Ready for some WTF biology? Of course you are! It's all about tandem repeats: stretches of the genome composed of boringly repetitive sequences of "motifs" made from 1 to perhaps a dozen or so base pairs. This paper shows that such TRs can have regulatory effects. /1 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tandem repeat variation shapes immune cell type-specific gene expression - Nature

Whole-genome sequencing and cell-level gene expression measurements show that length variation in tandem repeats in the human genome contributes to cell type-specific differences in gene reg...

nature.com

Pls RT: Postdoc position to work with me and - more importantly - the one and only @adameyrewalker.bsky.social - on inferring selection on sequence that lacks function. Yes, you heard that quite correctly. How do we quantify selection on sequence *not* to become something (deleterious)?

Vote Ossoff and Bottoms in Candi's memory. I know I did - for her, for me, for others delayed and denied critical medical care when pregnant.

Reproductive Freedom for All@reproductivefreedomforall.org · 2w ago

Candi Miller died a preventable death because of Georgia’s abortion ban. She should be alive today. We can’t bring Candi back—but we can elect people who fight for reproductive freedom, who will keep this kind of senseless, preventable tragedy from happening to more families.

How well does TWAS estimate a gene’s direction of effect on a trait? We think of this as an important stress-test for the accuracy of TWAS. In a new paper, we find that TWAS gets the sign wrong around 20-30% of the time! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

High false sign rates in transcriptome-wide association studies - Nature Genetics

This study finds that the direction of effect captured by transcriptome-wide association studies is often reversed relative to the true biological mechanism, suggesting that caution is needed when int...

nature.com

The worms say VOTE!

"'There’s no way to sugarcoat this,' Lau [SciAm president] told them. Springer Nature felt that Scientific American’s criticism of Trump was threatening their broader business—selling subscriptions to their scientific journals. The federal government was a major client."

Maris Kreizman@maris.bsky.social · 3w ago

Science is inherently political and when our government is actively hostile to science as a whole, publications should be able to write about it without being censored. Alas. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Come be my colleague! My department (Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech) is hiring a tenure-track professor in the area of Computational Genetics. The job posting is here: tinyurl.com/5fxwcds3

Careers

Georgia Tech prides itself on its technological resources, collaborations, high-quality student body, and its commitment to building an outstanding and diverse community of learning, discovery, and creation. We strongly encourage applicants whose values align with our institutional values, as outlined in our strategic plan. These values include academic excellence, diversity of thought and experience, inquiry and innovation, collaboration and community, and ethical behavior and stewardship. Georgia Tech has policies to promote a healthy work-life balance and is aware that attracting faculty may require meeting the needs of two careers.

tinyurl.com

New work from our lab! We've developed a culturing pipeline for generating clonal and axenic strains of Blastocystis, a prevalent human gut eukaryote with some intriguing links to health. Using this pipeline, we uncovered multiple strains of the same subtype coexisting within a single host.

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 3w ago

A novel clonal and axenic isolation pipeline for the human gut protist Blastocystis reveals within-subtype strain coexistence https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.19.760120v1

Pregnant women in ICE custody are being denied care. It's unconscionable. Yesterday, I visited Eloy with Rep. Adelita Grijalva, @repyassansari.bsky.social & @repdexteror.bsky.social to hear directly from those detained. We won't look away. More tomorrow on My Body. My Pod. https://bit.ly/4z3CdDP

Significant news in the ongoing dismantling of NSF. Fewer and fewer left to direct an agency whose decisions on what to fund (or even whether to use their budget at all) increasingly reflect the administration's political priorities rather than the prioritization of investigator-initiated research.

Dan Vergano@danvergano.bsky.social · 3w ago

FYI Science Policy News NSF Acting Director, Chief of Staff to Exit www.aip.org/fyi/nsf-acti... Agency leaders will be “working closely with the White House” to identify a new acting director if President Donald Trump’s nominee is not confirmed by Jan. 1

"Some women have health. Others, not so much. This is due to the varying fluoride levels in tap water." buff.ly/ycFDqJW

Recommendations from Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Women’s Health Task Force

“Some women have health. Others, not so much. This is due to the varying fluoride levels in tap water.”

buff.ly

Most importantly, we will remain adaptive. No-one knows what the world will look like in a few years, and our approach may change. Our primary goal is to maintain a service that benefits the community. That includes authors and readers (human and machine), whose desires may sometimes conflict 7/n

We don't want to penalize AI use but note it is enabling generation of both AI slop and submissions that are technically correct but of no use to the research community. It has always been our policy to decline such 'facile' submissions; they are just easier to generate now (to pad CVs). 4/n

How we are approaching AI at openRxiv - new blog post prompted by growing adoption by researchers, submission patterns, and questions from the community openrxiv.org/approach-to-... 1/n

how does it "protect girls" (a loaded phrase!) to transvestigate every girl athlete? To sexually harass, intimidate, and assault every girl just in case she *might* be seeeekritly a boy? Their goal here is twofold: to destroy trans kids, and destroy girls' sports. We can say that out loud.

