Thank you @natgenet.nature.com for this nice Research Briefing www.nature.com/articles/s41... on our recent paper reporting live-cell measurements of Sox2 promoter bursting kinetics when varying its genomic distance from the SCR enhancer 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The genomic position of an enhancer modulates bursting dynamics of the cognate promoter - Nature Genetics

We show that, in a genomic locus with minimal complexity, the distance between promoter and enhancer modulates the frequency of clustered transcriptional bursts. Thus, besides the nucleotide sequence,...

nature.com

I'm just so sick of this shit day in and day out I genuinely do not believe we can take another 2.5 years of it

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last mo.

Trump posts an image featuring a map showing the United States taking over Canada and Greenland

Trump on Lindsey Graham's death: "This is a big blow to the SAVE America Act, let me tell you"

ICE has killed again. Again, the govt scrambled to claim an officer was threatened by ICE’s victim’s car. And again, that appears to be a lie. Except this time ICE also grabbed 3 witnesses, and is trying to get them out of the country. Immoral, authoritarian, and practically an admission of guilt.

Greg Sargent@gregsargent.bsky.social · last mo.

NEWS --> Three men who were in the van with the victim of the ICE shooting in Texas are potential witnesses, but they're now under pressure to self-deport, a rep for the families tells me. They remain in detention even as ICE's story falters. Details in this piece: newrepublic.com/article/2129...

From @snipy.bsky.social: “All along, he’s seemed equal parts angry and confused that any past misdeeds couldn’t be batted aside with one of two answers: (1) never happened or (2) he changed.”

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last mo.

New in PN: A sentient collection of red flags "When it came to Platner & his supporters trying to push back on the misdeeds that ultimately doomed him, there was never anything of substance or real. He just demanded people accept he was a totally different person than all evidence showed him to be"

I didn't know Louisa well but our paths crossed professionally several times. Such a smart, talented, passionate advocate and public servant. It's hard to know what to say about such such a tragedy. It is a societal and political choice that people die like this--a choice that we must stop making.

The Boston Globe@bostonglobe.com · last mo.

A cycling advocate and transportation planner for the city of Boston was identified as the cyclist who was struck and killed in a crash near Roxbury Crossing this morning.

Excited to share our latest paper! We found that large pieces of the human genome can transfer between cells upon direct contact, endowing recipient cells with heritable phenotypic changes. @cp-cell.bsky.social (1/7) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

yeah with a ouija board

Politico@politico.com · last mo.

Senate GOP leaders say they’ve spoken with Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell's possible death raises new questions about Joe Biden's health.

This, emphatically, shouldn't have been done, and shouldn't be used. You'd think we'd have learned that someone else's contextless algorithmic division of science outputs into "the best" and "not the best" is a disaster. Doesn't matter whether AI or Elsevier does it. the-one-percent.qedscience.com

The academic hiring system is simply not designed for candidates like me. It privileges a kind of performative intellectualism—the ability to stand at a whiteboard and extemporize about science as if you were some kind of 19th-century naturalist 😂 😂 😂 open.substack.com/pub/inprepar...

Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination

By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

open.substack.com

(1/n) Very excited to share tri-lab collab (Mirny & Zechner) led by Harvey, Henrik & Jack: Q: How do enhancers & promoters interact in space (contact vs. action-at-a-distance) and time (stable vs. transient)? A: Transient E-P contact (~25-42 nm lasting ~10-20 sec): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/🧵 Can transcription factor condensate formation be explained without phase separation? Our new preprint introduces SPARK, a simulation tool that reproduces condensate behavior (clustering, fusion, FRAP) from diffusion & binding kinetics alone. Movie: 60 sec FRAP sim www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

oops! reminds me of previous misadventures in human gene nomenclature: www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/213...

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates

Microsoft Excel: 1 — Human Genetics: 0.

theverge.com

Sholto David@sholtodavid.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Today I'm posting a new blog about an astonishing scientific own goal. Hundreds of papers have reported using a totally wrong antibody to investigate the tumor suppressor p16. This mistake has happened because scientists have muddled the names of two proteins. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/02/m...

