So proud of my lab mate @sagrill.bsky.social (whose on the job market 👀) for this magnum opus from @remlehmann.bsky.social lab @whiteheadinstitute.bsky.social ScRNA-seq of 🪰 germ cells reveals new biology, answers age old questions, and proposes new paradigms! 1/8 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

RIP King

Harvey, a mutant cockroach who baffled St. Louis scientists, has died

Scientists were fascinated by Harvey’s unique split coloring but still don’t know exactly why he looked that way. In his long life (for a cockroach) he was a favorite among visitors to the Sophia M. S...

stlpr.org

Well they finally did it. DOGE got rid of my friend Anne, the only remaining person at the web design system for the entire US government. The replacement appears to be AI-generated code with no dedicated human oversight.

GSA’s web design system head replaced with Treasury AI engineer

The U.S. Web Design System is intended to help the federal government build accessible and mobile-friendly websites.

nextgov.com

I think house centipedes should be considered good luck to see, even if people don’t like them I think they should be universally recognized as a bringer of fortune and prosperity.

The 2026 @aaup.org Faculty in the South Survey shows deep fears about the impact of government intrusion into curriculum and the future of higher ed. An Alabama professor wrote scholars at the top of their fields are fleeing the South and academia. Let's dig into the results. 1/x

Gerry Dee Says 'We Did A Survey' on Family Feud

ALT: Gerry Dee Says 'We Did A Survey' on Family Feud

static.klipy.com

I want you all to note the unions that stepped up to the plate to protect international students when universities wouldn't:

Judge Blocks Controversial International Student Restrictions

A Massachusetts judge issued the injunction hours before the regulation was set to take effect. Institutions worried it would harm international students.

insidehighered.com

Students in discussion of uncurated materials is not teaching. Students hanging out together is not teaching. Good teaching is the thing that AI cannot do, while it can mimic a role in the first two. 9/

After reading some of the recent pubs and discourse around US higher ed.… I should just stop right here. But here are the three major fallacies of much of what’s out there, three contexts that are missing, and the one big thing that is driving me around the bend (actually already there, but). 1/

she crawled up my hand to keep her treat away from the male…

Were it not for calcite, it might have been centuries before scientists discovered the polarization of light. Huygens found that, by rotating a second piece over the first, he could make one of the images disappear! Calcite was the key to discovering that light has orientation!

I’m looking to hire an NIH funded postdoc to join our lab here at Davis (please RT). Ongoing areas of interest include: 1) polygenic signals of selection from time series, ARGs, GWAS, etc 2) The interpretation of GWAS, polygenic scores, & sources of confounding

The second chapter of my PhD thesis is out in @NatureComms 🎉!! we found that a "Yellow" protein, the same gene family known for pigmentation in many insects, has been repurposed to protect a beetle's bacterial symbiont. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yellow protein co-opted to sustain obligate symbiosis in leaf beetles - Nature Communications

Insects have evolved diverse strategies to protect their genome-reduced symbionts during vertical transmission. Here, authors show that tortoise beetles have co-opted a Yellow protein to form spheres ...

nature.com

Do you work with microscopy images and segment to quantify or track? Do you study cell biology? development? Gather round! Let me tell you about FOCUS-3D, a segmentation algorithm that is fast, accurate and can be used on any model. We used it here to study zebrafish development. 🧪 (thread)

FOCUS‑3D: Robust, generalizable volumetric cell segmentation for three‑dimensional fluorescence microscopy

Understanding how cells establish spatial organization within tissues is a fundamental question in life sciences. While modern three-dimensional fluorescence microscopy captures large-volume tissue ar...

biorxiv.org

The largest arthropod ever was a sea scorpion. Jaekelopterus stretched about 2.5 meters, longer than a person is tall, hunting the seas 400 million years ago with claws half a meter long. Nothing with an exoskeleton has come close since. 🦂 🧪 #FossilFriday #HowToBuildAGiant Artwork by Dani Navarro

Think this is a useful framework to improve the sexual conflict discourse, even though there will be cases where it's debatable what constitutes an individual entity with agency.

