After 150 years of boring wooden Galton boards, I finally fixed it!
Now with lasers, bazookas, bombs, pinball bumpers, and extremely serious sci-fi hamsters.
🎯 EXTREME GALTON 👇
sachaepskamp.com/extreme_galton
The music👌!
It feels like yesterday that online-engineers-of-a-certain-age were saying that heavy freight could never be electrified. To quote William Gibson, "The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet." Fossil fuel interests want to keep it that way.
A photo of a rosy veincap growing from a mossy log. The mushroom’s cap is pink with a wrinkled texture. It has a drop of blood red liquid at its base.
Behold the rosy veincap! This species, which is considered inedible, is the only fungus in its taxon. It has a wide range & can be spotted worldwide, including in parts of N. America, Africa, Europe, & Asia. Have you ever seen one?
Photo: Dan Molter, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Mental image of Boaty McBoatface putting on hat, fake mustache, and sunglasses as he approaches Strait of Hormuz
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/w...
🚨New Paper in PNAS: "Refugee Labor Market Integration at Scale: Evidence from Germany’s Fast-Track Employment Program"
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Ungated preprint osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/px9ew_v3
w/ J Hainmueller, D Hangartner, @niklas-harder.bsky.social & E Vallizadeh
#econtwitter #econsky
I've been coming across so many great open science initiatives in other fields that I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the efforts happening in the Education Sciences.
New blog post! 💡
cghlewis.com/blog/ed_open...
Today we launch The Australian DNA Bridge, a study focused on individuals with mixed ancestries to help us make genetic discoveries that are more accurate, inclusive, and equitable across all populations.
Want to learn more? Follow the link.
[https://australiandnabridgestudy.org/]
You were (very likely) born because your parents mated 😅
Title and sub-heading aside, great piece by @kristenfrench.bsky.social on the genetics of individual differences in sensitivity to music and art
‘I’ve been swept up by the autism spectrum idea, and it’s only in the past 10 years that I have felt things have gone too far. Very slowly, I have come to say, “No, this is not right”’: Autism expert professor Uta Frith talks to @helen-amass.bsky.social
To be fair, it does feed our unborn babies, and I know a few women who have fried it up after childbirth. But yeah, still not cake :)
📖5th #iWORDD this October: 2 days of reading & dyslexia research, 1 on real-world impact!
Join our outstanding keynote line-up + share your work here by April 15: shorturl.at/lSlBI
@jyeatman.bsky.social @gaablab.bsky.social @drmluciano.bsky.social @standehaene.bsky.social @cassandrapw.bsky.social
GWAS Catalog API v1 retires in May 2026 🧬
Migrating to v2? It's faster, more stable, and gives you better query control.
Docs 👉 www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/rest/api/v2/docs
Ref 👉 www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/rest/api/v2/docs/reference
3 months to go
#genomics
Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue
Mendelian Randomization is powerful but often debated. We benchmarked it against the "ground truth" of human metabolic pathways to see how often it gets it right. 🧬
Result: MR is robust! It matches known metabolism in 43% of cases and identifies valid drug targets.
www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...
what was the take home message for those of us who missed it?
@clydefrancks.bsky.social found what is potentially (likey?!) the first fully hallucinated GWAS paper, of “left handedness”… the Manhattan plot has the wrong number of chromosomes, and genes labels with one wrong chromosome placed in a second wrong chromosome… wild…
Dyslexia isn’t just about reading and writing. Prof Maggie Snowling explains how reading disorders originate in the language system, and why many children also struggle with oral language.
Read the full blog to learn more. https://bit.ly/4qr5SlY
The department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University is proud to present a lecture series on the topic of eugenics. As philosophers and ethicists, we are concerned about the revival and normalization of eugenic discourse.
humanitiesacademie.ugent.be/eugenics
Copy reads: "We’re building a central hub for LPS training - strategic, inclusive & responsive to evolving needs. Neil Kaye, CLOSER Head of Education and Training." Left side: black text on white background. Right side: Neil Kaye headshot. Population Research UK logo at the top left.
🚀The UK’s longitudinal research sector is about to get a major upgrade in training.
CLOSER, supported by Population Research UK, is creating a strategic, UK-wide training resource for LPS.
Find out what’s coming: shorturl.at/guRbh
Same DNA, different cells, different stories 🧬
Some genetic changes arise during life, creating genetic ‘mosaics’ in the body. Here, we explain what somatic mutations are and how we are exploring them.
sangerinstitute.blog/2026/01/15/what-are-soma...
Just 2 questions: 1) how did personality PGI perform? and 2) is cheese more abundant in Estonian cities :)
Remember the famous UKB migration paper? We found that internal migration also shapes population structure in Estonia. Key patterns replicate within families.
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
Thanks for sharing - we're looking forward to it!
Clever use of proteomic data to stress-test TWAS and QTL colocalization methods, revealing a high false sign rate. This hypothesis about high-LD and cross-tissue confounding is particularly interesting:
This looks really cool, but where are the brain-related phenotypes @nbaya.bsky.social? N.B. I haven't read the paper, only the abstract and this glorious figure :)
International Workshop on Reading and Developmental Dyslexia is in San Sebastián, 7-9th October 2026, www.bcbl.eu/events/iword... Scientific and Practical Days, see you there!
Some of us from the UK's Specific Learning Difficulties Network @sldnetwork.bsky.social have shared our views on the new Delphi definition of dyslexia onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/..., special thanks to Kinga Morsanyi @kmorsanyi.bsky.social for pulling it together so nicely!
This is great - a clear overview of key principles in data visualisation, written in a super-accessible and interest way, with great examples throughout.
