RFK Jr. just said HHS is "cleaning up the risk pool" (i.e., people who are unhealthy) to bring down healthcare costs.

nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

I’m thrilled to share my journey from the kitchen to the lab, which has ultimately led me to publish in Cell Journals. I hope you enjoy reading my latest paper:

Senior professors - if you want to help your junior colleagues in these times, I am begging you, review our papers. I have done 25 manuscript reviews in the last 6 years. But my own manuscript is stalled out waiting for reviewers. Relatedly, I won't be doing any more reviews until tenure. 🧪

Baeus! The impossibly cute (and small at ~600µm BL) spider egg parasitoid wasp - found beneath a stone in my backyard, Oklahoma

Job Summary: The FlyBase project is an international collaboration of ~35 people distributed at several sites. This position is located at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. All FlyBase staff work as a part of a team, in which curators and software engineers collaborate extensively. Each site has its own set of responsibilities. The Harvard FlyBase curators focus on curation/annotation of literature and high-throughput data pertaining to the Drosophila genome, transcriptome and proteome. FlyBase is constantly evolving, seeking both to improve and to expand its role within the Drosophila and wider scientific communities. The ideal applicant will be enthusiastic about participating in this process, bringing to the FlyBase group expertise and ideas concerning emerging directions in Drosophila biology and genomic/proteomic analysis. FlyBase is increasingly integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning tools into its curation workflows. The ideal candidate will be open-minded and enthusiastic about exploring AI-assisted approaches to biological data curation, including the use of large language models and AI coding assistants to accelerate and enhance curation tasks.

Job-Specific Responsibilities: • Reading and abstracting of data from the current Drosophila literature, including its relationship to human disease, physical interactions, and gene expression • Evaluating and validating AI generated annotations and curation suggestions, ensuring accuracy and biological relevance before integration into the database • Using AI coding assistants (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini) to write scripts for data wrangling, format conversion, and routing curation tasks • Providing feedback on AI model outputs and refining prompts to help improve automated curation pipelines and annotation quality over time • Annotation and analysis of the Drosophila melanogaster genome, including gene models, mapped mutations, and regulatory features • Together with curators and developers at other sites, interact with broad research community by answering helpmail and giving presentations and tutorials at research conferences • Handling high-throughput datasets and associated metadata

FlyBase is seeking a new scientific curator at our Harvard University site.
More information here: wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...

The Pokémon universe goes hard on ecology and climate science The Pokémon franchise, including its recent game Pokémon Pokopia, is inspired by real animals and their ecology. It’s no surprise that so many scientists love to try and “catch ’em all”

My latest for @sciam.bsky.social is all about the real biology, ecology, and climate science that is used to create the world of Pokémon, and how scientists use it to teach science in the real world.

This is just about the most fun I’ve ever had interviewing anyone, and I hope you enjoy! 🧪🌎

Always read any story with a custom-built 7-foot-long sephadex column, that's my motto.

Female octopuses throw rocks at males that bother them, documented in Octopus tetricus

This week has been day after day of not doing the job fast enough, we're facing massive challenges to get things done, beatings will continue until morale improves, general OMB shit to all fed employees..... but yes please add being more empathetic unto the emotional beating the last year has been

kind of astonishing that they are giving people TWO WEEKS to apply for the NIH Institute Director position at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Almost as though they want to push through some hand-chosen political hack

Spectral characterization of serapH1.0.

serapH: a photostable pH biosensor based on mStayGold by Kelvin K. Tsao and team:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#Seabattical paper just dropped!

One of the wildest things I learned about planarian flatworms: you can isolate their pharynx (throat) and it will autonomously engage in feeding behavior.
www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Literally a hole in the ground countries and corporations can throw bribes into

More of this. The best way to make progress in this moment is just for all of us to truthfully describe what is happening.

Just watched the NIH Strategic Planning input session...

