🔬 Your tax dollars once paid a physicist whose own colleagues told him he was wasting the university's money. In 1951, Charles Townes sat on a D.C. park bench and worked out, on the back of an envelope, how to force molecules to release coherent radiation. 🧵 1/5

Interesting resource for those starting with #Drosophila research (set of videos by Bruno Lemaitre) youtu.be/aUewlFU-6rw?...

Drosophila Genetics 1 Basic Knowledge edX compressed

YouTube video by Bruno Lemaitre

youtu.be

+15k signatures now in just over one day. Britons now favour rejoining the EU with a strong majority (+21). At 100k, it became "considered for debate in parliament." This is worth sharing. Tell parliament in clear terms what they're debating, and for who.

Mark A. Hanson@hansonmark.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Official petition for the UK to rejoin the EU, open to UK citizens and residents: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74... Takes literally 1 minute, very quick. With changing political climate, worth making your UK voice heard if this is your view. Petition closes June 8th 2026.

Tonight we congratulate our friend Stephen Colbert and his writers, staff and crew for eleven years of excellence. Watch Colbert’s finale tonight, and then never watch CBS again.

Why do males and females differ in infection outcomes? In our study just published in #GENETICS @genetics-gsa.bsky.social using #Drosophila melanogaster, we show that #sexdifferences in nutritional #immunity - specifically iron sequestration—shape resistance to #infection by Providencia.

Sex bias in iron sequestration by transferrin 1 modulates sexually dimorphic infection outcomes in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract. Host sexual dimorphism in the outcome of infections is a ubiquitous phenomenon across taxa. However, the immunological differences between males

academic.oup.com

While BioNtech & Moderna become household names because of their Covid vaccines, those emerged from different projects: finding ways to treat the most challenging cancers. They hypothesized that we could vaccinate patients against their own tumors, & evidence is mounting that they were right! 1/n 🧪

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's sweeping order lifted restrictions at more than 75 federal lands, including beloved national parks and seashores.

The Trump administration just quietly lifted hunting restrictions at more than 75 federal lands — and critics say the public never got a say

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's sweeping order lifted restrictions at more than 75 federal lands, including beloved national parks and seashores.

oregonlive.com

I still love the theory a Year 6 child proposed to me that David Attenborough is actually God and he got fed up with people not noticing the amazing things he'd created, so he made documentaries to show off.

I am. ery happy to join the JEDI meeting in Portugal for the first time as #newPI. Come join us!

Junior European Drosophila Investigators@fly-jedi.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Extended registration deadline for our conference (June 1st - 3rd in Palmela, Portugal) to May 15th! Join if you are a Junior #Drosophila PI or senior #postdoc about to transition to independence. Spread the word! 🎬Venue: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P1n... 🔗Registration: fly-jedi.org/meetings/202...

In this (very niche) post, I explain how I FOIA'd NIH to demonstrate that NCBI staff did not alter the metadata of a coronavirus sequence dataset. Come the emails, stay for the pangolins? (also works the other way round (-:) #covidorigin

The pangolin sub-subplot

This is the story of a coincidence: some lab leakers managed to make sequence data of pangolin viruses public again the same day that Jesse Bloom was submitting a preprint highlighting their absence. ...

pandemonium.hypotheses.org

This is definitely something that should be discussed before implementation. Read and provide feedback. What we need is more funding, not more restrictions. A particularly bad move for Starting, and specially, Consolidator stage.

Johanna Joyce@johannajoyce.bsky.social · 4mo ago

What should Europe do when demand for #ERC funding keeps rising? Restrict access or invest in excellence? Please read our open letter calling for reconsideration of the ERC 2027 resubmission restrictions & for constructive alternatives that preserve openness Consider to share & sign - see below 🧪

Did you know that many organisms delete parts of their genome during development? To know more please join us at the Roscoff meeting on "Mechanistic and Evolutionary Basis of Programmed DNA Elimination" Sep21- 25, 2026. Please share!
cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en/conferenc...

😵

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3mo ago

RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'" Trump: "Right"

Tsang et al. used four species of Drosophila to investigate how climate affects gene expression in different sexes of insects, showing that protein-coding genes and microRNAs have undergone different selection between sexes. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... #genome #evolution #drosophila

Response of Protein Coding Genes and microRNAs to Temperature Changes in Four Species of Drosophilids

Abstract. Insects are the most abundant described living animals in the world, and they play important roles in the environment and in human society. Clima

doi.org

The #circadian clock & cellular #metabolism: @drummonk.bsky.social & @joanna-chiu.bsky.social explore a @plosbiology.org study showing how #glucose #metabolism changes during the day in #Drosophila and how it is disrupted in clock & sleep mutants 🧪 Paper: plos.io/3Olm1M1 Primer: plos.io/4sUov2g

Morning friends. There are still those amongst us that need to wake up.

