Kyle MacLea 🦠

Do you love alpine plants, ancient DNA, and/or population genetics? My lab will be hiring a postdoc soon to be based at the University of Maine! We’re looking for someone who uses genetic tools and thinks like a community ecologist. Happy to chat at #ESA2025 if you’re interested.

Latest paper elifesciences.org/articles/107... closes an important cycle in our efforts to study regeneration: week-long recordings allow us to observe the behaviour of cells during the entire course of regeneration in a crustacean leg – bright objects in movie are fluorescent nuclei of cells. 1/6

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This country is a joke. A very, very terrible joke.

History of the English Language was fascinating. Intro to Linguistics too!

The Cells That Breathe Two Ways | Quanta Magazine In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

Bacteria from a Yellowstone hot spring do something no other organism has been found to do: breathe oxygen and sulfur at the same time. 🧪 It's both aerobic and anaerobic, a beautiful freaky creature from a beautiful freaky place

🦠🧍‍♀️From bacterial to human immunity.

We report in @science.org the discovery of a human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins that participates in the TLR pathway of animal innate immunity.
Co-led wt @enzopoirier.bsky.social by D. Bonhomme and @hugovaysset.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

it's never been about antisemitism

Once as postdoc/lab manager I asked the PI for help with setting the large floor centrifuge that I hadn’t used before. He set the rotor wrong and sheared off the pins, and centrifuge was out of commission for months. VERY glad it wasn’t me! 😅

Very cool! One of my last pups was very picky as he got older and this would have been helpful I think!

Wow didn’t know this kind of stuff existed for dogs!

E.P.A. Says It Will Eliminate Its Scientific Research Arm

Terrible Friday news dump.The wealth of expertise. The decades of scientific progress. The emerging and urgent challenges we were focused on tackling. It is all so short-sided and cruel. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

The spatiotemporal distribution of human pathogens in ancient Eurasia - Nature Screening shotgun-sequencing data from ancient humans covering 37,000 years of Eurasian history uncovers the widespread presence of ancient bacterial, viral and parasite DNA and zoonotic pathogens coi...

M⃣I⃣S⃣S⃣I⃣N⃣G⃣ L⃣I⃣N⃣K⃣S⃣

𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 paper by Sikora et al: metagenomic data from 1,313 ancient human remains over 37,000 years

Identified >3,000 instances of known human pathogens

Zoonotic pathogens begin to appear ~6,500 years ago coinciding with the rise of livestock domestication—major epidemiological shift

Thanks!

WTF? How did the faculty not get rather worked up about this change?

Would like to do it the RIGHT way! Nice job!

Yeah the only half I did (I didn’t really train for) and my feet felt like hamburger after! 😆

Nice!!

apart from its inherent qualities as a comic strip, I really appreciate that Watterson resisted the urge to franchise and merchandise C&H. There's no animated movie, no tv show, no line of toys, no ipad game.

it exists in its entirety as a comic strip written and drawn entirely by one man.

‘This is bull——”: National Science Foundation employees protest HUD's takeover Dozens of National Science Foundation employees crowded the agency’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, Wednesday to protest the news that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, w...

Another day testing the limits of resilience.

The Alexandria NSF building was designed for the NSF merit review process (gold standard), complete with a floor devoted to panels.

Now we aren’t allowed to have in person panels.

The loss of US science leadership will haunt this country for decades.

Kennedy provides a bunch of references for his claim that thimerosal in vaccines (barely used anymore) is harmful.

If a high-school student submitted this as their reference list, they would fail.

I will do what Kennedy didn’t - actually look at them. 🧵

Alright fellas. Come one come all, #amateurbiology poster presentation at #asmicrobe on our first set of methylation screening results on Halococcus. Come ask about an exciting new finding I couldn't put on the poster! #archaeasky EEB 1147 🧪🧫🦠

Congrats! 😄

Yeah that was … interesting! 😳 #ASMmicrobe2025

3D printed tardigrade with Doc Martin’s hat

What the microbe! Button

Tardidoc and What the Microbe! with @markowenmartin.bsky.social and @binomicalabs.org #ASMmicrobe2025

The 🐐!

Drosophila Genetic Database The Drosophila Genetic Database, FlyBase, is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden termination of the FlyBase NIH grant, which includes salaries for 5 literature curators based at the University ...

My lab studies bacterial infections. We spend a lot of time looking at (or for) species-specific genetic and genomic databases for hosts and microbes. FlyBase is the best of all—there is literally no comparison. Its existence is under threat. Please donate.
www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

This is the most deranged Dear Leader shit. Also likely a violation of the Hatch Act and political discrimination proscriptions.

"Kennedy said in the video announcement that there was no clinical data to support additional shots for healthy children"

LIES. Examining more than 386,219 kids and teens, scientists have shown that #COVID vaccine reduces the chances of developing #LongCovid by 20%
www.thelancet.com/journals/ecl...

“I’ve studied McCarthyism’s impact on higher education for 50 years. What’s happening now is worse.” -Ellen Schrecker, historian

Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege, but the current attacks from the federal government raise a new level of alarm. nyer.cm/u405qvQ