How does human genetics research live in the information ecosystem? Is it misused? Misrepresented? In my paper with @sramach.bsky.social, we tackle this question with 25 years of Wikipedia data, AI chatbot responses, and pages from Grokipedia www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

From Wikipedia to AI: Measuring 25 years of synthesis of human genetics research in the public-facing information ecosystem

Genetics research frequently intersects with ethnicity, nationality, and race, making it uniquely vulnerable to misrepresentation. Yet, 25 years after the initial sequencing of the human genome, there...

biorxiv.org

We worked closely with @murray.senate.gov and team on this rule. She’s great, she had EXCELLENT staff, and thank you to her and the team.

Senator Patty Murray@murray.senate.gov · 10h ago

Trump & Russ Vought proposed a rule to take every federal grant in America hostage. They don't care about making our tax dollars work better—they just want them to work for Trump. Well, Democrats BLOCKED their corrupt rule, and I'll be fighting to kill it permanently.

While this is a HUGE WIN, there's more work to do. It's time to DOUBLE DOWN in pressuring Congress. They need to revoke the OMB Proposal. Members of Congress who fail to stop the Proposal will be out of a job January 3rd, 2027, we will make sure of it. 🧵

Recombination in human telomeres and subtelomeres - detected from pangenome analysis, happens among non-homologous chromosomes! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Concerted evolution and unorthodox recombination of human subtelomeres

Human subtelomeres contain duplicated sequence that is shared among the ends of non-homologous chromosomes and provides a substrate for ectopic exchange [[1][1]–[6][2]]. However, incomplete reference ...

biorxiv.org

This is such cool and important work! Some wild examples of changing sperm stem cell clones.

James Gagnon@james-gagnon.bsky.social · yesterday

In a new (ish) preprint, we used CRISPR barcodes to label germline stem cell clones in zebrafish, then tracked their contributions to sperm production for 2 years. Instead of staying stable, individual clones rose, fell, and disappeared over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 Antivaxxer & stats: WRONG. "Anti-vaccine discourse exhibits systematic patterns of statistical misreasoning": - correlation–causation fallacy - base rate neglect - Denominator neglect - cherry picking Study: Antivaxx statistical misreasoning & disinformation journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Statistical misreasoning in online content about vaccines: Implications and recommendations for addressing disinformation

Background Statistical misreasoning is a key mechanism through which anti-vaccine narratives distort scientific information and undermine public confidence in immunisation. Although prior research has...

journals.plos.org

Presented for historical comparison: perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/h...

Higher Education in Nazi Germany

Learn how the Nazi regime transformed German higher education in order to advance Nazi goals.

perspectives.ushmm.org

Gregg Gonsalves@gregggonsalves.bsky.social · 2d ago

So Trump and McMahon now are trying the velvet glove approach to get universities to submit. It’s just a watered down version of the compact they tried to impose last year. No self-respecting university should comply. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/u...

Pro-wrestling executive Linda McMahon issued a letter today (in her role as US Secretary of Education) demanding that universities justify their existence and explain policies to the Trump administration by the end of 2026. Not sure what the endgame is, but it sure feels like a trap.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon Issues National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards

Today, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued a national call to action to university presidents and governing boards, urging them to reaffirm higher education’s foundational commitments to ...

ed.gov

A stool transplant delivers billions of microbes into a sick gut. Almost none move in for good. We followed donor-recipient pairs from whole communities down to single nucleotides, and found the gut runs a ruthless strain-level filter. Out now in Cell Reports 🧵 www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Strain-level ecological filtering governs microbial colonization of the human gut

Baertschi et al. demonstrate that microbiota transplantation functions as a selective ecological filter. Although donor species frequently appear, only specific lineages achieve stable strain integrat...

cell.com

Universität Bern@unibe.ch · 3d ago

A strict “gatekeeper” decides whether a #fecaltransplant is effective: sohub.io/wruy. This is shown by a new study led by @bahtiyil.bsky.social from #unibern & @inselgruppe.bsky.social @dbmr-unibe.bsky.social

“Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 to consult on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ staff restructuring efforts, according to internal documents obtained by The Crimson.” www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

Harvard Paid McKinsey $250,000 For FAS Consultation, Internal Documents Show | News | The Harvard Crimson

Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 to consult on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ staff restructuring efforts, according to internal documents obtained by The Crimson.

thecrimson.com

sakura christmas@prof-christmas.bsky.social · 7d ago

Unsurprising that all these cuts being made to #Harvard —from the Office of Student Services to the Writing Center to now the Dudley Co-op—are happening with input from McKinsey, a firm made up of The Second Worst People I knew in college there

Would like to see this on every social media website, and I’m glad we’re calling it what it is now

Tits McGee@scientits.bsky.social · 7d ago

Oh my God, this is not a drill - LinkedIn has added 'seems like AI slop' as an option on posts Genuinely thought it was a joke until I clicked on a few posts

This whole exercise isn't about COVID-19 or Gain of Function research...this is about Congress putting a retired public servant through the wringer because they want to spook scientists. This is all a part of a plan to chill scientists from taking evidence-based and principled stands against govt.

