Thoughts on the various Trump administration proposals to revamp US science funding - and what they all have in common:

The Assault On Science Funding Continues

science.org

Application portal is open for travel and registration scholarships from the @jxtxfoundation.bsky.social to the CSHL Biological Data Science conference. Applications are due by Aug 5 #cshldata26 #methodsmatter Apply here: jxtxfoundation.org/news/2026-06... Learn more: bit.ly/cshl-biodata26

JXTX + CSHL 2026 Biological Data Science Scholarship

JXTX + CSHL 2026 Biological Data Science Scholarship

jxtxfoundation.org

I've noticed that without the very basics, higher level R becomes sorcery: yelling incantations to the machine and trying to get it right.

I pushed a package to bioconda 2 weeks ago and it's still waiting for review. Anyone here a maintainer that could help get it unstuck? github.com/bioconda/bio... (We have a paper in review that mentions an option for bioconda install - would like to make that aspirational sentence reality!)

Add vatools by chrisamiller · Pull Request #67110 · bioconda/bioconda-recipes

Adds a new recipe for vatools (https://github.com/griffithlab/vatools), a package designed to ease manipulation of genomic data stored in VCF format

github.com

Like I said in Scientific American last month, this is the military-industrial, for-profit approach to research funding. It presupposes an ability to guess at (and fund) successful research, and most scholarship on it says it generates neither new knowledge *nor* higher productivity.

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · 2w ago

Ahead of a hearing before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee tomorrow, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has released a 120-pg report, "Science: A New Golden Age" www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u... Here's the summary from the press release:

Hi everyone! I'm excited to announce that our lab at UW will soon be recruiting a postdoc to work on DNA methylation signatures in rare disease. This will be a mostly computational position. Please share and reach out if interested! millerlaboratory.com

It‘s just insane to me that a sitting president has made MORE THAN A BILLION DOLLARS peddling fucking fairy dust with no intrinsic value beyond his stature and power AS president, and it’s not treated as the biggest corruption scandal in American history.

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · last mo.

“.. He also reported earning $636 million in royalties from Celebration Coins.” @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

tired of the "#1 dad" nonsense. if you're a dad, stop treating it like a joke and post your actual national dad ranking. i'm # 492,018, which is actually really high up there, but more importantly it lets me enter ranked dad lobbies where i can get matched up for fistfights with dads of my caliber

“A single Tomahawk cruise missile runs about $3.6 million, roughly what it takes to fund one scientist’s multiyear grant. The entire National Science Foundation budget is less than what we spent in the first week of the war with Iran.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/o...

Opinion | The Science That Turned Lizard Venom Into GLP-1s Is Under Attack

nytimes.com

Minibwa is a hybrid of bwa-mem and minimap2 and the successor of bwa-mem for short-read mapping. ~4X/2.5X as fast as bwa-mem/bwa-mem2 for WGS reads at comparable accuracy. Native support of directional bisulfite-seq. Applicable to long reads. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2606.15357

Someone help me with time management please my family is starving * 40 hours working * 20 hours cooking and cleaning * 10 hours childcare * 30 hours email * 50 hours 2-factor authentication

An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:

The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

science.org

Deeply worried about deskilling in bioinformatics and software development. In parallel, also worried about low quality code being churned out rapidly by folks using these tools without doing proper quality control on the outputs 😬

Jordan Nafa@ajordannafa.com · 3mo ago

The more I use AI for development, the more concerned I am about the fact that knowing what makes an effective prompt and the appropriate, opiniated, guardrails necessary to consistently get high quality output is much harder if you don't have quite a bit of experience doing things by hand first.

Pleased to see our preprint on expanding the transcriptome of AML go live. Includes splicing factor-mutants, healthy BM populations, and 170k+ new transcripts Explore the long-read data here: leylab.org/isoforms Look up your favorite gene, and see which transcripts are actually being expressed!

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Long read sequencing reveals novel isoforms and spliceosome-mutant-enriched transcripts in AML and MDS https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.20.726635v1

This would constitute one of the most brazen, most appalling acts of corruption in U.S. history. I know we’re numb to all of this but this is a seven-alarm fire. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/b...

Justice Dept. Officials Consider Settling Trump Suit Against I.R.S.

nytimes.com

I don't know who needs to hear this, but to have any hope of creating a "Virtual Cell", we'd have to have the foggiest idea what the hell was happening in the real ones first

Future researchers will never be able to determine which commit messages I wrote and which were written by Claude

For me, it was the fact that I misred and misunderstood this ad...

Miguel Branco@brancolab.bsky.social · 3mo ago

scRNA-seq has partly ruined murmurations for me...

scRNA-seq has partly ruined murmurations for me...

Digital Brain@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Witness the mesmerizing murmuration of starlings in Italy, a stunning display of nature's coordination and beauty as they dance through the sky in unison.

🎧LEVER TIME: The secret 40-year plot to bury you in tax paperwork & force you to pay accountants - rather than letting the IRS send you your completed tax returns like other countries do. This story is enraging - it's a GOP plot to enrich tax prep companies & make you hate taxes.

Tax Day Could Be Easy. They’re Fighting To Make It Hard.

The IRS already knows what you owe. Why are you drowning in paperwork every April?

levernews.com

With the heavy discounting on the first year of .bio domains right now, how can we not? It is decidedly not well-considered, but I will accept debate only in the form of a pull request compbiovs.bio

In a first last month, renewables supplied more power to the U.S. than natural gas, a milestone in the shift to clean energy. e360.yale.edu/digest/us-re... via @yalee360.bsky.social

For the First Time in the U.S., Renewables Generate More Power Than Natural Gas

e360.yale.edu

Delighted to share our latest research from the 23andMe Research Team, just published in @nature.com ! We looked at data from >27,000 participants to uncover how human genetics influences weight loss efficacy and side effects of GLP-1 medications like semaglutide. A short thread 🧵👇

Erm, they're called palaeontologists, actually.

#Artemis II lunar flyby images are showing up! 😍 A crescent Earth setting behind the Moon.

This map shows the cost of charging an EV at home across the U.S. Home-charging is significantly cheaper in all 50 states than fueling a car with gasoline. Source: @karinkirk.bsky.social @climateconnections.bsky.social yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/04/what... #energy #uspol

Few people are aware of how much progress has been made against cancers. Leukemia is probably the most striking example. Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would soon die from it. Now, most children in rich countries survive. ourworldindata.org/childhood-le...

Mike Black@mikeblack114.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Cancer wasn't quite a literal death sentence like HIV was, but you had a barely coin flip chance of making it across the board 5 years, and a whole lot of different kinds that were close to a death sentence in 1980 that are extremely treatable today

At Kennedy Space Center astronauts have to take elevators to the top of launch pad towers in order to enter their space capsules before lift off. This is the elevator panel at Pad 39A.