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Out now in Science! Our study challenges long-standing assumptions about transcription factor specificity in eukaryotes. Novel single-molecule measurements of TF behavior in living cells reveal an independence of locus-specific binding from DNA sequence recognition.🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Unstructured transcription factor interactions enable emergent specificity

How intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) shape chromatin binding and nuclear organization of transcription factors (TFs) remains unclear. We used proximity-assisted photoactivation (PAPA), a single...

science.org

Sorry but I believe in society

Forbes@forbes.com · 3mo ago

“We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington,” the Amazon chairman said.

re-upping this in light of the very amusing Granta fiasco

The Easy Promise of Hidden Revelations

Don't blame LLMs. We have always wanted slop.

hegemon.substack.com

Billionaires must be targeted with tax policy and antitrust policy not because it helps everyone else (though it does) but because their political power must be limited so they can't wreck the world the way they're currently doing

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3mo ago

Bezos on CNBC: "You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you."

Insane

Peter Ly@peterlylab.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Excited to share our latest paper! We found that large pieces of the human genome can transfer between cells upon direct contact, endowing recipient cells with heritable phenotypic changes. @cp-cell.bsky.social (1/7) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

The vice president of the United States is just standing up here saying people should feel sorry for domestic terrorists who were given free and fair trials and were then convicted in a court of law. Absolutely despicable.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3mo ago

JD Vance: "You know who never, ever gets an ounce of sympathy when it comes to disproportionate sentencing? People who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6 protest."

Important: Dems will seek to force Republicans to vote on a bill blocking Trump's illegal $1.8 billion slush fund, Rep Jamie Raskin tells me. Dems will use discharge petition. Hakeem Jeffries is supportive of Raskin's efforts, I'm told. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/2106...

This article is essentially a confession that legacy media has so internalized the different benchmarks via which they judge Republicans and Democrats, they're comfortable expressly writing articles on that basis.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3mo ago

TRUMP: Routinely falls asleep on camera, has unexplained injuries on his makeup-caked hands, regularly makes genocidal threats, posts nonstop AI slop, compares himself to Christ, goes on unhinged rants every time he appears in public THE ATLANTIC: "He's becoming purer"

The “we don’t have the votes” excuse for refusing to force a vote on impeachment is conceding the point and saying even the opposition party doesn’t think this high crime merits removal from office. It’s not being politically astute and pragmatic, it’s self-defeating in its cowardice.

Ryan Enos@ryanenos.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I say without hyperbole that this is the most brazenly corrupt action in US Presidential history. That it does not immediately lead to impeachment is a dangerous sign of how far the rule of law has declined.

MIT is doing less research and enrolling fewer graduate students as a result of federal actions, the university president warned. Federally funded research on campus is down more than 20 percent compared to this time last year, she said.

MIT president blames federal policy shifts for big drop in research on campus

Federal funding cuts have curtailed research at elite universities such as MIT, dulling America’s competitive edge globally.

washingtonpost.com

More on the destruction of US science: Federal science agencies lost more jobs in 2025 (12%) than over the previous TWO decades (8%), including 30% of personnel at NSF, 20% at USGS, NOAA, and NIH. NASA lost 12% (now up to 24% by Jan 2026). (Data from www.aip.org/fyi/federal-...)

Federal Science Workforce Declines Sharply Under Trump

The last year was marked by turmoil at science agencies and the administration’s stated desire to shrink the federal workforce.

aip.org

If you’re having AI do your brainstorming, “your brainstorming muscles are going to get weaker,” the MS NOW host Chris Hayes tells @cwarzel.bsky.social. They discuss the possible effects of letting AI take over creative and generative thinking: www.youtube.com/watch?v=da8U...

We are implementing a similar policy at @arxiv.bsky.social. If there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, this means the authors did not take the time to read the LLM output and we can't trust anything else in the paper. Penalty is 1 year ban from arXiv followed by...

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 🧪 🧵👇