Noah Reid
@noahreid.bsky.social
Computational Biology Core at the University of Connecticut. Genomics, bioinformatics, evolution. Also nature, natural history. A little too into birding. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IbPpB9sAAAAJ&h
For folks interested I just posted my keynote on ARGs from #PEQG26 on youtube (with permission). Thanks again to @genetics-gsa.bsky.social and organizers for what was a wonderful conference (except for the 24hrs prior to my talk when I was too nervous to sleep or think straight) youtu.be/ntJOdZd0mwc
PEQG Keynote 2026
YouTube video by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra
youtu.be
Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.
Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades
The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.
nature.com
me, a big brain PhD with years of research experience and a number of highly cited publications teaching bioinformatics:
I wrote about a reason not to use generative AI in your writing that I haven't seen anyone talking about. Once I realized this, banning GenAI in our lab's writing became a no-brainer. Feel free to share, I think this is probably useful especially for trainees: www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the...
The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI — The Carlson Lab
Over the last year, our lab has been developing a policy on AI use. To do this, we did three main things: We read a lot of academic publications and tech news. We set up an #ai channel on our la...
carlsonlab.bio
This looks pretty cool! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Adaptation across an extreme elevational gradient in Andean leaf-eared mice, the world’s highest-dwelling mammal
Andean leaf-eared mice (Phyllotis vaccarum) live at the highest elevations of any mammal, and they also have the broadest elevational range, from sea level to mountain summits of >6700 meters. Highlan...
science.org
Is there an explainer out there about this? How can you "dismiss charges" against people who have already been convicted? Why is any judge bound to do it? What an insane travesty. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/u...
Judge Pained as He Grants Dismissal of Jan. 6 Charges Against Oath Keepers
The judge, Amit P. Mehta, blasted the administration’s request for a dismissal in the case, saying it bestowed “unearned grace” on the Oath Keepers defendants “by wiping their records clean.”
nytimes.com
White House Faces Stiff Pushback on Subjecting Grants to Political Review
White House Faces Stiff Pushback on Subjecting Grants to Political Review (Gift Article)
Academics, city leaders and congressional lawmakers number among the thousands to urge the Trump administration to reconsider a plan to assert more control over grants.
nytimes.com
Someone just sent me this photo from Chicago, unbelieveable
Join us July 28–30 for a Virtual ChIP-Seq / ATAC-Seq Workshop! 🧬 📅 10 AM – 2 PM EST 💻 Live on MS Teams + recordings 💰 $600 ($500 UConn affiliates) Register: bioinformatics.uconn.edu/cbc-workshops/ #ChIPSeq #ATACSeq #Bioinformatics #Workshop
Casual soccer watcher... I have no idea why that just happened. Couldn't follow the announcers. Anyone want to help me out?
Hey team - it’s looking very likely that I’ll be hiring not one but two four year postdocs! We’re a fun lab with tons of theoretical and applied pop gen projects - broadly in polyploid, conservation, and human evo. Competitive salary, sunny San Diego! Do share with your about to defend grads!
I submitted my comment about the OMB rule impacting federal funding today.
Colette Delawalla, PhD@cdelawalla.bsky.social · 2mo agoWant to learn about the OMB rule? We gotchu: www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-a... Never written a public comment before? We gotchu: www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-a... Need some moral support? We gotchu (fri @ 2pm et): events.standupforscience.net/stand-up-for...
How good is MiniBWA, the successor to BWA? To test it, I ran MiniBWA on sequencing from 76 different species, comparing mapping speed, rate and accuracy with BWA MEM. In short, it's really good. If you map short reads, it's well worth your time. andrewcarroll.github.io/2026/06/30/t...
