contaminatedsci.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Has anyone with a recently council reviewed application received a NoA?

submitted 14 days ago • 2 comments

If you're a millennial like me, you may also have the below XKCD cartoon burned into your subconscious. It delivers a clear message-- its useless to argue with folks online. I am trying to unwire this part of my brain. Moderates must also our voices, particularly around tough issues.

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

My quote of the day …But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world. Vannevar Bush Science: The Endless Frontier

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Related: I think the Mismeasure of Man should be required reading for all scientists. Top ten most important book ever written, which radically changed the way I view the impact of my work on the world. Cannot recommend it enough especially for new scientists.

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

Earnshaw, Goloborodko, Dekker & Mirny labs are excited to present our latest work, "Rules of engagement for condensins and cohesins guide mitotic chromosome formation" - now accepted!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... A short clip describing the key results: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmvO...

submitted 7 days ago • 6 comments

Interesting. Let’s hope this is true and extends into other aspects of NIH operations www.politico.com/news/2025/04...

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

submitted 5 days ago • 120 comments

📢We are #hiring a full time editor to handle areas including microbial ecology & plant microbiology🦠🌱 This position will work closely with @naturecomms.bsky.social #microsky #microbiomesky #ecologysky 🧪 Available in NYC, Madrid, or other US offices Read more & apply here: shorturl.at/yvdYJ

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

The Trump administration plans to eliminate the research arm of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, close all weather and climate labs and eviscerate its budget along with several other NOAA offices, according to internal documents obtained by CNN.

submitted 6 days ago • 137 comments

Joined the national AAUP last week.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Federal spending is up under Trump according to the Wall Street Journal. Chaos is not actually the same as cost savings. Actual budgeting is a kind of actual policy-making and takes real work spread over real time. Running around breaking stuff isn't that. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

submitted 7 days ago • 135 comments

I was waiting two years to see this out!! The genomic location of bacterial genes is not random!!! Congratulation on the authors (Martin Lercher and Team!). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

they finally did it. they invented a machine that can't run doom.

submitted 8 days ago • 54 comments

Exclusive: Researchers at the US National Institutes of Health were told they can't attend scientific conferences and meetings without official permission, even if they pay their way and go during time off, current and former NIH scientists told Reuters reut.rs/4j7rFLT

submitted 8 days ago • 86 comments

If you use Kraken for profiling microbial / environmental / ancient metagenomic data, please check this preprint where I benchmark filtering strategies of Kraken outputs on simulated microbial and environmental metagenomic samples, and provide recommendations for optimal filtering thresholds

submitted 8 days ago • 4 comments

This has been a long journey, but it's now out in final form. @kjamali.bsky.social academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Our latest paper, in which @brinda.eu (along with @zaminiqbal.bsky.social and others) introduces phylogenetic compression for storage and search of enormous microbial genome libraries, was published today in @naturemethods.bsky.social: rdcu.be/eg4OA 1/

submitted 8 days ago • 11 comments

Harvard is facing an existential crisis. The Trump administration is blackmailing them and need a community that's willing to stand with them and that's willing to fight. This is a battle for the soul of Harvard. Sign and show up this Saturday noon at Cambridge Common forms.gle/CfFYKjtHBKKV...

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

Urgent: The Harvard board flew to Cambridge weekend presumably to decide if they’ll capitulate to Trump. Working on a full-throated response. Anyone willing to help connect with / organize Harvard faculty, students or others interested in an impromptu demonstration this Saturday?

submitted 9 days ago • 4 comments

“McDonalds workers in Denmark make more than Honda workers in Alabama” is such a key point. It’s the institutions, stupid.

submitted 10 days ago • 206 comments

There's something weird happening where The Discourse about the tariffs is about how Trump is trying to return us to 1950's and 1960's, the manufacturing heyday of America, but he's not! He' been very very explicit about this. He wants to return us to the 1890's. That's a different project!

