Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

Hochul Proposes Tax on N.Y.C. Second Homes That Are Worth $5 Million

We will be taxing the ultra-wealthy and global elites.

Donate to Brad Lander Show your support with a contribution.

Pitch in to join the fight: secure.actblue.com/donate/lande...

I’m running for Congress because we need leaders who will fight, not fold. I recognize this moment, and I’m ready to meet it. #FightDontFold #LanderForNYC #LanderForCongress

The Autism-Microbiome Hypothesis Is Falling Apart Why this new review paper should be required reading for every microbiome researcher

I wrote about the recent autism-microbiome paper, why I think it's the most important microbiome paper this year, and what it says about the field

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

Widespread low-affinity motifs enhance chromatin accessibility and regulatory potential in mESCs Low-affinity transcription factor (TF) motifs are an important element of the cis-regulatory code, yet they are notoriously difficult to map and mechanistically incompletely understood, limiting our a...

We are pleased to announce a new preprint by @mlweilert.bsky.social: “Widespread low-affinity motifs enhance chromatin accessibility and regulatory potential in mESCs” (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). See summary and longer recap below:

(TLDR; low-affinity motifs matter as pioneers!)

Meet Paul Maddox Paul Maddox is a world-renowned cancer researcher, two-time entrepreneur, and native son of Western North Carolina–and now, a candidate for U.S. Congress. ....

🧪hey all, a friend and colleague, @maddoxfornc.bsky.social, is running for Congress in North Carolina. He is a scientist, professor, and parent, perspectives that are especially important right now. I hope you will support his run for Congress. Find out more here: www.maddoxforcongress.com/about/

Nature Communications will publish ~10K papers in 2025 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov?term=%22Natu...

That's ~$70M in revenue, while many of the non-profit journals that used to occupy that slot in the journal hierarchy have seen a precipitous decline in submissions in the 15 years it's existed.

I'm floored by colleagues who are totally not interested in understanding the Nature Comms scourge of academic publishing and just throw their science and their money at these losers

The latest is from Porfirio and is recently published. Aside from the main points of the paper, I want to highlight this work for those who study enhancers in worms, as Porfirio characterized multiple through deletion and endogenous insertion of reporters.

C. elegans is a little animal with sexually dimorphic tails. Fitch lab does wonderful work on the evolution and transcriptional regulation of tail tip morphogenesis in nematodes.

New in #GENETICS: Using Chip-seq and mutant analysis, Fernandez et al. show the transcriptional control of the male tail tip morphogenesis during development by the master regulator of a male-specific morphogenesis gene DMD-3. buff.ly/EGahYv2

An interview with Azim Surani Professor Azim Surani is the Director of Epigenomics and Germline Imprinting at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, UK. He is this year's recipient of both the prestigious Kyoto Prize and the Paul Ehrl...

I didn't think I could admire Azim Surani more than I already did
journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Working with C. elegans This channel provides clear demonstrations of core C. elegans lab skills, including: recognizing life stages and common phenotypes, picking and manipulating worms, and maintaining healthy cultures. De...

Hi fellow C. elegans scientists, I've made a few videos that may be of use for new trainees working in worm labs. Hoping to add more in the future, but figured I'd share this resource as is in case it's helpful :)
www.youtube.com/@Workingwith...

For academic purposes, I generated 100 UMAPs from the same tabular raw data, I sorted them and the result looks too funny to not share it with you 😃
haesleinhuepf.github.io/BioImageAnal...

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

thanks for making a list, I d like to be added as well

This is my reminder of what the American people need from her.

2/2

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.

For who still thinks this can’t happen here… it’s already happening.
www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

A 🧵 1/n

Andrew Cuomo thinks its absurd for the city try to to own a grocery story while New York State owns three (!) ski resorts and Cuomo personally oversaw their operation, even heralding it in his state of the state address.

Look it up if you don’t believe me.

Great ad. This guy is great. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Don’t be deterred by racist scare tactics! This guy is great, as is Lander.
Don’t rank Cuomo.

Springer Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing *identical* journal names, and likely similar business model.

What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it?

A 🧵

the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

Spinger Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

New from The Strain Team:
🎊 Springer Nature Discovers MDPI 🎊

Springer Nature has spawned a copycat journal series called "Discover" mimicking #MDPI journal titles and citation behaviours. We even made a browser game to prove it (see 🔗).

Gross! 😀 1/n

#ResearchIntegrity #SciPub #AcademicSky

New York's Congressional Delegation Must Defend Federal Research Funding for CUNY & SUNY. List of signatories. FACULTY & STAFF: ADD YOUR NAME BELOW TO THIS OPEN LETTER WRITTEN BY THE DEFENDING RESEARCH FUNDING WORKING GROUP OF THE PROFESSIONAL STAFF CONGRESS/CUNY Federal investment in scientific research gene...

CUNY and SUNY faculty, please sign this letter to the NY State Congressional Delegation protesting cuts to research funding (and all the other crap going on)!

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Thank you for reposting!

At last night's mayoral forum cosponsored by Hell Gate and NY Focus at the Public Theater, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social asked @bradlander.bsky.social a question that Lander was more than ready to answer: What he thought was the worst thing Andrew Cuomo did as governor.

The new Neil Halloran documentary on Smallpox has completely changed how I see the RFK Jr. version of the world. Neil (softly) argues that realizing that disease isn't the fault of the sick /or/ the fault of the Gods ushered in a new future where we felt the authority to care for each other.

Defeating a Virus That Killed Half a Billion People – The Plea YouTube video by Neil Halloran

What a horror show to have put that man in charge of anything. The documentary is very short and very good. You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybVZ...

Take the Quiz: Meet Your Mayor 2025 Candidates for NYC mayor told us where they stand on issues. Which is the top match for you? Find out before heading to the polls.

This was illuminating and useful… not at all surprised by my #1, but I made helpful discoveries elsewhere. (And no, I'm not telling.)

FW: Find your own match, powered by @thecity.nyc and @gothamist.com: projects.thecity.nyc/meet-your-ma...

Cohesin organizes 3D DNA contacts surrounding active enhancers in C. elegans - PubMed In mammals, cohesin and CTCF organize the 3D genome into topologically associating domains (TADs) to regulate communication between <i>cis</i>-regulatory elements. Many organisms, including <i>S. cere...

our latest work summary: cohesin is preferentially loaded at/near active enhancers and loop extrudes in both directions, forming loops that create the dna contacts that appear as the newly defined "fountains" in hic maps pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40210441/