Giving ground on trans issues is morally indefensible, electorally indefensible, and grounds for being cast into Grethor.

Matthew R Francis@bowlerhatscience.org · 3w ago

too many "progressives" give ground on trans athletes, which is stupid on so many levels. You don't have to grant that the bigots have *any* points here! They don't! Everything they say is bigoted! You can just look them in the eye and say that!

We found that the most gendered experience wasn’t work-life balance, the focus of most retention efforts. It was feeling devalued, in formal evaluations, but particularly in everyday interactions. Unlike every other topic, the gender gap in devaluation was larger among more senior faculty.

We wanted to understand why academics leave their jobs (doi.org/10.1126/scia...). We asked: “Tell us your story: what needs/needed to be different about your position?” I thought we would get a few hundred responses and I’d learn a bit more about the context of academic retention for myself.

Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty

Women faculty are more likely to leave their jobs than men, most often due to workplace climate, rather than work-life balance.

doi.org

Meet me in the public square I guess

Jessica Valenti@jessicavalenti.bsky.social · last mo.

Katie Zacharia sat on the advisory board of an organization that calls for women who have abortions to be executed “in the public square,” and for pro-choice Americans to lose their right to hold public office.

Most animal species pack sperm DNA with protamines instead of histones. Protamines are essential for male fertility. They are among the fastest-evolving genes in animals. That makes little sense. We think we know why, in a new paper led by @ching-hochang.bsky.social. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Rapid protamine evolution suppresses meiotic drive in Drosophila

Many animal species replace histones with protamines during spermatogenesis. Although essential for sperm function, protamines evolve rapidly for reasons that remain unknown. Using in vivo gene replac...

science.org

Please share! My lab is recruiting a postdoctoral scholar in evolutionary development. For more details feel free to email me.

This preprint rocks. Check out new info about one of the coolest regions of the human genome, plus join me in being so gratified that data I generated in grad school is being used by smart people to investigate fascinating topics! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hard to think of anything less abstract and more materially consequential than being pregnant

Marty Lederman@martylederman.bsky.social · last mo.

Samuel Alito: We won't overturn Obergefell because it's engendered reliance interests. Jan Crawford: Well, many people had organized their lives around Roe v. Wade. Alito: No, they didn't. Women merely had an "abstract" interest in "ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in."

Are you a postdoc or new faculty member who would benefit from an invited talk? My department is looking to bring someone for spring. Due to budgetary reasons, you must be either: 1. In driving distance to Orono, ME OR 2. Working on alpine or Arctic plants

Who says they “don’t make enough money”? Compared to what? You don’t need to grant the far right authoritarian party’s premise. You can write that they’re using arbitrary numbers based on no standards that should not be taken seriously, & you can just say that plainly instead of stenographizing

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2mo ago

Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/kQdKbY1

The people closest to the problem are the people closest to the solution… And here we have Trump making sure that the systems stay the way they are by keeping those closest to the solutions AWAY FROM POSITIONS WHERE THEY COULD HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEMS.

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2mo ago

Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/kQdKbY1

Early career faculty in Evolution? I would love to chat with you!

Society for the Study of Evolution@sse-evolution.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Want to be featured in an upcoming Evolution Exchange interview? We are seeking two to four new faculty members to talk with host Dr. Gina Baucom about their careers and current positions. Nominate yourself or someone else by September 30! forms.gle/tnpK6NYwJZGG...

I keep coming back to this as an academic and a teacher -- but also as a mom. My 5yo is learning reading and basic arithmetic right now and it is absolutely magical to see the world expand for him, and the new ways he can interact with the world (1/n)

Matt Ford@mford.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

I memorized my multiplication tables up to 20 x 20 in a classroom with a rack of calculators hanging on the wall. There are clear benefits to learning stuff the hard way first. This is … just not a difficult or controversial pedagogical point, I think?

Matt Ford@mford.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

At least where I got my PhD, if I wasn't sure what I found, how it worked, if it was useful or significant, nobody pretended I accomplished anything.

Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they)@katjathieme.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Who are the scientists, what are their names, and what have they published on this topic. 🤦🏻‍♀️