submitted 10 days ago • 558 comments

Our commentary on the elegant in vitro microbiome coalescence experiments from @goldmandoran.bsky.social @ksxue.bsky.social et al is out. It was a pleasure to write about one of my favorite microbiome papers of the last few years. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

A recent study of an mRNA vaccine in a mouse model of 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘭𝘦 infection provided proof of concept of a protective effect. Learn more: nej.md/4kS8x5X @umich.edu #MedSky #IDSky

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Aneuploidy is the leading cause of pregnancy loss. In work led by @saracarioscia.bsky.social and @aabiddanda.bsky.social, we reanalyzed genetic testing data from 139,416 IVF embryos to discover variants associated with recombination phenotypes and aneuploidy risk. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Contrary to popular belief, what is important in science is as much its spirit as its product: it is as much the openmindedness, the primacy of criticism, the submission to the unforeseen, however upsetting, as the result, however new that may be. – Francois Jacob www.nature.com/articles/s41...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

This is what election-rigging looks like.

submitted 13 days ago • 141 comments

“Where the original Enlightenment championed reason, equality, and democracy, the Dark Enlightenment preaches in-equality, elitism, and autocracy…If one truly believes that human groups differ vastly in innate intelligence or “aptitude,” the egalitarian premise of democracy looks fatally flawed”

submitted 13 days ago • 4 comments

Job opportunity in SF to work at a small startup with the first PhD graduate of the Lieberman Lab!

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

The only relevant political point is that Republican members of Congress are all supporting these tariffs 100%. They could stop them at any moment. Each day is on them. Everyone with a messaging bullhorn needs to make that clear. They can pull the plug now or pay the price at the polls next year.

submitted 14 days ago • 137 comments

Since last time Trump was President

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

Another $2.6 billion in cuts to NIH are coming by next Tuesday www.statnews.com/2025/04/03/n... The shredded image fits

submitted 14 days ago • 8 comments

Has anyone with a recently council reviewed application received a NoA?

submitted 14 days ago • 2 comments

Imagine you're a plasmid just chilling in the same host for 200 years and then some scientist comes to extract you and transform you into a random other strain because they need to express GFP or some shit www.nature.com/articles/s41...

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. 1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

submitted 15 days ago • 962 comments

“There isn’t a single person in this entire country whose life isn’t impacted by the essential functions of HHS, and soon we’ll see what happens when those functions are destroyed.”

submitted 15 days ago • 29 comments

Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.28.646016v1

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

Very compelling study showing the association between herpes zoster vaccination and dementia prevention. The authors leveraged a unique cohort for this natural experiment which shows a reduction in dementia risk of 20% in vaccinated individuals. #MedSky #IDSky 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

submitted 15 days ago • 10 comments

Trump and Musk are trying to block all NIH spending. Trump and Musk are trying to block all NIH spending. (Legal aside: so they’re admitting that regulations matter. That’s good.)

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

Preprint out! Bacteria w/ hyper-replicative filamentous phage lead to overnight emergence of cheater phages. Bacteria w/ both phages can outcompete wildtype, then rapidly lose phage via a phage Tragedy of the Commons @shellyscrib.bsky.social @vscooper.micropopbio.org www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

submitted 16 days ago • 6 comments

Read: OpenAI raised $40B—i.e., the entire NIH budget.

submitted 16 days ago • 2 comments

#phage

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Wow - open-source LLMs for code are so back Just one week after the latest DeepSeek release, here is the All-Hands team dropping a 32B model with matching performance on software engineering tasks benchmarks (SWE-Bench). 20 times smaller than the DeepSeek model --

submitted 17 days ago • 6 comments

Trump's 3/27 executive order targets the Smithsonian for advancing "the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct." Trump argues that the exhibit's statement, below, is unscientific. He's wrong. As a biology professor and population geneticist, I agree with every word of it.

submitted 17 days ago • 72 comments