Did you know the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting has an entire session just for NEW PI Talks? And a New PI Keynote Talk? It does! These will be chosen from the abstracts. New PIs, sign up! @socdevbio.bsky.social @rashmi-priya.bsky.social @lowelab.bsky.social scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu

A reviewer of my evolutionary genetic complexity paper asked me to cite Donovan as evidence of the real harm of simplification, and I'm so grateful. This is a hard read.

Bondi was awful, but no worse than Patel. Noem was terrible, but no worse than Hegseth. Funny that it’s only the women who get fired.

If preparing figures please consider "colorblind friendly" approaches (www.nature.com/articles/d41...). I am missing the long-wave opsin, which manifests in strange ways: I can't discern red vs. black. This dichromacy is rare and severe, but ~300 million have more common forms addressed in link.

How many of us who remember watching the Challenger launch in your elementary classroom still get highly emotional when a personed mission launches?

The Cooper lab is hiring a postdoc with a strong background in mouse genetics and molecular biology to advance.our gene drive work. Must be extremely organized, engineering-minded, and outcomes-oriented. Spread the word and have interested candidates email me directly.

Annual reminder: if you’ve been accepted to multiple graduate programs and are still deciding, please let the ones you’re definitely not going to know as soon as possible! -Someone who got into his PhD off the waitlist the day after the deadline

First year and incoming PhD students are impacted the most bc few faculty can be comfortable with a ~5 year financial responsibility.

Possibly once councils meet that some of these (especially the single digit) will turn into NOAs eventually. Its not possible to plan anything on 'eventually' - projects/labs just stagnate because you don't want to hire, put out resources only to find out the grant won't be funded.

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Very sad news. Gail Martin (1944-2026) was a figure in developmental biology. She pioneered the field of ES cells. A great colleague, a friend and a lovely person.

I had an email exchange with a guy yesterday who insisted I was making a mistake not outsourcing my writing to an LLM. He said, "It knows more than you do." He couldn't understand that this was impossible because the work of writing is figuring out what "I" think.

Cause that's what heroes do.

"Relax your tight end" for the win...

This is ok tho

Co-loquial literally refers to speaking together, what more could behoove a journal?🤷‍♂️

L.o.l

It would be great if SoCal earthquakes would stop happening while I'm in my office on the 6th floor 🤢

Meanwhile, "Even a casual pass through the great halls of mammals..." was deemed "too colloquial" for another journal. @currentbiology.bsky.social for the win again.

As Julie Packard prepares to retire, a look at her amazing legacy that shaped the Monterey Bay Aquarium and its global impact. 🌊🦑🧪 #scicomm www.montereycountynow.com/news/cover/a...

It's been a good few weeks for cool bird genomcis - incl this, on warblers sharing colour genes through hybridisation (with evidence of between-genus introgression journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Bilaterian guts share embryonic patterning, but what about the adult gut? This study of 5 species reveals conserved TF modules that define A-P #gut compartments, with lineage-specific modifications, illuminating #bilaterian gut #evolution & diversification @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/49pgpH3

I taught Genetics again this year. We need to include discussion of the problematic history of our field, especially as the claims of eugenics are once again centered in our political discourse. Last year I wrote this piece, explaining my reasoning and approach 🧪 1/n www.cell.com/trends/genet...

A new reporter mouse for visualising Hedgehog/GLI signalling activity This Research Highlight showcases the work from Hannah Schrader Dear, Nicole Franks, Benjamin Allen and colleagues: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Look at those tail crescendos!! Another amazing example of disproportionate elongation of mid-tail vertebrae, and they note it is distal to the more functionally-constrained proximal tail.

C'mon people, mustard gas is chemical warfare...

This perfectly encapsulates what the GOP position is on the shutdown.

If SNAP benefits vanished tomorrow, feeding 42 million Americans for a month would cost about $7.8 billion.That’s less than 1% of the combined net worth of the three richest men in the U.S. A reminder of how obscene inequality has become and how easily hunger could be solved if we chose to.

Surely there's no problem for the long term stability of university procurement systems, right?

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Dear @nytimes, It is entirely possible to write a story about education without seeking comment from Chris Rufo. Sincerely, An actual educator

Please read and share this ⬇️ journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Dems really need to be cutting ads with wall-to-wall messaging of “trump and his billionaire cabinet don’t fucking care about you”. All the clips are out there! “Trump is laser focused on his ballroom while SNAP benefits expire” “Bessent fancies himself a farmer, but he is really just a landlord”

Everyone needs to read the book Robopocalypse to see where this could go...

Biology PhD program directors who want to join the conversation, my email and DM are open.

I still contend that >90% of the benefit of writing a review isn't the audience. It's for the author going through the literature, finding gaps in knowledge, learning how experiments are done, etc. It really isn't about writing a review. It's about doing the review yourself. AI can't do that for you

As I work on my own grant resubmissions I have to wonder- is it worth it or will mine sit there unreviewed for months while my lab slowly loses students and eventually folds as well? 2/

Really excited to share the pre-print of my first paper! It details the computational method we used to identify uncharacterized metabolites along the developmental gradient of maize roots, I hope you find it interesting! 🌱🌽

I've received an 'exclusive' invite to try Nature's new 'research assistant', which will burn down a forest to provide a 'summary of the paper' I'm reading and I have SUCH exciting news for them, that's called an 'abstract' and the actual authors already wrote it for me, no forest-burning required.

Also applies to grant writing...

Here, we use the jerboa and mouse to understand the temporal growth dynamics that establish adult vertebral proportion, the cellular drivers of differential growth, and candidate genetic mechanisms that determine and diversify vertebral proportion. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Extremely proud of @ceriweber.bsky.social and team and the newest paper from our lab!

Lab’s 1st preprint! Menstruation is understudied due to societal taboos + a biological challenge: mice (a key system for research + drug discovery) don’t menstruate. @cagricevrim.bsky.social made menstruating mice + used them to discover early events in menstruation. He is on the job market!

My HPLC was definitely overlooked www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Strong statement today from UC's Academic Senate:

Hugely problematic that 2nd year PhD students are no longer eligible. It also seems that concurrent BS/MS students are considered graduate students during their senior year of the BS and so would have one year of eligibility.

Signed. I was also a GRFP recipient.

I was on H-1B after my J-1. This new fee is terrible. Forget going home for a family emergency. Forget fieldwork. Forget conferences. Living abroad on a job-tied visa is stressful enough already. I hardly recognize the country that was my home for 9 years.

So excited!!!