Arvid Ågren@arvidagren.bsky.social · 4w ago

Why grouping intralocus and interlocus phenomena under one umbrella of “sexual conflict” is a mistake. Insightful paper from @imprintedgene.bsky.social, @andygardner.bsky.social y.social, Tracey Chapman, and @jennyperry.bsky.social yperry.bsky.social. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

New preprint led by amazing undergrad @ogolwala.bsky.social! Within ~10,000 years, sperm traits have diverged between trophic specialists in this young radiation of pupfish. Hybrids are fertile, but show transgressive sperm kinematics and reorganized integration. With @fishspeciation.bsky.social.

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · last mo.

Rapid divergence in sperm morphology and transgressive segregation of hybrid sperm kinematics in a young pupfish radiation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.17.745335v1

Conspecific Gamete Precedence in Speciation: History, Evidence, and a Research Roadmap I’m very happy to share this review about a fundamental reproductive barrier that has been largely overlooked in speciation research. I’d appreciate all your feedback! Preprint: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

@vakirlis.bsky.social and I are proposing a new term in the de-novo genes / molecular evolution cinematic universe. The term is: "Emergence Bias" and our perspective piece describing it was published in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social today! So, what is an emergence bias? (1/7)

Emergence Biases in Molecular Evolution

Abstract. Biases in molecular evolution can significantly influence evolutionary trajectories. They have been described in a variety of contexts, such as d

academic.oup.com

I've heard thousands of climate denial arguments over the last few decades. But do you know they all fall into one of 5 categories? 1. It's not real 2. It's not us 3. It's not bad 4. We can't fix it 5. You can't trust the info/experts Source: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

16 months ago: Never forget how it started.

More Perfect Union@moreperfectunion.bsky.social · last yr.

BREAKING: The FDA is planning to end most of its routine food safety inspections, according to CBS News. www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-foo...

Straight from Hoth, a massive killer, the North American wheel bug. Spotted by a friend on our bug walk on the UChicago campus. What a beast! #bugsky

Folks thinking that uploading confidential material to their favorite AI is safe because of of their special fences should be reminded that this past month, AI agents at all major AI companies broke out of their sandbox (much more secure fences that yours) and attacked another company!

MadScientist@mads100tist.bsky.social · last mo.

Remember that by using LLMs, you're stealing from your colleagues and yourself. You're better than that 🧪

Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Zero new NSF grants in sociology, anthropology, political science and economics. The agenda of this US govt is to stop documenting the society in which we live while they are destroying it. We will find other ways to track and explain our times and fight to restore our research funding.

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · last mo.

Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.

For some perspective on how much FY26 is a historic outlier this is, here is a mockup using the number of grants with an original date for each fiscal year. n.b. slightly overestimates the true number of new grants because it counts transfers, etc. as new awards

Manuscripts and grant proposals submitted for *peer* review are typically meant to be confidential. I'm fairly confident the text of these confidential documents have now been uploaded to an LLM. I don't know which one, but I'm guessing it wasn't a 'local' LLM sandboxed on someone's computer.

I have been tasked by @markjfbrown.bsky.social with making sure that all social insect groups go up on the map. If for some inexplicable reason you're not yet on the map, be warned - I might ambush you in the IUSSI poster session 🤣 #IUSSI2026

Nominations for the GSA Larry Sandler Award are now open! genetics-gsa.org/awards/larry... This award recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis (graduating between 07/2025 and 12/2026) in any area of Drosophila research. Include 1) the thesis abstract, 2) the Nominee's CV and 3) a nomination letter.

7. It's yet another thing that AI has stolen away from the current generation of scientists. Yet again, AI proves to be an anti-egalitarian force in that these abuses force us to abandon the Mertonian norm of universalism for increased reliance on credentials, reputation, and personal connections.