🎧LEVER TIME: The secret 40-year plot to bury you in tax paperwork & force you to pay accountants - rather than letting the IRS send you your completed tax returns like other countries do.
This story is enraging - it's a GOP plot to enrich tax prep companies & make you hate taxes.
What about Computeral Bioinfology?
With the heavy discounting on the first year of .bio domains right now, how can we not? It is decidedly not well-considered, but I will accept debate only in the form of a pull request
compbiovs.bio
In a first last month, renewables supplied more power to the U.S. than natural gas, a milestone in the shift to clean energy.
e360.yale.edu/digest/us-re... via @yalee360.bsky.social
Delighted to share our latest research from the 23andMe Research Team, just published in @nature.com !
We looked at data from >27,000 participants to uncover how human genetics influences weight loss efficacy and side effects of GLP-1 medications like semaglutide. A short thread 🧵👇
A 'Dinosaur Smarties' Easter egg.
Erm, they're called palaeontologists, actually.
![Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation.
[alt text from NASA]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:62gdkmpwa7xme36getyqnem3/bafkreid6rp25tpuxaceaziwiduvtsnbystj5s542tlmuhcstyuxyfaj7ve)
Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation. [alt text from NASA]
#Artemis II lunar flyby images are showing up! 😍
A crescent Earth setting behind the Moon.
Price of gas got you down? Heres how cheap it is to charge an EV right now. This map shows the cost of charging an EV by an amount equivalent to one gallon of gasoline. Figures reflect electricity prices as of January 2026. $1.24 $1.16 $1.32$1.09 $2.76 $1.16 $1.2631.16 $2.72 $1.48 $1.40 $1.32 $0.9851.35 $1.22 $1.641.75 $1.06 $1.15 $1.82.08 $1.$1.4658 $2:9318 $1.28 $1.06 ŞP43 $1.28 $1.1351.11 $1.18 $1.23 $1.39 $1.28.441.30 $1.41 $1.12 + $2.29 $1.43 $3.58 Puerto Rico $2.47 Vehicles used for the comparison are the 2025 gasoline-powered Hyundai Kona and the 2025 Hyundai Kona Electric. This analysis is based on home charging. Map: Karin Kirk for Yale Climate Connections • Source: Energy Information Administration and FuelEconomy.gov • Get the data • Embed • Download image • Created with Datawrapper
This map shows the cost of charging an EV at home across the U.S. Home-charging is significantly cheaper in all 50 states than fueling a car with gasoline.
Source: @karinkirk.bsky.social @climateconnections.bsky.social yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/04/what... #energy #uspol
Few people are aware of how much progress has been made against cancers.
Leukemia is probably the most striking example.
Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would soon die from it.
Now, most children in rich countries survive.
ourworldindata.org/childhood-le...
💯. Or just as bad: alpha-gal syndrome
A series of buttons for different levels. The bottom level is labeled "Earth" and the top level is called "Space"
At Kennedy Space Center astronauts have to take elevators to the top of launch pad towers in order to enter their space capsules before lift off. This is the elevator panel at Pad 39A.
My main gripe with the alphafold example is how it shows you need decades and decades of high quality data, well structured, open and accessible to train a model -- and yet they always gloss over it and pretend it's just AI and magic. No, we need to continuously invest in real data and FAIR data.
Ever receive a BAM aligned to “GRCh38” and realize that could mean several different references?
We just released ref-solver, a tool that identifies the reference genome behind BAM/CRAM/FASTA files by comparing sequence dictionaries to known builds.
🔗 whatsmygenome.fulcrumgenomics.com
Read more 👇
My impression is that scholar was someone's 10% project that was successful enough to keep, but not successful enough to devote any resources to
Interesting looking study. Seems they are certainly aligned with the neutral-rebel/rebel-rebel #epigenetics camp by invoking chromatin accessibility and TF binding as an epigenetic memory 🤔 (image credit: @zchiang.bsky.social)
And 20kb reads are gonna be pretty tough in that setting. If it's perfect fresh cell-line DNA, this may be less of a problem!
What's your RNA quality? With ONT cDNA (poly-A selected), on real-world frozen tumor samples we see that as many as 50% of reads aren't full length - they have random truncations from RNA degradation. It works, but had to do all sorts of filtering and discarding to get to a reasonable dataset.
"Society should not be judged by how it treats it's most exceptional citizens, but by what percentage of its host star's energy it captures" -- Fyobro Dudeskyevsky
💯 Renting a car for long road trips often ends up being a better deal anyway, once you factor in wear and tear on your car.
If you're a two-car family with a garage, there aren't many reasons left why you shouldn't get a cheap EV for your "around town" car.
Impressive - that's great production from a master's student!
Next lesson: figuring out which of those plots are actually the ones worth looking at 😄
I want to make a simple argument: every new bioinformatics tool and method you write should be AI-ready. AI assistants need to work with your code, your outputs, and your analysis logic. Machine learning needs to train on the rich data your tools produce. If you’re not gathering this data as you go, you’re leaving value on the table.
An argument from @nilshomer.com that in the long run, your tool's intermediate data may be just as important as the end results.
blog.fulcrumgenomics.com/p/your-bioin...
🚨 BREAKING: A federal judge has ruled in favor of @ameracadpeds.bsky.social and issued a preliminary injunction against the CDC.
The ruling pauses the Jan 2026 childhood immunization schedule revisions, blocks RFK Jr's 13 recent ACIP member appointments, and pauses all votes taken by the committee.
Samples returned from the asteroid Ryugu contain all five canonical nucleobases (A, G, C, T, U). Their presence in Ryugu and Bennu supports the hypothesis that carbonaceous asteroids contributed to the prebiotic chemical inventory of early Earth. http://dlvr.it/TRWtVp ☄️
Same.
Brent Pedersen, Mitchell Vollger and I have "posted" our preprint of the manuscript describing bedder, a complement to the functionality of bedtools. The "preprint server" we have chosen is google docs because it was rejected by biorxiv.
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
I've been through this before, and we decided to send our preprint to arxiv.org/archive/q-bio where it was posted rapidly
I kind of get why they made the rule (they don't want a new preprint for every version bump of every tool), but maintain that tools like this should have a place in bioRxiv
There is something darkly comical about vibe coding forcing a bunch of engineers who likely derided engineering management now managing a corral of AI agents that basically act like a mix between Amelia Bedelia and the guy from Memento
Excited to share this preprint that describes my latest work on using GPUs to accelerate processing of RNA-seq data.
The title says it all: "RNA-seq analysis in seconds using GPUs" now on biorxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... and github github.com/pachterlab/k...
Figure 1 shows they key result
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
How Colorectal Cancer rates among young folks are 📈 and what we can do about it:
www.hankgreen.com/crc
To his excellent list, I'd add one more actionable item:
Advocate for cancer research funding. Cancer is not insurmountable - we've cured many types! We just need dollars and brains working on it