Some observations:

(1) I am glad that NIH is doing this (although I do remain skeptical about how seriously they will take input which challenges their existing intentions).

PEOPLE SHOULD STILL COMMENT!

grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

1/4

Automatic registration for US military draft to begin in December Eligible men will automatically be registered into the military draft pool by December as part of an effort to streamline the previous process of self-registration and save money. The Selective Ser…

Starting in December 2026, the U.S. government will automatically register young men for the Selective Service System using federal databases. No form to fill out. No reminder card. No choice. You exist, therefore you’re on the list. 

Because here’s the deeper issue: if efficiency is the goal, why does it only seem to apply when the government wants something from you?
We can automatically register young people for a potential war but not automatically guarantee them healthcare, housing, or even the right to vote in every state.

Han. M., Xia, B., Kim, A-R., Filine, E., Stoneburner, E., Miao, T., Liu, Y., Zirin, J. and Perrimon, N. (2026) Phage display-mediated immuno-PCR to detect low-abundance secreted proteins in Drosophila. PNAS. 14;123(15):e2531777123. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2531777123. PMID: 41941621

Octopamine regulates neural circuits in the mushroom body and central complex, influencing sleep and arousal. Sleep is a widespread yet incompletely understood phenomenon, and animals exhibit diverse arousal states beyond the simple binary of sleep and wake. Essential behaviors such as feeding, courtship, and...

Excited to share our latest paper from the lab, now out in iScience! 🧠✨

Huge credit to the incredible team whose creativity and hard work made this study possible—so proud of my team! 🙌

#Neuroscience #Sleep #Drosophila #Behavior #Connectomics

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

An enteric neuron ionotropic receptor regulates salt stress resistance - Nature The I3 pharyngeal enteric neuron in Caenorhabditis elegans detects high-salt conditions, and the GLR-9 ionotropic salt receptor expressed specifically in I3 regulates genes related...

Here's the link to the online OA version:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another paper from our awesome lab out today @nature.com. Led by 🌟 PD Jihye Yeon with fantastic collaborators. We show how an ionotropic receptor (related to insect sensory IRs) in a single pharyngeal enteric neuron senses ingested salts and protects the worm from high salt stress.
rdcu.be/fbd4a

A good day to read the 14th amendment, to understand the gyrations of logic needed to rule against birthright citizenship:"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

HHS and OMB have stopped them.
They have mandated the new NOFOs also be written in “simple” text.
While NOFOs are being reduced, IC staff are working to get topics in place for parents.

NOFOs are being written but they’re being rejected or just sitting in HHS & now OMB offices….

Whether you’re new or old to the stellar fly neurobio community, you should be applying to this now!

I can’t recommend taking this course enough! 👍🪰💪👍🔥

The proud tradition continues! Please spread this widely and encourage outstanding students to apply! The CSHL Fly Course is an amazing opportunity and experience.

We are so looking forward to CSHL Neurobiology of Drosophila 2026 🔬 🧠.

The new application deadline is April 13th. Come join us!
@cshlnews.bsky.social
@cshlcourses.bsky.social
@rister.bsky.social

Much respect to Scott Waddell for retracting the paper after catching a major mistake which made a subset of the data incorrect. And respect to Gaby Maimon for catching the error in the raw data and informing the authors. This is how science moves forward.

Receptor sequence divergence, gain, loss, duplication, and neofunctionalization drive olfactory adaptation in Drosophila suzukii | PNAS Shifts in ecological niches are often driven by evolutionary changes in the olfactory system, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understoo...

I am very happy to share that the latest work from the lab, led by Dr. Qi Xue, has been published in PNAS and is now online: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Great to watch mentees shine. @golddenn.bsky.social @champalimaudr.bsky.social @hannah-haberkern.bsky.social @hhmijanelia.bsky.social drove this project, using computational modeling to show how flies dynamically adapt local search based on metabolic states @currentbiology.bsky.social Huge congrats!