Can a single brain cell decide whether to eat or not? 🧠🪰 Turns out... yes. And we found it in the fruit fly. A pair of neurons called SELKs (subesophageal leucokinin neurons) can drive feeding behavior in both directions. They promote it or suppress it. Here's how: 🧵

Un nouveau site pour les 30 ans et un appel ; "Transformer les médias, une urgence démocratique !" Bravo et merci à @acrimed.bsky.social

Acrimed@acrimed.bsky.social · 4mo ago

👀 www.acrimed.org

New paper out: Artificial selection for increased reproductive effort accelerates actuarial senescence and reduces lifespan in a precocial bird url: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... @uniexecec.bsky.social @erikpostma.bsky.social @joelpick.bsky.social y.social @oscarvedder.bsky.social

Very nice read explaining why if your variables that you want to correlate are measured with error, a simple correlation underestimates the true relationship, and you need to use methods that account for that error, rather than simply correlating summary statistics like line means.

Mark Rieke@markjrieke.bsky.social · 4mo ago

his is such a good write up (and also validates the "just be bayesian" approach [you get all the shrinkage and extensions to differing number of observations per subject for free!]) haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

Beyond delighted to share our amazing collaboration with Thierry Alquier's lab @alquierthierry.bsky.social on a conserved role for neuronal lipid droplets in regulating energy homeostasis in vivo led by Celena Cherian, Romane Manceau, Danie Majeur, and Colin Miller www.nature.com/articles/s42... /1

Neuronal lipid droplets play a conserved and sex-biased role in maintaining whole-body energy homeostasis - Nature Metabolism

In vivo regulation of neuronal lipid droplet formation mediates whole-body energy homeostasis in a sex-specific manner in Drosophila and mice.

nature.com

If you know about @peercommunityin.bsky.social, the future of scientific publishing, you should take this short survey. If you don’t know about it, you absolute should read about it, and take the survey. form.typeform.com/to/CO4KpWgi

France is switching from Microsoft to Linux "We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny. We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control."

A mother Pilot Whale carries the body of her dead baby. When a mother loses her baby, she carries it in her mouth for weeks, until it decomposes. This mourning process is known as requiem. [📹 Felipe Ravina Olivares] Original post

There's a strange myth about science: that theory comes first, and that data cannot show anything new. But anyone who's ever done science knows the truth that there's a long conversation between data & hypotheses. Back & forth.. until the discovery. And if you think about it, it has to be this way!

Buckle up 'So let’s finally talk about peptides. And I don’t mean peptides as chemists and biologists understand them (short chains of amino acids) I mean “Peptides!”, the hot new wonder drugs that you can order by mail. Oh man.' www.science.org/content/blog...

Ah, Peptides. Where to Begin?

Ah, Peptides. Where to Begin?

science.org

Posição para Professor Auxiliar OU em História e Filosofia da Ciência OU em Genética 🧬 na FCUL a aceitar candidaturas até 12 de Maio. Mais informação aqui: arquivo.ciencias.ulisboa.pt/concursos?id...

Posição para Professor Auxiliar OU em História e Filosofia da Ciência OU em Biologia Evolutiva na FCUL a aceitar candidaturas até 12 de Maio. Mais informação aqui: arquivo.ciencias.ulisboa.pt/concursos?id...

Agreed, although it should not take crises to remember that there are people behind papers/grants.

Jason Shepherd@jasonsynaptic.bsky.social · 4mo ago

It’s brutal in academia right now. A lot is out of our control, but it doesn’t cost anything to remember that there are humans behind papers and grants…reviewers, program officials and funders can be more empathetic in the face of unprecedented chaos in the US scientific enterprise.

Many talk about #obesity as if it is something we can fully control, but this ignores our underlying biology. 🧪 Two papers came out this week highlighting this point: First, genetics impact GLP1 receptor agonist efficacy. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Genetic predictors of GLP1 receptor agonist weight loss and side effects - Nature

Identification of genetic variants associated with the efficacy and side effects of GLP1 medications could underpin development of precision medicine approaches in the treatment of obesity.

nature.com