1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.
We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.
Why do some individuals defy their polygenic score?
In the largest study of its kind (402k UKB individuals; 7 continuous traits + 3 diseases), we asked: If your phenotype deviates from common-variant polygenic score prediction, what's driving that difference?
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
The first (of hopefully many) reports to come from our collaboration with @hjp.bsky.social
We present a new type of cell fitness assay that allows you to both quantify and explain differences across human donors in cell proliferation and sensitivity to environmental toxicants.
A bar plot of the 10 ten cities with roundabouts. The top 3 are Auckland (NZ), Carmel Indiana (US), and Gothenburg (SWE).
It's been a long while since I've done a #tidytuesday - did a quick bar plot of the top 10 cities with roundabouts.
I used #databot and went pretty fast. I spent about 10 minutes getting the data to this point. Mind is blown. #rstats #databs #datascience
As Trump tries to use the tragic story of the Brown shooter and his victims to further vilify immigrants, remember that MIT professor and innovator Nuno Loureiro followed the same path here
Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.
Super excited to get this out. This collab started a few years ago and is the first paper from it. Here, with experimental and computational approaches we:
1. establish that cell villages can be just as accurate (one might argue more accurate!) than arrayed-based designs
bsky.app/profile/bior...
This is a lovely article that showcases some of the outstanding work that my UCLA colleagues Tom Carmichael and Alcino Silva and their trainees have done over the past few years seeking to leverage intrinsic repair pathways. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/s...
Perhaps gauche to quote your own book, but I think CROSSINGS's section on the Roadless Rule gets at something fundamental: that to designate places as roadless is to assert that our national forests have value—for wildlife, for water, for slow recreation—beyond mere timber extraction. #roadecology
Me three months ago:
Hundreds of millions of dollars suspended for cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's research (among many, many other equally important diseases and endeavors) and for what? What is the point of all of this? Help me understand how this makes our country better, stronger, and healthier in any way.
Finally out! 🥳 Our paper showing how a transposable element (TE) insertion can cause developmental phenotypes is now published @natgenet.nature.com 🧬🦠🐁
Below is a brief description of the major findings. Check the full version of the paper for more details: www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02248-5
Post: being recommended to stop using em dashes because ChatGPT uses them a lot. Image of two guys, one saying: no way. Should I change? He’s the one who sucks.
exactly
Dear Science Journalists,
Please mention when your write-ups covers work that was funded by federal agencies that are now being dismantled, defunded, and censored.
The public needs to know what is being lost, and if you don't tell them in the context of Cool New Science, who will?
Anadromous threespine stickleback fish in a person’s hand.
Freshwater and gravid female threespine stickleback in a person’s hand.
Freshwater reproductive male threespine stickleback in a person’s hand above a table with a bucket and fish net on it.
More fun teaching kids about fish today. Today we had anadromous and freshwater threespine stickleback to show off. The kids were surprised to learn that all the fish were fully mature adult fish and that the freshwater stickleback were in fact not the anadromous stickleback’s babies. #stickleback
A graphic for the latest LA Podcast episode, The LA Shitty Budget, with an image of LA Mayor Karen Bass giving her state of the city address to the council
How bad is this year's budget? You can hear us discuss on the latest LA Podcast: thelapod.com/episode/the-la-shitty-budget
But you don't have to take our word for it. City department after city department have sent scathing letters to the budget committee begging council not to make these cuts 🧵
@genandgenes.bsky.social makes a powerful case for anti-racist genetics education in secondary school and university, and at the risk of climbing onto a well-worn pedestal, I'd argue this moment, more than any other, calls for a rethinking of how we approach doctoral education in genetics
concentration camp, internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order. Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial. Concentration camps are to be distinguished from prisons interning persons lawfully convicted of civil crimes and from prisoner-of-war camps in which captured military personnel are held under the laws of war.
Amidst all of the horrors of the Trump administration, one stands above the rest: the trafficking of 270 men to El Salvador's CECOT prison.
Here is the definition of concentration camp from the Encyclopedia Britannica.
There’s a big thread of baffled people on Reddit trying to figure out what the emails mean or if they’re real. They include:
- Citizens
- Canadians (living in Canada)
- Green card holders
- DACA recipients
Whatever dataset DOGE used was the wrong one. www.reddit.com/r/USCIS/comm...
Unless I've missed it, I don't believe we have computational models that would accurately predict how a *bacterium* would respond to a novel compound. Just, you know, for context.
Very well visited by me, a Reedie 😊
it's been years upon years of labored "campus culture" op-eds from salaried writers hectoring students about free speech, and now the state is kidnapping students for their speech in broad daylight
🥚🥚🥚🥚🥬🥬
I’ll fall for any charming emoji/ascii account
🌽🌽🥬🥕
New: Energy use shapes brain organization and development. We use gene expression maps from the @alleninstitute.bsky.social Human Brain Atlas to map the main energy metabolism pathways in the brain. Led by @moohebatpe.bsky.social @misicbata.bsky.social @goliashf.bsky.social and Justine Hansen 🧵
enacting fascism because you're afraid of an imaginary computer is the most Loser shit ever conceived. did you know you can go ride bikes or something
There are days in life that shake you.
I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University
& academic career... 1/🧵
I was thrilled to learn that Pi Day was a Reedie invention! Also, the Exploratorium was/is one of my favorite places ever, having introduced me to the amazing mix of science and art!
