Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Plastic bird feeder with chewed through hole on the side

Squirrels really wanted this bird seed I guess.

Central dogma: DNA --> RNA --> Protein, this is the only way it happens
This paper: okay but like what if
protein --> DNA

New FeiginLab paper is OUT! A commonly prescribed anti-anxiety drug reduces inflammatory signaling in pancreatic cancer through regulation of cancer-associated fibroblast activity!

aacrjournals.org/cancerrescom...

WAT
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What is the PhD actually for? A response to Prachee’s “Free the PhD”, and a critique of my own work

What is the PhD actually for, especially now that AI can do increasingly more of what we train scientists to do? compbiologist.substack.com/p/what-is-th...

A response to @pracheeac.bsky.social's thought-provoking essay "Free the PhD".

Excited to share this preprint from Rachel Sharp @rrsharp.bsky.social in the lab, in collaboration with a great team of collaborators at UNC and Duke. We examine bipolar disorder case status with social risk variables and with polygenic risk in the All of Us Research Program.

Had to save up for the publication fees

I'm going to have to get my butt in gear if I want to get one last publication out before retirement

(www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

🤪

@barrlab.bsky.social Yes, I saw this...

Here is the video of the response.

"It ... promotes fairness to taxpayers..."

Let's explore this a bit.

1/5

Pretty rough out there in the world, but at least I can watch my favorite sports team and player....what's that Joel is out with an illness...thats ok, I'm sure he'll be back next game

world....not so fast

You need to make AI guidelines for your lab Here's why you should, and how to start

I wrote about why every lab should have AI use guidelines, and how to do it.

open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

I recently shared a blog post written by Britt DeVries on how she used ChatGPT to create REDCap data dictionaries. I was so inspired by her post that I wrote my own on my experience using Claude to create a data dictionary draft.

cghlewis.com/blog/claude_...

Counterpoint. We can and should. Every bomb . Every missile is a theft from our future.

Award and abstract submissions due April 20! Join FASEB for #BioMethylSRC! Featuring speakers @garcialabms.bsky.social and @metorrespadilla.bsky.social alongside organizers @brianstrahl.bsky.social, @vanrechemlab.bsky.social, @bonalditiziana.bsky.social, and @rothbartlab.bsky.social. buff.ly/3GCABMr

I think this was a conflict with some other inline suggester - maybe windsurf or github copilot I had at one point. I think I tracked down everywhere they were in settings and turned off and at least Ctrl+Space seems to pull up file completion now

Insane ending

Reproducible pipelines There was a discussion recently on Bluesky about reproducible data analysis pipelines.

We recently had a conversation here about reproducible data analysis pipelines. I put my thoughts into a longer-form article. Whatever you do, it's critical you save and archive your final processed data right before plotting.
blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/creating-r...

🧪

Under CoPilot settings -> Privacy -> Disable

Allow #GitHub to collect and use my Inputs, Outputs, and associated context to train and improve AI models

Disable.

constantly down too - again this morning. Maybe stop pushing out half-baked new features and get stable

Carolina reaches 200 IP-based startup milestone | UNC-Chapel Hill The milestone places UNC-Chapel Hill in an elite tier among U.S. research universities.

@uncchapelhill.bsky.social reached a cool milestone w/ 200 IP-based startups. It's exciting to see the work of brilliant innovators having a public impact. Innovate Carolina does an great job creating a path from basic research, through translational work to startup.
www.unc.edu/posts/2026/0...

I generally like positron and have started moving over form Rstudio, but is there some trick to getting rstudio style completions working. I cannot get file names or variable names to complete even if I turn off ai inline suggestions (or at least I think I did)

Completely agree. NC punches above its weight because it made these choices. Other states could make similar investments

North Carolina invested a lot in science and it's paid off. State legislature has a big cancer research fund that helped build capacity and has compounded over time.

Rough start to the week, but then I got a plyranges hex sticker and things are looking up

Neat to see frameworks for evaluating this kind of stuff

This and the response letter are great. I feel like we're reaching or have reached a breaking point on publishing. Paying these fees and also donating a ton of effort to reviewing for these journals would be far better used in other ways.

Pls re-post: My department @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social are recruiting for several new faculty positions (links below). Broad search in molecular biology/biochemistry, across prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Interested in understanding life at the molecular level, this job might be for you!
1/n

I am - thanks, I'll add it to the list

Today's grant reviewing soundtrack is brought to you by Outer Wilds. I'm on a videogame soundtrack kick