Did you know the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting has an entire session just for NEW PI Talks? And a New PI Keynote Talk? It does! These will be chosen from the abstracts. New PIs, sign up!
@socdevbio.bsky.social @rashmi-priya.bsky.social @lowelab.bsky.social
scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu
A reviewer of my evolutionary genetic complexity paper asked me to cite Donovan as evidence of the real harm of simplification, and I'm so grateful. This is a hard read.
Bondi was awful, but no worse than Patel. Noem was terrible, but no worse than Hegseth. Funny that it’s only the women who get fired.
If preparing figures please consider "colorblind friendly" approaches (www.nature.com/articles/d41...). I am missing the long-wave opsin, which manifests in strange ways: I can't discern red vs. black. This dichromacy is rare and severe, but ~300 million have more common forms addressed in link.
How many of us who remember watching the Challenger launch in your elementary classroom still get highly emotional when a personed mission launches?
The Cooper lab is hiring a postdoc with a strong background in mouse genetics and molecular biology to advance.our gene drive work. Must be extremely organized, engineering-minded, and outcomes-oriented. Spread the word and have interested candidates email me directly.
At what point will AI kill wonder because we will all naturally become cynical...
Programs across the country have cut cohort sizes ~30% and anticipate higher yields on offers bc of the spillover. So yes, fewer offers are going out, wait lists are being used, and the system may jam up until candidates accept their best offer in hand on April 15th.
My heart is with you.
🎯
Novelty is often an illusion of incomplete data.
There's a 50% probability of randomly getting this correct and yet it seems the equivalent of trying to insert a USB-A...
Annual reminder: if you’ve been accepted to multiple graduate programs and are still deciding, please let the ones you’re definitely not going to know as soon as possible!
-Someone who got into his PhD off the waitlist the day after the deadline
First year and incoming PhD students are impacted the most bc few faculty can be comfortable with a ~5 year financial responsibility.
Possibly once councils meet that some of these (especially the single digit) will turn into NOAs eventually. Its not possible to plan anything on 'eventually' - projects/labs just stagnate because you don't want to hire, put out resources only to find out the grant won't be funded.
If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!
One of my PhD students today was telling me about how her grandmother remembers getting the internet...
I did in - in 2005 when Endnote kept crashing Word once the document got too long, even with citations unformatted. It was miserable, and I've been using Zotero since not long after.
Very sad news. Gail Martin (1944-2026) was a figure in developmental biology. She pioneered the field of ES cells.
A great colleague, a friend and a lovely person.
I had an email exchange with a guy yesterday who insisted I was making a mistake not outsourcing my writing to an LLM. He said, "It knows more than you do." He couldn't understand that this was impossible because the work of writing is figuring out what "I" think.
Image of Bad Bunny giving his Grammy to young Liam from Minnesota.
Cause that's what heroes do.
"Relax your tight end" for the win...
This is ok tho
Ah, the good old days ...
Seems so
Co-loquial literally refers to speaking together, what more could behoove a journal?🤷♂️
Haha, I see what you did there with your ungulate pun...
L.o.l
It would be great if SoCal earthquakes would stop happening while I'm in my office on the 6th floor 🤢
Meanwhile, "Even a casual pass through the great halls of mammals..." was deemed "too colloquial" for another journal. @currentbiology.bsky.social for the win again.