The Best of Both Worlds - Assessing MiniBWA
Recently, Heng Li released MiniBWA (GitHub) alongside a paper by Heng Li and Nils Homer describing the method (paper). MiniBWA builds on the approaches in Minimap2 (also by Heng Li), but falls back on...
andrewcarroll.github.io
It is so weird that people like the term "upshot", as in "result of an event". It is so close to "upside", as in "the good part of the result of an event". To my ear you sound like a psychopath when you say "the upshot of this policy is that 25,000 people will die preventable deaths".
Bummed to miss #Evol2026. For all those students looking for a position, we're recruiting MS students (polyploid genomics) and a PostDoc (conservation genomics) for next year. Shoot me an email!
Sam Scheiner accepts his @sse-evolution.bsky.social Lifetime Achievement Award by pulling up a slide packed with names of colleagues from his 26 years at NSF, and reminding us to thank federal agency staff and scientists who are still working to support research while going "through hell" #Evol2026
I'm very happy to say that we now have new tools for viewing @nextflow.io log files for both the #CLI and the #VSCode extension! Try it out with the latest Nextflow edge release (26.05.0-edge) after a run: $ nextflow logfile Or open any log file in VSCode with the Nextflow extension installed ✨🌈
Nextflow@nextflow.io · 2mo agoNextflow log files are great for debugging, but digging through 1000s of debug lines to find an error can be difficult Introducing new log viewers in the CLI and VS Code extension, with syntax highlighting and log-level filtering to drill down to a few lines of warnings and errors hubs.la/Q04m8s110
I installed the posit assistant in RStudio out of curiosity and in the last 20 minutes it has been just awful. I haven't tried to use it for anything substantive, but it's making all these code/text predictions that are not helpful AT ALL.
Are you worried that the AI tutoring you is feeding you nonsense? Do you suspect its praise of your brilliant questions is... insincere? Allay your fears by learning how to analyze single-cell data from an actual human at our live-taught virtual workshop coming up next week!
UUConn Computational Biology Core@cbcuconn.bsky.social · 3mo ago
Join our Single Cell RNA-seq Workshop on June 23-25! Gain practical skills to analyze and interpret single-cell data. No experience needed! 📅 10 AM – 2 PM ET 💻 MS Teams + recording 💰 $600 ($500 UConn) Register: bioinformatics.uconn.edu/cbc-workshops/ #RNASeq #Bioinformatics
Kind of staggering to watch another major forest tree species get erased in Connecticut (ashes first and now beeches).
🐪 Animal #1048 🐀 I figured it out in 4 guesses! 🟧🟩🟩🟩 🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 4 metazooa.com #metazooa
Metazooa
Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!
metazooa.com
Vincent J Lynch 🐘🦣🦥 🦇🐋🐢🐍@devoevomed.bsky.social · 3mo ago🐗 Animal #1048 🐹 I figured it out in 6 guesses! 🟧🟧🟩🟩🟩🟩 🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 6 metazooa.com #metazooa
Bob Ricklefs RIP. One of the giants of ecology. His textbooks were the gateway to the field for many students. His papers were invariably thoughtful, well-argued and provocative, even those I disagreed with. 🌏🧪🌐
dynamicecology.wordpress.com
Which scientific field would be least comprehensible to a time-traveling scientist from, say, the 1950s? I feel like it's gotta be statistics.
Unexpected expansion and regrowth in Earth’s mangrove forests over the past four decades www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Unexpected expansion and regrowth in Earth’s mangrove forests over the past four decades
Global mangrove forests have disappeared rapidly because of deforestation but have also regrown through natural regeneration and restoration. Yet their long-term trends in extent and canopy cover rema...
science.org
Are you a life scientist? Do you deliver or enroll in short-course professional development. Join our community especially for tomorrow's community call (11AM U.S. Eastern/16:00 UTC) for a panel discussion exploring AI for professional learners: lifescitrainers.org/2026/05/25/a...
AI and Short-Format Professional Development — What We Know and Don’t Know About Learners Outside the Classroom
This community call will explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping short-format training and professional development in the life sciences.
lifescitrainers.org