgi Apparatus. It is perhaps not my finest work, but some neuroscientist will appreciate it 😊 #sciart

Street poet at her typewriter, Pirates Alley, New Orleans

Loss of smell during a viral infection may be connected to the viral destruction of the olfactory mucosa: www.mucosalimmunology.org/article/S193...

Row of double shotguns, N Rampart, Marigny, New Orleans

Here are two "I can't believe these are free" online stats texts books that cover both underlying principles and practical applications in R that I regularly refer to. Learning Statistics with R learningstatisticswithr.com Doing Meta-Analysis with R bookdown.org/MathiasHarre...