In this collaboration with the Gokcumen lab, @alberaqil.bsky.social developed a method based on interchromosomal linkage disequilibrium to detect false positive trans-eQTLs, showcased on GTEx and MAGE. The approach could be used to filter other trans molecular QTLs, which may be similarly impacted.

Gokcumen Lab@gokcumenlab.bsky.social · last wk.

New paper with @rajivmccoy.bsky.social @ajhgnews.bsky.social. Bottom line: Polymorphic gene duplications absent in the reference genome can produce spurious trans-eQTLs, and we propose a method to identify these false positives. authors.elsevier.com/c/1nWChgeXHnOF

The OpenFold consortium has been following in those footsteps for a while: openfold.io

It’s almost as if for-profit companies are not a reliable partner in developing long term scientific innovation for public good.

Well that sucks. www.engadget.com/2225849/goog... Least bummer interpretation: AlphaFold served its purpose, DeepMind already spun off a drug lab, so it was time to reassign the time.

Google shuts down its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold project as it focuses on Gemini - Engadget

DeepMind's award-winning AlphaFold team is no more.

engadget.com

RNA-seq tells us how much RNA is present in the cell. But to understand gene regulation, we need to easily measure the synthesis and decay rates driving this abundance. We introduce AIR-seq: analog intrinsic recoding sequencing. (1/6) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Analog intrinsic recoding measures RNA dynamics without chemical conversion

Steady-state RNA abundance measurements mask the synthesis and decay rates that shape gene expression. Analog intrinsic recoding sequencing (AIR-seq) repurposes the base-pairing properties of N4-hydro...

biorxiv.org

Amazing news for the R core team being awarded $1 million and the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics. Really great writeup too about the advantages of open source R software for plotting and stats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026

Note: “Letters of collaboration should be limited to stating the intent to collaborate or provide material support as described in the application and should not contain endorsements or additional information about or evaluations of the proposed project. “

I-75 Scientist@flscitriguy.bsky.social · last wk.

Oh, and Forms J are coming... grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

In the last 24 hours I have parked my car (license plate ZEA MAYS) next to a car with license plate CEREALS and then one that is MUTATOR. Davis is a normal town.

📅 TONIGHT: Join us at 5:00PM for a convo on Georgia’s fertility care landscape with experts from the Center for Reproductive Rights, SisterSong, Muna Fertility, and Morehouse School of Medicine to discuss Georgia’s fertility care landscape. 🔗 Register now: https://bit.ly/4hF4478

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: The State of Fertility Care in Georgia. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

Join the Fertility Justice Now coalition and other GA advocates, providers, and researchers for insights into the State of Fertility Care in Georgia! TOPICS WILL INCLUDE: 1) Kick off GA's Fertility Care Awareness Week! Why this week is needed. 2) Th...

bit.ly

Exciting news for the RNA research community! The Human RNome Project has been launched: a global effort to map all human RNAs and their chemical modifications. Proud to support it and contribute to the article in Genome Biology doi.org/10.1186/s130... #RNA #bioinformatics #RNAstructure #modomics

Unlocking the regulatory code of RNA: launching the Human RNome Project - Genome Biology

The human RNome, the complete set of RNA molecules in human cells, arises through complex processing and includes diverse molecular species. While research traditionally focuses on four canonical nucl...

genomebiology.biomedcentral.com

You can't claim to be an advocate for maternal and child health and be anti-vaccines.

The report finds that in dozens of cases, the people who were supposed to stop this type of federal overreach — university boards & administrations — failed to protect academic independence. Most trustees & admin "have at best been caught flat-footed & some have welcomed governmental intrusion." 2

OUT TODAY, the AAUP just released the first comprehensive account of how the Trump administration has taken the same playbook it's used on law firms & foreign governments & turned it on American universities. US higher ed has, in effect, become a target of a massive extortion racket. 🧵

New Report on Extorted Compliance Charges “Massive Extortion Racket” Against Higher Ed

A new AAUP report, "Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance," exposes how the Trump administration has extended its pay-to-play approach to gov...

aaup.org

13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.

12. Here's the key insight though: as labor-augmenting technologies LLMs make researchers more productive and therefore they *raise the opportunity cost of researcher time*. As a result researchers will have incentives to invest less time in polishing a current project before moving on to a new one.

New White House plan for science and technology released yesterday www.whitehouse.gov/releases/202... 1/9

OSTP Director Releases Landmark Report and Recommendations for Renewing American Scientific Discovery

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Michael Kratsios

whitehouse.gov

According to the most rigorous studies, 10.8% of college men perpetrate at least one rape before graduation. This statistic always comes to mind when I see men in power reacting with disgust to the idea that one of their peers could face even a shred of accountability.