in addition to the ablism, it's false reassurance -- nearly half of adults have hypertension, a lot have diabetes or high cholesterol, 7% are immunocompromised… people we encounter in our daily lives all the time we think of as healthy take BP meds, cholesterol meds, take mAbs for IBD…

Matthew Cortland (they)@matthewcort.land · 6d ago

I'm really, really, really tired of public health officials going out of their way to tell us that the dead had "underlying conditions" — a phrase so vague as to be useless in actually informing risk assessment. It's just ableism...

Not a big fan of the "sick, elderly and/or disabled people don't count" discourse that appears to follow public health disasters these days.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · last wk.

Breaking News: Two deaths in Michigan have been linked to cyclospora. Both people who had the parasite also had underlying health issues.

This is exceptionally cool transcriptional biology (and science in general).

Jeff Groh@jeffgroh.bsky.social · 2w ago

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Not my area of expertise, but it’s probably bad when water is shooting UP from drains during a downpour?

Devastating office pineapple plant update - it toppled over sometime during the weekend and now looks sort of drunk when I flipped it back upright. I suspect its remaining days are numbered. 🫡

Could Excel be conscious? We surveyed more than Jan 1 1900 people to find out.

One minute these babies are fine. The next they're seizing, or vomiting blood, or not waking from a nap, or not breathing. I spoke with more than a dozen doctors who have seen the consequences of more parents declining the routine vitamin K shot for their newborns. This is what it looks like.

As Parents Reject Vitamin K Shots, Some Babies Develop Devastating Bleeding

nytimes.com

On today’s episode of Adventures in Berry Farming - about $15 worth of raspberries if they were from the store and with a bonus of getting a bunch of stabs from thorns while picking em.

Just gonna say my Chicago-based office has been tropical way before it got trendy here.

I know it seems like a heretical idea, but one way to figure out if a preprint is really interesting (to you) is... to read the preprint. Then, in the spirit of sharing, send a note to authors: a simple kudos or a more detailed question. I do this a dozen times a year. It's awesome. Try it.

I’ve been pretty sure autocorrect has gotten worse, but this is a whole new level.

We regret that our event on Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office. Our apologies to everyone who was planning to attend the event.

If OMB's proposed changes to the federal grant process are enacted, political appointees could: 1. Make funding decisions regardless of the advice of scientists. 2. Stop funding midway through a promised grant period. 3. Institute new rules, including rules severely limiting foreign interactions.

The OMB and the Politicization of Science | NEJM

The Editors highlight three aspects of OMB’s recently proposed rule changes as particularly striking: that decisions on research funding would be made by political appointees, that funding could be...

nejm.org

NEJM.org@nejm.org · 2mo ago

NEJM editors highlight 3 aspects of recently proposed rule changes as particularly striking: decisions on research funding would be made by political appointees, funding could be cut off midway through a grant period, and foreign interactions would be limited. Learn more: https://nej.md/43yBIUb

Don’t mind me, just adding in a work deadline for the end of November 2028 to my calendar on a sunny summer Monday morning in 2026.

Dean Winchester's Exasperated Sigh

ALT: Dean Winchester's Exasperated Sigh

static.klipy.com

We *were* wondering why our strawberry patch seemed slow to produce this year.

I get the occasional gardening success.

Members of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) were removed by police during the organization's annual meeting on Friday as they handed out copies of an editorial criticizing Trump administration changes to U.S. biomedical research. www.medpagetoday.com/special-repo...

Video: Police Tussle With Diabetes Experts at ADA Meeting

Researchers told they could no longer attend the annual scientific sessions

medpagetoday.com

Celebrating the start of Pride in true physician-scientist fashion: working on a grant at home while also on call.

New preprint! Why does the timing of mutations during B-cell development matter for childhood #leukaemia? Using a new computational model of B-cell differentiation, we explain observations from BCP-ALL patient data and predict how it shapes #cancer evolution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I heard from several sources yesterday that NIH is planning to release a Request for Information (RFI) that apparently will include this: Scores and percentiles for NIH grant applications will not be shared with applicants although they will be provided to NIH program officers and staff. 1/3

Huh Kermit

ALT: Huh Kermit

static.klipy.com

A UCSF colleague got a perfect 1. He won’t get it. Why? 1. He has nih funding already (not relevant). 2. Institute (can’t remember which) priorities have changed to more clinically relevant. 3. Geographical considerations.

Michael D. Green, PhD@michaeldgreen.phd · 3mo ago

In this story, they highlight two researchers who scored in the 3rd percentile well over a year ago and were not funded. Is this the environment that’s supposed to “encourage innovation”? How many past papers and discoveries would we have missed under these conditions?

Today’s grant writing assistants.

Someone in the news departments of @nature.com or @science.org needs to take a look at this--its a huge scandal from the scientific supplier that has become a monopoly

Sholto David@sholtodavid.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Earlier this week I posted an example of a fake western blot provided by ThermoFisher to demonstrate the validity of a p53 antibody. I considered it an amusing curiosity. In fact Thermo Fisher Scientific has systematically manipulated antibody validation data!

A colleague received bad news from her NIH program officer today: my colleague’s grant got a great score, but NIH still can’t pay it, and my colleague will have to closer her lab. The call ended with the program officer (not my colleague) crying. Awful on so many levels.

you've heard alot about how cells are or are not crowded at the molecular scale, but what about at the organelle scale? in her new preprint, @marymirvis.bsky.social develops a quantitative way to ask this question in budding yeast - see her thread below www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mary Mirvis@marymirvis.bsky.social · 3mo ago

1/13 So excited to share our new preprint!! How do organelles pack together in a crowded cytoplasm? we know organelles interact via contact sites, but how does competition for space contribute to organelle morphology and interactions? @wallaceucsf.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Why can't we explain enhancer action despite 2 decades of chromosome conformation technologies? 😬 Our new study spearheaded by Leonid Mirny's group points to a flaw in our assumptions, and to a solution from physical principles By @timothyfoldes.bsky.social 💻& @karissalhansen.bsky.social 🧪 🧵👇

The face of a dog who does NOT APPRECIATE me taking out the trash to the bins without his help.

Look, I know the clover in our yard is good rabbit food but you’re flirting with danger here, buddy.