I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.
Pls share. Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences - Genetics/Genomics at Smith College. apply.interfolio.com/190342
NEW: The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired visas as they travel through airports, according to documents obtained by The Times and interviews with lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/u...
ICE Arrests Surge at Airports, Opening New Front in Deportation Drive
Federal agents are arresting spouses of Americans, tech workers and others whose visas have expired, including many who have active applications to stay in the country.
nytimes.com
Thread from @s-j-aitken.bsky.social explaining our new paper that finds strong epistatic interactions between germline genetic background and somatic driver mutations that set the course of cancer development.
Sarah Aitken@s-j-aitken.bsky.social · last wk.🧬NEW PAPER🧬 To what extent is cancer development deterministic? Does the germline genome affect that predictability? Find out in our #StrainDifferences paper @nature.com "Genetic background sets the trajectory of experimental cancer evolution" www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵[1/14]
One third of all PhD STEM workers in the US are immigrants who studied at a US university. Today the US Administration extended its efforts to slash high-skill immigration, undermining foreign students' trust that they can complete their degrees & work afterwards. My new piece at @brookings.edu —>
What does the new duration of status rule mean for international students and workers? | Brookings
Brookings guest authors break down a recent DHS rule change and what it means for US temporary visa holders and the broader economy
brookings.edu
NEW: The Trump admin finalized a regulation which makes the largest changes to the student visa process in 50 years, along with changes to rules for exchange visitors and international journalists. 🧵on some of the most consequential changes set to go into effect in September.
AILA@aila.org · 3w agoDHS has published its Final Rule to eliminate "duration of status" for F, J & I nonimmigrants. One of the most significant changes to international student, exchange visitor & foreign media programs in decades, it will be costly, cause chaos, and cut legal immigration.
The most anti-legal immigrant administration ever just made it illegal for international students to transfer schools or change majors or shift any "educational objective" in their 1st year and for graduate students **at any point** ever, at all. There is no legal basis for this
I am thrilled to share that UC Berkeley and UCSF have launched a joint initiative in Computational Biomedicine! cdss.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berk... We will soon be recruiting new faculty and postdoctoral fellows. Please repost to help spread the word.
UC Berkeley and UCSF Launch Computational Biomedicine Initiative
UC Berkeley and UCSF have launched a joint program called the Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative to develop the frontier of AI and biomedicine, tremendously accelerating advances in clinical c...
cdss.berkeley.edu
We should all be concerned. Members of Congress were prevented from speaking with people inside at least two different US concentration camps this week. Both facilities are privately run FOR PROFIT by the same company, GEO Group, which is expected to make $3 billion in revenue this year.
1/n Check out our new paper, spearheaded by @fborne.bsky.social, just out in PLoS Genetics doi.org/10.1371/jour....
Epistasis among clustered lineage-specific amino acid substitutions in the Drosophila Trio protein
Author summary Proteins fold into three-dimensional structures that are essential for their function. Because these structures depend on interactions among amino acids, the fitness effect of a mutatio...
doi.org
I first met Neil Shubin 30 years ago when he was digging for fossils of our fishy ancestors in Pennsylvania road cuts. Now he's becoming president of the National Academy of Sciences. We talked about taking the helm of the 163-year-old organization at this fraught moment. Gift link: nyti.ms/4giD3FX
nyti.ms
Now published: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
What sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species?
Mutation rates per generation are strikingly similar across germlines of animals and across at least one somatic cell type, suggesting a key role for natural selection in shaping mutation rates. This ...
journals.plos.org
Molly Przeworski@mollyprz.bsky.social · 8mo agoHappy to highlight an essay I wrote together with @marcdemanuel.bsky.social, @natanaels.bsky.social and Anastasia Stolyarova, trying to think through what sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n
postdoc alert 🚨! NIH-funded postdoc in my lab to work on Ancestral Recombination Graphs in space. Please spread the word widely in your networks, and please reach out if you're interested! (2-3yr position, start date flexible, pay/benefits good!). details here: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...
recruitment
Multiple positions available: Postdoc PhD students
genescape.org
BREAKING: New proposed OMB regulation, applying to all federal grants, requiring grant reviews by senior political appointees and re-emphasizes that "peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion". #standupforscience public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-10817.pdf
public-inspection.federalregister.gov
Happy to have the chance to share this commentary by @will-milligan.bsky.social & me: rdcu.be/fldBs.
Adaptation: by giant leaps or many tiny steps?
Nature Reviews Genetics - In this Comment, the authors argue that understanding the genetic basis of adaptation requires considering the genetic architecture and ecological properties of traits...
rdcu.be
This is North Korea level bullshit, and a total fucking disaster for science and for the United States alike. It doesn't matter whether it fails to pass; this kind of thinking is already penetrating NIH, NSF, NASA, etc and causing severe harm. NASEM, AAAS, AAUP, etc must condemn unequivocally.
