Woke up this morning being my usual nerdy self, thinking about AI and it's relationship to data management. 🤓
Things on my mind:
1. Preparing data to be "AI-ready"
2. AI accessing your publicly shared data no matter the license
3. How to ethically use AI for DM
4. How to NOT ethically use AI for DM
Research on hybridization between salamanders Triturus cristatus and T. marmoratus in France reveals a rare but notable presence of triploid (CMM) hybrids, with frequencies up to 18% in some samples.
Photo: Rainer Theuer
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@jascha
Reminds me of that joke
Child to his biologist dad:
"Dad what's an electron?"
Dad: "Why don't you ask your mom, she's the physicist, electrons are her wheelworks."
Child: "But I don't want to know *that* much about it."
Scientists discovered a caterpillar that murders insects and stitches their dismembered body parts onto its back as armor
You’re welcome. Happy day! 😆
This beautiful salamander is a 17 year old triploid.
Such a cool paper.
moiraine: an R package to construct reproducible pipelines for the application and comparison of multi-omics integration methods academic.oup.com/bioinformati... 🧬💻🧪 #Rstats github.com/Plant-Food-R...
Recently we're working with SNPs from whole genome assemblies to estimate ARGs. It's a pain to go from alignment files to vcf, keeping track of masked and invariant sites. So we wrote a snakemake/SLURM pipeline. Hope it's useful to others, and don't hesitate to post issues if there are problems!
I'm so happy to share our latest paper! Now out in @narjournal.bsky.social 🥳
Did you know that transposable elements embedded in mRNAs can form dsRNA and activate innate immunity? 🧬🦠 Have a look! academic.oup.com/nar/article/...
#TEsky #RNAsky #RNAbiology #immunity #NAR
Join us at the EMBO Workshop “RNA-guided genome protection” 🇨🇭 June 16–20. Transposon silencing • stem cell biology • RNA-guided immunity. Keynotes: Déborah Bourc’his + Ian MacRae. Register now + submit your abstract! meetings.embo.org/event/26-gen...
🔌🚗 Electric mobility in Germany: Untapped Potential!
Electric mobility has been slow to take off, but there are positive trends. I summarize them in the new @diw.de Weekly Report, based on data collected on the #OpenEnergyTracker. (English version of a report first published in 🇩🇪 in February)
Northern California’s first condor egg in 100 years reported in redwood tree
Who COULDN’T use some good news? ‘ Scientists with the Yurok Tribe say that two of dozens of condors released to the wild in Humboldt County since 2022, to reestablish the endangered birds, have paired up, built a nest in a redwood tree and appear to be tending to an egg.”
#californiacondor
Finally, today's offering! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
This began life as a very different project which failed because we couldn't agree on defining eqtl sharing across cohorts. So two young members of the lab dug deeply into this - first @ijbeasley.bsky.social, then @patrickgibbs.bsky.social
The real problem is that we publish many more papers per scientist than before.
A two-column status table titled "Stage" and "Start Date" tracks the timeline of a manuscript submission from its preliminary data submission on October 8, 2025, to its eventual withdrawal on March 2, 2026. The log reveals a lengthy and repetitive administrative process, particularly between October 26, 2025, and February 19, 2026, where the status cycled more than ten times between "Contacting Potential Reviewers" and "Waiting for Reviewer Assignment," suggesting significant difficulty in securing peer reviewers. Following these numerous failed attempts to move into the active review phase, the final entry shows the manuscript was officially withdrawn on March 2, 2026, at 09:08:18.
My first paper had to be mailed to Stockholm, Sweden, and then mailed to reviewers around the world. Everything by mail! It was submitted, reviewed, revised, typeset, and published in 3 months. I feel bad for early-career scientists who can't find a single reviewer after 5 months. It's gotta change.
Pangenomes, really?
Most early “pangenomes” = oligogenomes (oligo, Gr., few).
More recent “pangenomes” generally = poligenomes (polis, Gr., many).
True pangenomes (pas, Gr., every/all) would be rare indeed.
🙏🏼 @zbao.bsky.social for pointing out his review.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
we talk about carcinization, but never about the many, many times plants have invented the “tree.”
Tree is not a kind of plant, it is a thing plats do, and they are by and large unrelated.
Hey - there's a preprint about the bioRxiv preprint server published as a preprint on the bioRxiv preprint server:
bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
in honor of a certain surgeon general nominee’s hearing today, here is the story of (among other things) the time I tried to take her advice about milk www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
Have you ever wondered 🤔... Does phenotypic variance respond to environmental perturbation? Does it have a genetic basis? Are mean and variance regulating loci exposed to different selection pressures? These and more questions are explored in our new preprint 🔥
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Happy Birthday!
I first read about the LTEE in high school in a science magazine my Bio teacher had in the classroom. I don't think I thought "I want to be a microbiologist," but the article planted the seed.
Amazing that it's nearly at "mid life" (by human standards)., excited for what's next!
Happy 38th birthday to the #LTEE!
#BOTD in 1988.
Keep on evolving!
#science #evolution #microbiology
Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).
If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.
It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...
I'd like to go there, but not sure if I would ask for a glas of tap water.
The strongest version of this illusion I’ve seen! Absolute head-wrecker!
More good news on vaccines
A two-in-one mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna targets seasonal influenza & COVID-19. It produced robust and durable immune responses w/o safety concerns in a small mid-stage trial.
mRNA is the future. We can’t afford to lose it.
🧪 www.reuters.com/business/hea...
Exciting! Stanford researchers have developed a UNIVERSAL INTRANASAL vaccine. A study in mouse models shows that vaccinated mice were protected against Covid & other coronaviruses. Still a long way to humans. This study was #NIH funded.
A potential game changer.
🧪 med.stanford.edu/news/all-new...
BREAKING: Former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has been convicted of insurrection for declaring martial law in December 2024, and has been sentenced to life in prison.
Now, I have thoughts on all this but that’s for elsewhere. What immediately strikes me most is that Dawkins was using a definition of “gene” that he admits (and Stent acknowledges) was taken from George Williams, and which was common in evolutionary biology then and still is now. But…. /9
