Gnomix is published! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Still the most accurate & fastest local ancestry inference (LAI) method, bests Flare and others (RecombMix & Orchestra) released since our preprint. Easy to use, github.com/AI-sandbox/g... Use it with our toolkit, snputils.org

Scalable high resolution ancestry deconvolution for genomic data - Nature Communications

The authors present Gnomix, a local ancestry framework that delivers leading accuracy across diverse admixed datasets on both whole-genome and array data with high efficiency, together with Gnofix, it...

nature.com

If you are interested in learning computational population genetics and ancient genomics, I have curated my list of workshops and online tutorials (and will continue to do so) indicating suitability for self-learners and status. You find the list [here](www.stephanschiffels.de/resources.html).

Just got our @genomeresearch.bsky.social article by Margarita Geleta. 📬 I love hard copies...still here's a link genome.cshlp.org/content/36/2... Rita's article was a tour de force of genomic uses for the autoencoder architecture: compression, dim reduction, ancestry, synthetic genomes.

Some data isn't fit for LLMs, esp. many biomedical datasets & anything with spreadsheets. Large Tabular Models (LTMs) are the way to go! Our LTM (iLTM accepted #KDD2026) is now in the dictionary! Thanks @spectrum.ieee.org and @merriamwebster.bsky.social! www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/t...

Scaling genetic clustering (ADMIXTURE/STRUCTURE-style unsupervised clustering) is now easy. Out in Bioinformatics, our ADAMIXTURE method clusters all of UK Biobank (500k genomes) in just over a hour with likelihoods as good as ADMIXTURE, which would take weeks. doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

ADAMIXTURE: adaptive first-order optimization for biobank-scale genetic clustering

AbstractMotivation. Estimating genetic clusters from sequencing data is a fundamental task in population and medical genetics, enabling demographic inferen

doi.org

Proud of @carbarjon.bsky.social who just earned her PhD after getting the cover of Nature Medicine earlier this spring! In her study we show clinically relevant allele frequencies can vary regionally across Mexico by more than even between many global populations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The University of California should bring back a standardized test admissions requirement, the editorial board writes.

Opinion | Bring Back the SAT, California

Under the test-blind policy, more students are thrown into classes for which they are unprepared.

nyti.ms

How better to celebrate Independence and Freedom than the free launching of fireworks all across east Oakland? While we in Academia argue about the abstract, life is happening here, and I love it!

Who wants free coffee?! Join our lab!

Nicholas A. Christakis@nachristakis.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Apparently, there is a cafe in Shenzen’s biotech hub that gives you free coffee for a month if you publish in @nature.com or @science.org. ;-)

We are presenting ARGformer tonight at #PEQG26! We released ARGformer this winter (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...) bc ARGs are huge & hard to use. ARGformer turns local genealogical paths into tokens & learns dense embeddings, similar to language embeddings, to visualize, clustering, and query.

ARGformer: learning on ancestral recombination graphs with transformers

Recent advances in inference of the ancestral recombination graph (ARG), which describes how segments of chromosomes trace back through recombination and shared lineages, have made it possible to reco...

biorxiv.org

Scenes from the HUGO workshop in Athens, Greece 🇬🇷 HPRC collaboration in action, advancing pangenomics both stateside and abroad.

Very proud to share our new work on General, orders-of-magnitude faster whole-genome analysis with genotype representation graphs (GRG). We topped ourselves in this one 🚀 and made GRG a practical foundation for biobank-scale population and statistical genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... thoughtful new local ancestry method by Rita Geleta, @alexgioannidis.bsky.social & others. Really looking forward to using it! 🧬

The Israeli bombardment in Lebanon has killed more than 680 people and displaced over 800,000, according to Lebanese officials. Follow live Middle East updates. nyti.ms/4b6i7iH

China’s genius plan ft.trib.al/YYI7wOj

China’s genius plan

A network of ultra-competitive high-school talent streams has been turning out the leading lights of science and tech

ft.trib.al

This matches my experience. The implementation of this system has increased inequality in some cases. Underrepresented groups are underrepresented in getting extra exam time in my classes, imposing an additional burden on those groups, as others shift their exam times forward, chasing the curve.

Financial Times@financialtimes.com · 9mo ago

How redefining special needs rocked education on.ft.com/4iRbp22 | opinion

Life is what happens when you’re busy trying to get your paper published

Student acceptance of violence to silence speakers is at a record high. In 2020, 1 in 5 students said violence was acceptable to stop a speaker. In 2025, that number is 1 in 3. That’s a 79% increase in just five years. And it’s chilling.

The attorney general would be wise to read the words of the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly held that the "proudest boast" of America's free speech tradition is "freedom for the thought that we hate."

"He retired from public performances in the 1970s and focused on teaching. He taught for many years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, splitting his time between there and Cambridge." Tom Lehrer had it all figured out. RIP to one of my heroes. www.npr.org/2025/07/27/8...

Tom Lehrer, influential musical satirist, dies at 97

The songwriter and math professor found a following with his satirical political songs.

npr.org

I'm disturbed by tenured faculty on here behaving like high school bullies. I ask them to look up ad hominem and recognize that what Mamdani did was atrocious and newsworthy. Why are we defending an uber-privileged applicant whose father was faculty at the Ivy League university he was applying to?

After a quarter of a century, the UCSC Genome Browser remains an essential tool for navigating the genome and understanding its structure, function and clinical impact https://go.nature.com/40wPxkB

’We couldn’t live without it’: the UCSC Genome Browser turns 25

After a quarter of a century, the website remains an essential tool for navigating the genome and understanding its structure, function and clinical impact.

go.nature.com

It is with great sadness that we mourn the loss of our friend and colleague Dr. Atul Butte. A hui hou Atul. We will miss you.

Sad.

I have an opportunity to hire a staff scientist for my lab. Looking for someone with outstanding skillset in ML/statistics, genomics applications; interest in mentoring, strong publication record, PD experience required. Email CV to me+cc my assistant (see 'contact' on my website). Ad to follow.

Most proteins are left-handed, but scientists have found an ancient molecule that works in both mirror-image forms https://go.nature.com/4mCImRm

Rare ‘ambidextrous’ protein breaks rules of handedness

Most proteins are left-handed, but scientists have found an ancient molecule that works in both mirror-image forms.

go.nature.com

Very sad to see this. Cemal Kafadar is a deep, evenhanded scholar, and had a formative influence on my understanding of Ottoman history as an undergraduate. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...