Lawmakers propose banning all U.S.-Chinese research collaborations
Critics say bill would weaken U.S. science by cutting flows of ideas and talent
science.org
I'm excited to share that our work studying gene dosage response curves (GDRCs) is now out in Cell Genomics (@cellpress.bsky.social). www.cell.com/cell-genomic... [1/n]
Buffering of gene dosage response curves for human complex traits
Milind et al. explore why loss-of-function variants and duplications tend to have average effects in the same direction on 94 complex traits. Using gene dosage response curves (GDRCs), they gather evi...
cell.com
Shut Delaney Hall down, NOW. Today, @menendez.house.gov and I went to Delaney Hall because of the inhumane conditions we've been hearing about. What I saw and heard is absolutely unacceptable.
“Eddy received a letter from the [NIH], informing him that his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," he recalls. Eddy says he has given up on any dream that his funding would be restored”
Maggie WW@maggieww.bsky.social · 2mo agoI keep thinking I’m done being shocked. It is abundantly clear there is a vendetta against anything that gives joy or laughter and helps people. I cannot believe the brilliant researchers who have been targeted and criminalized. Easy to demolish, hard to rebuild. www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...
Some deep work by my former student Matthew Aguirre on what the properties of cis- and trans eQTLs can teach us about the structure of gene regulatory networks!
Matthew Aguirre@aguirre404.bsky.social · 2mo agoHappy to share that this is now out in Cell Genomics and a featured paper for Multi-Journal Submission from @cellpress.bsky.social — many thanks to the editorial team + our reviewers! Short recap + some further thoughts on the paper ⬇️ [1/7] www.cell.com/cell-genomic...
"An email from NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to research-center grantees, seen by Science, requires their institutions to promise that U.S. authors of papers NIH has flagged because of foreign co-authors will not collaborate with them in the future."
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 3mo ago“Units of the NIH are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States.” Grantees also told to remove papers with foreign authors from progress reports.
U.S. researchers who coauthor research papers with scientists affiliated with foreign institutions are drawing fresh scrutiny from NIH, NASA. #scientificpublishing @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...
U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators
NIH, NASA grantees are confused and concerned amid agencies’ piecemeal communication
science.org
I am delighted to share new work with Simon Myers (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...), on how genetic variants that influence binding patterns of PRDM9 and slow down the repair of meiotic double-strand breaks impact mammalian spermatogenesis and fertility. 1/n
biorxiv.org
Great work from Sheel Chandra and Ziyue Gao: “Overall, our findings reveal that the base composition at polymorphic sites is strongly shaped by the interaction between demographic history, mutation bias, and gBGC, and does not represent stable, genome-wide trends.”
bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 3mo agoInterpreting GC content differences across populations at polymorphic sites https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.16.725686v1
Now Dr. Vanesa Getseva…
Molly Przeworski@mollyprz.bsky.social · 3mo agoHappy to highlight new findings by Vanesa Getseva and Lin Poyraz about the sources of variation in germline mutation rates among humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Joint work with Anastasia Stolyarova and @ipsitaagarwal.bsky.social. 1/n
NEW: A serious staffing shortage — of the Trump admin's own making — is delaying the agency's ability to send billions to universities around the country, leaving labs reeling in the meantime. “I thought we were at rock bottom”, a senior NIH official said. “We are below rock bottom now.”
NIH staffing shortage could slash number of new grants issued this year
Some units at the US funding giant are so understaffed, they are focusing on mandated grant renewals rather than new awards.
nature.com
MIT has lost 500 international grad students relative to last year. Caused directly by the White House. Closing America's doors to the very best, most brilliant people on the planet is like dropping a bomb directly on America's capacity to innovate. On the prosperity of our children's future.
A message from MIT President Sally Kornbluth
YouTube video by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
youtube.com
Happy to highlight new findings by Vanesa Getseva and Lin Poyraz about the sources of variation in germline mutation rates among humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Joint work with Anastasia Stolyarova and @ipsitaagarwal.bsky.social. 1/n
A sibling study of variation in parental mutation rates
People are born with variable numbers of de novo germline mutations (DNMs), depending primarily on the ages of their parents. To explore additional causes, we developed an approach to call DNMs from nucleotide differences between siblings in genomic regions inherited identical by descent from both parents. Applying it to whole genome sequences from 28,985 sibling pairs of diverse genetic ancestries present in the UK Biobank and All of Us datasets, as well as 2,330 trios, we identified >800K autosomal DNMs and characterized mutation phenotypes in 27,645 sets of parents. We found subtle shifts in the mutation spectrum but no differences in total DNM rates among genetic ancestry groups, or between smokers and non-smokers. Testing for associations between parental mutation phenotypes and their burden of loss-of-function and deleterious missense variants in a set of 180 DNA repair and maintenance genes, we discovered that disruptions in REV1 and LIG1 increase germline mutation rates, and thus that rare mutator alleles segregate in population cohorts. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. NIH, R35 GM083098
biorxiv.org
1/ There is a bill going through the New York State legislature that would transform our ability to provide medical genetics care: www.nysenate.gov/legislation/...
NY State Assembly Bill 2025-A3229A
Prohibits insurance companies from discriminating based on genetic predisposition including refusing to issue or renew, charging any increased rate, or restricting any length of coverage; prohibits insurers from requiring genetic testing.
nysenate.gov
Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr
After USDA request, Indiana plant biologist locked out of lab by school
Move comes after Roger Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs
scim.ag