Jason McDermott

Conrad Hal Waddington was born OTD in 1905.

His “epigenetic landscape” is a diagrammatic representation of the constraints influencing embryonic development.

On his 50th birthday, his colleagues gave him a pinball machine on the model of the epigenetic landscape.

🧪 🦫🦋 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci #evobio

This is a subjectively scary comic for #halloween2025

shocked. shocked i tell u

ha! That's true - but I wasn't posting about you

BTW: I know that often times talking on via Zoom/Teams/Phone is a waaay more effective mode of communication than text/emails but I still don't have to love it.

A short poem about using the phone:
Please don't call me when I'm in another meeting
Please don't call me without pinging me first
Please don't call me when I don't have my headphones handy
Please don't call me when I do have my headphones handy
Please don't call me
Please

AI be like

yes but also manatees

What's in yer basement?

Shriekback: ‘big black nemesis, parthenogenesis’

As coding gets more plug and play, it becomes IMPERATIVE for us as educators to teach fundamentals about what the statistical tests are comparing and assumptions.

Students might not need to understand how to code things up, but they should understand what the snippets are doing and why

5 seconds of the current news seems to do the trick

I mean, to be fair to Indiana lawmuckers, all those extra digits ARE pretty confusing.

It turns out that the infinite monkeys that may be put out of work from our new (and I, for one welcome them) AI overlords are actually us scientists

I had a few tastes and smells that stayed with me about 6 months before they faded away.

GPU-accelerated homology search with MMseqs2 - Nature Methods Graphics processing unit-accelerated MMseqs2 offers tremendous speedups for homology retrieval from metagenomic databases, query-centered multiple sequence alignment generation for structure predictio...

MMseqs2-GPU sets new standards in single query search speed, allows near instant search of big databases, scales to multiple GPUs and is fast beyond VRAM. It enables ColabFold MSA generation in seconds and sub-second Foldseek search against AFDB50. 1/n
📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
💿 mmseqs.com

I’m sitting here enjoying the NATURAL FLAVOR when all of the sudden the NATURAL FLAVOR kicks in

Gosh how helpful

I may be willing to give them the Gary Busey one...

One out of 3 ain't bad Google News.
.
.
.
Ok. It really is bad.

Macro photo of spider carrying a fly

Knock, knock.
Who is it?
Spi-door dash

Another favorite: Highlights of 1000 by Kiwi Jr. Has a cinematic scope, though I'm not sure quite what it's talking about. And it's just poppy and clever all the way through.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAcU...

Line drawing of a two story institutional building with a sign in front, "Welcome to the BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT. It has been 3 days since we discovered something existentially horrifying about abugs that make you question your whole reality."

The new XKCD has to be a reference to the ant paper where ants just casually lay eggs of a different species, yes? Maybe? There are so many weird bugs its hard to know.

Heres' one of my recent favorites from Peter McPoland - Digital Silence. My son said it's big on Tiktok (or was)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOxH...

You can't give a monkey a hammer and call them a carpenter

[me: about myself, with respect to AI expertise]

Cartoon timeline titled 'Typical Timeline for a Scientific Paper by @redpenblackpen'. Start. Outline. Rough draft. v1. FINAL draft! (all clustered at the left). On top of the timeline: when you thought you'd have it submitted, Original submission deadlin, Original publication deadline. Then a space and 'Preprint? Sure, why not?' '*Really* FINAL DRAFT. (on top of timeline) Project Ends. (underneath timeline) draft_v5_final_reallyfinal_thistimeImeanit.docx. (on top) weeping. gnashing of teeth. (on bottom) Holy crap guys. Then 'what the hell is this?' - pointing to a break in the timeline. Then 'submitted'. (on top) a sign pointing off the end of the timeline into the future "Accepted for Publication. 6 months-10 years"

I won't say this is *every* paper, but I have trouble remembering any that weren't like this

Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:

I got coal in my stocking

Today was the day BlueSky finally became Twitter

I am delighted to announce that the UW Department of Biochemistry has opened searches for TWO tenure-track positions.

Descriptions and links in the following two posts.