Very nice post, and this is very lovely work
02.03.2026 17:35
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Very nice post, and this is very lovely work
They wonβt stop until the National Institutes of Health is a hollowed out RFK Jr. echo chamber and revenue generation machine for snake oil peddlers.
Moderna is at least the ninth company to have received a surprise rejection from Vinay Prasad and his team.
If you were online last weekend, you probably caught some clips from Jon Ossoffβs speech. Itβs worth watching the whole thing because itβs an object lesson in how Democrats should communicate in the upcoming midterms. messagebox.substack.com/p/a-speech-e...
The flu and pneumonia kill over 45,000 people a year. Moderna developed a new mRNA flu vaccine for people 50 and older--who are most at risk. Prasad, unilaterally, against the recommendation of experts within the agency, denied Moderna's appplication. www.statnews.com/2026/02/11/m...
Freeman Hrabowski III, the President Emeritus from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, giving a TED talk.
This is a powerful message from Freeman Hrabowski.
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1/12
Reminder that the abstract deadline for the Biology of Genomes meeting at CSHL is on Feb 13! We have a fantastic lineup of keynote speakers (Janet Kelso and Jonathan Pritchard) and session chairs. Submit your best science to this exciting and engaged meeting!
meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...
Super thread, thank you Ragnar. I told my lab I would explain suffixient sets in a meeting this week and I'm going to start by just walking through your thread π
Time for a thread on our Christmas preprint βOrigin and evolution of acrocentric chromosomes in human and great apesβ. I had so much fun with this project and paper. It will be hard to summarize in a thread, but Iβll try www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... [1/21]
New tool from @alexsweeten.bsky.social to find and classify all your satellites: "AniAnn's: alignment-free annotation of tandem repeat arrays using fast average nucleotide identity estimates"
π www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
π¦ github.com/marbl/anianns
Announcing a new tool for "denoising" long-read amplicon sequences: savont.
Savont enables amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) directly from nanopore (or HiFi) long reads. Tested on 16S nanopore amplicons -- seems to work okay.
1/4
github.com/bluenote-157...
RFKJr's principal accomplishment as the nation's health guardian.
Congratulations to @hopkinsengineer.bsky.social undergrads Arda UzunoΔlu, Steven Tan, Suyu Ye, and Alvin Zhang on their Honorable Mentions for the Computing Research Associationβs 2026 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards!
Wow. This is devastating.
www.science.org/content/arti...
A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.
We have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves. The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.
snyder.substack.com/p/lies-and-l...
RLBWT-Based LCP Computation in Compressed Space for Terabase-Scale Pangenome Analysis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.23.701410v1
The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.
A powerful piece by M. Gessen
I can't do it justice by excerpt
go read it (gift link)
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/o...
Post from Pete Buttigieg that reads: If there was ever a moment for libertarians and conservatives to step up and join the rest of us, weβre in it. Americans have to unite and stop this descent from a freedom-loving nation into the kind of place where masked, militarized government agents are sent to politically noncompliant areas to roam the streets, terrorize civilians, and deploy violence with impunity.
βStudents and scholars shouldnβt have to live in fear that ICE agents could seize them from their homes merely for engaging in political expression. Todayβs judgment makes emphatically clear that the administrationβs campaign of intimidation must end.β
βRamya Krishnan, @knightcolumbia.org
Optimizing sparse and skew hashing: faster k-mer dictionaries https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.21.700884v1
If you / your lab / your institution rely on NIH funding, you need to read this and understand how this is one of many changes affecting you. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Huge congratulations, Can! And well deserved.
Not only was DOGE illegally accessing your Social Security information, but it was also illegally offering to share it with third-party political groups working to overturn elections.
This is a deep betrayal of the public trust and must be fully investigated. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/u...
Pregnancy loss is common in humans, and chromosomal abnormalities are the leading cause. Using genetic data from ~140,000 IVF embryos, we show that maternal variation in meiosis genes influences recombination and aneuploidy risk.
First authors: @saracarioscia.bsky.social & @aabiddanda.github.io
What is the contribution made by universities to their research output?
It's complicated to compute, but an estimate by MIT suggests that for every dollar they obtain from the federal government, they co-invest one dollar.
More here: issues.org/federal-rese...
This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024β25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.
This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.
www.nature.com/immersive/d4...
The Carney speech is worth reading in full: globalnews.ca/news/1162087...
