Motherhood derails women’s academic careers — these data reveal how and why Mothers in academia take on considerably more childcare-related responsibilities than do fathers.

Always good to have more data on gender, childcare, and parenthood gaps. Still, Ugh!

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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...

GBE | Allelic Variation at tRNA Genes in Three Nematode Species Indicates Mutation Load Despite Strong Purifying Selection Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are ancient, essential molecules with a consistent ‘cloverleaf’ structure (gray points here), but the genes that encode them vary substantially within populations of nematodes (like the C. elegans worm pictured here). This variation, represented by the pie charts here, has been governed by mutation and natural selection and likely impacts tRNA function.

@averydb.bsky.social @annalisepaaby.bsky.social et al. show that cytosolic transfer RNAs genes in three Caenorhabditis nematodes carry signatures of high rates of historical transcription-associated mutagenesis and of purifying selection.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag053

#genome #evolution

Introducing ggauto: automating better charts – Nicola Rennie The ggauto package is an opinionated ggplot2 extension package that aims to help people make better charts by default. This blog post explains why it exists and how it works.

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉

An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊

Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu...

#DataViz

Publishing with y'all is such a pleasant experience!

Allelic Variation at tRNA Genes in Three Nematode Species Indicates Mutation Load Despite Strong Purifying Selection Abstract. Cytosolic transfer RNAs (tRNAs), which are encoded as hundreds of genes in nuclear genomes, experience exceptionally high mutation rates and have

Now published @genomebiolevol.bsky.social: our paper showing that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences!
academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

This is devastating

if you want to know the history of this kind of policy, I made a podcast two years ago that explained why these tests make no sense, how they were already used and eventually abandoned by the IOC in the 80's and 90's, and the devastating impacts they have on real athletes: www.tested-podcast.com

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

How long until this reduces the prep time we're allotted for each class? How long until it's used as a reason to increase class sizes because we are no longer grading? I worry that admin will use this to overload faculty with classes whether we use it or not.

Integrated small and long RNA sequencing reveals piRNA mediated transposon repression during human oogenesis www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting announcement! My new department is launching a postdoc fellowship in quantitative biology. Fellows will be co-advised by two Bio faculty, one that is quant focused (not me) and one that is not (me???). I would love to co-sponsor a postdoc and build a collaboration so please reach out!

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of Biological Sciences.

2/10

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

Measles outbreaks are costing the U.S. millions of dollars. The true losses can't be counted. As vaccination rates decline, the economic consequences will increase, research suggests.

If measles vaccination rates continue to drop just 1% annually for the next five years, the cost to the U.S. could reach $1.5 billion a year, according to a new report from the Yale School of Public Health.

Delayed Denied Deficient Delayed, Denied, DeficientHow Exceptions Fail to Ensure Critical Care Under Georgia's Abortion Law. Read the Full Report We know that "excepti...

Sobering, important new study about how GA's abortion law's 'exceptions' fail to ensure critical care. I was interviewed for this study and shared the hoops my doctors and I had to jump through when I was hemorrhaging and my water had broken much too early at 18 weeks.

amplify-ga.org/denialofcare

Quite rare to see a chart that says quite so overtly that no one involved has the slightest clue what’s happening here

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Abortion stays legal in Wyoming as its top court strikes down laws, including first US pill ban Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming after the state Supreme Court struck down laws including the nation’s first explicit ban on abortion pills.

BREAKING: Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming after the state Supreme Court struck down laws, including the first U.S. ban on pill abortions.

As far as I can tell, RFK Jr.'s latest antivax stunt runs counter to the WMA Declaration of Helsinki. Withholding HepB vaccination clearly does not meet any definition of clinical equipoise. Doing it anyway, overseas, is straight up colonialist medicine.

Details in Dr. Jacobs's thread below.

NSF pares down grant-review process, reducing influence of outside scientists Memo cites overburdened staff, but some say move also aims to elevate White House priorities

“The changes permit as few as one outside review rather than the current minimum of three, end the routine use of expert panels to discuss those individual reviews, and give program managers greater authority to recommend which proposals should or should not be funded.”

#ASMR

Cruel, unpopular, health and life endangering (as in *checks notes* my own life)

(Also, I'm generally curmudgeonly about the push for academics to be All The Things (entrepreneurs, scicomm experts, journalists, Thought Leaders, etc) without institutional support or protection. E.g., "scicomm" is a specialty in itself, not something just any researcher can do)

Getting the COVID Vaccine Can Slash Risk of Premature Birth by About a Third in Pregnant People, Study Finds Pregnant people who receive a COVID vaccine are 60 percent less likely to experience severe disease and around 30 percent less likely to give birth prematurely, according to new research

Getting a COVID Vaccine while Pregnant Slashes Risk of Premature Birth, Major New Study Finds www.scientificamerican.com/article/gett...

Truly, hormonal depression and anxiety are prevalent and devastating. I speak from experience. Taking away tools to manage them at critical vulnerable periods - without evidence - is shortsighted and cruel. ('shortsighted and cruel' could be a tagline for RFK's policy proposals writ large.)

the proximate reason i post here — beyond the fact that i like a lot of you and enjoy reading your thoughts and jokes and observations — is that this is a non-algorithmic platform where people share lots of stuff and people read what is shared. that's still valuable even if it doesn't "influence!"

the secret goat, the geese vs the CEO, and other stories of animals at work Last week we talked about animals at work and here are 10 of my favorite stories you shared. 1. The unauthorized dog I’ve worked my entire career at tech start-ups, which are invariably filled with mu...

Intersection of the month: I'm a huge @askamanager.org fan and our dept is currently working to hire a new Chair (and I have a small child). So, naturally, I'm re-reading and re-cracking up about story 10 The Dean: www.askamanager.org/2024/08/the-...

Do yourself a favor and read it. Delightful.

I had some serious issues with decisions made while Claudine Gay was president, but I appreciate the very clear example of the normalization of pushing Black women out of their jobs and moving right along

Public education was never meant to be the sole source of education for our children. This is why there's a long history of supplementing public education with cultural programming to pass down languages, histories and political education (think: freedom schools).