New strain is strikingly red. Moreso in real life.

Photo of a white bacterial colony excreting a yellow liquid droplet

Bacterium: Here, look, I made this for you

Yep

Where U.S. science has been hit hardest after Trump’s first year The Trump administration has slashed the number of grants from the National Institutes of Health, with far fewer focused on women, cancer and mental health.

Those of us doing research related to women’s health have been hit particularly hard by the govt’s sabotage of the NIH. I spoke to WaPo for this piece, as painful as it was to discuss the reality my lab is facing. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

The new normal...

At war on Monday before US Markets open
"Peace" by Friday before US Markets close

For U.S. medical researchers, shrinking labs and bare budgets are the new reality The Trump administration has slashed the number of grants from the National Institutes of Health, with far fewer focused on women, cancer and mental health.

Very good (if tragic) story from the Washington Post

[GIft Link]

wapo.st/3OONwh6

1/8

Unfalsifiable by Design: A Year of Trying and Failing to Reproduce a Human Microbiome and Autism Study The myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:

merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

"A concept of a peace plan"

Context:
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

The Palantir post, summarized:

White, USA, religious nationalism is the path forward.

We should be allowed to do and say whatever we want.

Silicon Valley is able to, and should be left to, fix all the world's problems. Trust us bro.

a man wearing a baseball cap is standing in front of a blackboard . ALT: a man wearing a baseball cap is standing in front of a blackboard .

Trump: I'm rolling back progress towards oil dependence. Make oil great again!

Also Trump: I have now disrupted a significant portion of our oil supply!

a man with white hair is saying i feel like i 'm taking crazy pills ALT: a man with white hair is saying i feel like i 'm taking crazy pills

In the past just the fact the President publishes official government communication via a distribution platform he owns and makes money off of (Truth Social) would be scandalous.

Now all the more heinous scandals make that one seem tame. And that's partly the point

What are we doing as a society?

Where has this molecule been detected before across samples, organisms, body parts, and environments?
With StructureMASST, you can explore this directly by entering a molecule name and running a search in your browser.
🔗 structure-masst.gnps2.org
📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I only trust using it in domains where I'm an expert already. I can scan through the output and understand what's going on

But, Claude's Opus flags prompts to generate code even when it has to do with benign biology/chem.

I think it's cool people are getting interested in this stuff. But there is some slippery slope stuff here which means access needs to be gated in some way. I Just wish they also had a way for verified scientists to bypass some of the restrictions.

People on X making really apparent why Anthropic is so strict about blocking science related content in its latest models.

(e.g. "Claude helped me set up a lab in my basement")

Which sucks for scientists with access to proper facilities who would benefit greatly from using these models.

The FBI guy is on a paranoid bender and won’t leave his room.

The War guy quotes bible passages from Pulp Fiction.

The Health guy collects raccoon dicks.

It’s an Idiocracy on steroids.

That the president of the United States is personally looting the treasury to the tune of literally billions of dollars and that he is not being immediately removed from office and tried for high crimes against this country is a devastating indictment of every part of our political system!

Do we think Trump can beat Suharto in terms of most money stolen? He’s certainly giving it a good try.

Nominally independent media institutions celebrating press freedom by serving canapés to president fake news is some bleak, black comedy but the venue is chef’s kiss

It’s late; I’m not gonna do a whole thread about this (1/3, dammit) but “security clearance” and “classified” are executive-branch labels that should be understood to have exactly no purchase on the rest of the world, *especially* Congress.

A privately funded presidential bunker?

Agree
Did some lawns of this one too and it doesn't excrete into the air like this but does have fuzzy aerial mycelia.

Definitely threw away some Actinos early in grad school, thinking they were fungi.

Streptomycetes are weird

For a candidate that convinced his party he was their only chance of avoiding war... the signs the US is beginning to wage actual war on the world escalate

Tariffs
Threats
Maduro
Actual war
Changing Draft requirements
Talking to auto companies to transition a to war-time production footing
etc, etc

The SBIR program spans multiple agencies and hasn't existed since last year (e.g. zero NIH NOFOs). As a result many promising small businesses were never formed, have gone under, and more are still at risk even with this news.

It does not.

Looks like NIH staff is trying, but the earliest potential funding date is April 2027

The question is what happens to this year's funds since there have been no applications this year and the earliest potential application date is September. Likely too late for me 🤕.