Feeling pooped just tracking my baby sister running the Boston Marathon!

“It wasn’t only that America was a big, dynamic country with many world-class research institutions. It was that here, unlike so many other places, differences of opinion were encouraged, and the prevailing ethos was to let the best ideas win.”

Compelling article, must-read. 🧪

Unfortunately, turning away from the NIH system because it’s imperfect is not a viable option. We need to fight to preserve and eventually rebuild its integrity.

Request for Information (RFI): Inviting Comments and Suggestions on a Framework for the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2027-2031 This Request for Information (RFI) is intended to gather broad public input to assist the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in developing the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2027-2031 (FY27...

If this upsets you (& it should), contact your SRO copy your comments to csrdrr@mail.nih.gov, call your congress reps, and DEFINITELY provide feedback on this & other concerns about the NIH Strategic Plan through the Federal Register! Link on this page: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Have you served on an NIH study section (or thought about serving)? Did you know that that the small perk of being able to submit your own applications after the deadline has largely been revoked? grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Guess I should check out Derry Girls!

Screenshot showing the new season of Deadloch, which was just released on Amazon Prime Video.

Have been waiting for today for months.

Standing up for Science rally, Physics Girl is back, and we need to find more asteroids I’m angry about anti-science attacks, Dianna Cowern has made a new video, and a graph shows why we need to look for near-Earth asteroids

Great news! Physics Girl is making videos again!

Bad news: Attacks on science are so bad I need to talk at a rally on Saturday.

Interesting news: We need to find more near-Earth asteroids.

And it's all here!

badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/standing-u...

🔭 🧪

We are starting Bay Area Chromatin Club up again in 2026! Fist event March 5th at UCSF Mission Bay! Details and registration HERE: If you like to nominate a person for a talk- DM me. It's been a great experience in the past.

urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

wow! congrats!

1/ 🚀🧪🤖 Big update for #Omega — the LLM-powered autonomous agent for bioimage analysis in @napari.org ! Custom LLM endpoints, layer actions, plugin extensibility, agentic widget maker, modernized UI, & 30+ fixes. Here's what's new in version *2026.2.8.2*:

Wow! Congratulations Takashi!!

Breaking Fundamental Biological Law: Research by Takashi Akera Investigates Selfish DNA - Vilcek Foundation Winner of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, Akera’s novel research findings have huge implications for infertility and chromosomal disorders.

vilcek.org/news/breakin...

Asymptomatic: The Silent Spread of COVID-19 and the Future of Pandemics Asymptomatic: The Silent Spread of COVID-19 and the Future of Pandemics

Today's @nytimes.com dialogue with Ross Douthat & Jay Bhattacharya is tough sledding. I wrote a book on how silent transmission made COVID harder to stop and drove misleading narratives. The interview continues to mislead as a means to seize more power.

a 🧵
www.amazon.com/Asymptomatic...

I’m shocked.🫤

🥴

actually, I think that's when it the funding level really matters.

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Sea star wasting syndrome killed billions of stars, including sunflower stars. Thanks to a cohort of scientists, a cause of the syndrome is now identified. Each day, new science is emerging that will help our efforts to restore the population! Read more about sunflower stars: mbayaq.co/3ZlFtKf

When your A1 gets ND, it doesn't matter if it's 200K, 20K, or 2.

With Rob Reiner Dies a Whole Tradition of Hollywood Filmmaking Everyone’s remembering his acting, directing, and activism. But another part of his career was just as important.

My first post for Round 3 of Slate Movie Club was written the day after the news of Rob & Michele Reiner's deaths. So I knew it would be published two weeks after that "news cycle" (ugh) was over, but I couldn't not write about all his work meant to me & to so many others. slate.com/culture/2025...

The Most Feared Person at the NIH Is a Vaccine Researcher Plucked From Obscurity While NIH director Jay Bhattacharya focuses on podcasting, his second in command is dramatically remaking the agency.

Gift link:
www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

Worth a read, like everything @katherinejwu.com has written about the savaging of NIH and other HHS and science agencies.

Nice work! Note that the AtTIR1 we expressed in C. elegans (which I think was adapted to engineer AID2) includes 2 gain-of-function mutations identified in a screen by the Estelle lab (D170E and M473L). For traceability it may be worth including these in the allele designations.

Where does it say that clients must not (or do not) affect the thermodynamics of the scaffold? This seems to be a straw man fallacy.

The utterly fucked thing about this is that if any of that happens it's because of basic life science research investments (currently being gutted), not because of large language models.

Dario Amodei can eat shit and then do whatever it is that Bluesky would ban me for saying

now switch to DMSO!

I folded early

One of the wilder Texas Hold’ em hands I’ve played. (I did not win.)

FFS🙄