🧬✨ Meet Dr. Juan Manuel Vazquez, one of our newest faculty members in Penn State Biology!
His lab explores one of life’s biggest mysteries: why do some animals live so much longer than others?
👇🧵

This is why I can’t muster empathy for Charlie Kirk.

He worked hard at ensuring our children face as much gun violence as possible.

My empathy is reserved for these kids and that community.

This week was the first official week of the Vazquez Lab, with everyone officially starting! Not only did we have a great first lab meeting today, but we also had great (and comically excessive) ice cream from the Penn State Creamery!

Hope is only lost when we stop fighting back.

Listed are some of the many NIH research training programs that were terminated! Together, these programs supported thousands of trainees, whose careers are now in limbo. Such a great loss for discovery and innovation. We must protect our next generation of scientists!
#HandsOffNIH #ProtectScience

On the one hand, I should save up startup - on the other though, getting real tired of running around with 17lbs of laptop...

The propagation of misinformation on social media is among the greatest threats to public health right now.

Many people want to ignore this, but there are millions of Americans who have been groomed to believe that science is just some kind of scam.

Chris Murphy goes all in on funding bill boycott as Dems seek bipartisanship The politically ambitious Connecticut Democrat is walking away from bipartisan government funding negotiations as his party clamors for a seat at the table.

It’s deeply pathetic that Senate Democrats are continuing to advance bipartisan funding bills while Trump unconstitutionally seizes the right to impound funds, and implements a police state.

Murphy is absolutely right on this one.

Had a ton of fun at #2025IBRC! Got to see flying foxes for the first time (and folks dressed as flying foxes!), lots of cool wildlife, and shared some cool science! Also got to advertise my new lab - which I'm now off to start!

Xiphophorus fish species displaying a false gravid spot

Excited to talk about balancing selection, hybridization, and independent evolution at the #SMBE2025 hybridization & introgression symposium! Symposium 14: Day 3, Room 2 @ 11:30am Beijing Time

"When is cancer political?" Medical researchers, patients decry Trump admin's layoffs, budget cuts Scientists conducting medical research are facing an existential crisis: Layoffs and budget cuts pushed by President Trump that, they say, jeopardize finding a cure for cancer.

A incredibly powerful article from @cbsnews.com and Ted Koppel. 🧵

“Natalie Phelps has Stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. She and her husband, Jeff, live in Washington State.”

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore millions of dollars in canceled grants to University of California researchers, calling the terminations flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Good morning, this is a very helpful tool for keeping track of the critters and sharing data. 🧪

Colossal Bio threatens legal action against a critic of their scientific claims. 😬

It's very interesting that the letter doesn't actually *deny* that Colossal, its CEO, and their agents are leading a smear campaign against Lynch, instead focusing on the fact that he can't *prove* that they did. 🤨

@kenwhite.bsky.social The company that falsely claimed to de-extinct the dire wolf is now threatening legal action against a scientific critic for "defamation". Would New York's anti-SLAPP statute protect against this?

You just gotta laugh when they can't come up with better arguments than a 5 year old... pretty sad too that for all of their money, they couldn't spare $20 to have AI do a better job than the paralegal did here

I had been quiet about the illegal termination of my K99, but I'm very happy to see it included among the list of grants ordered to be reinstated - let's just hope that it's done sooner rather than later so I can submit the RPPR, the renewal, and the R00...

Wow, I’ve just found a Bluesky channel that lets you see only posts with links to scientific papers and get a feed that focuses on the science discussions around them. This is transformative!

Every flashbang could instead be a meal for a poor kid. Every hotel room for a National Guardsman deployed to fire at our neighbors could house a homeless vet. Every "less-than-lethal" bullet pulled from a journalist's eye could be already needed healthcare for anyone else. All of this is a choice.

Read the letter for yourself.
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Make open access to tools and data part of your annual giving by making a tax deductible donation to @veupathdb.org. 💙This resource simplifies and supercharges global infectious disease research.

Need more reasons to support VEuPathDB? Here's a short list: veupathdb.org/veupathdb/ap...

I always have superglue in my toolbox for woodworking - usually it's for gluing wood, but sealing chisel-induced gashes is a 10/10 secondary role!

Its always important to find the time to celebrate the little things - or big things, like graduations and new labs!

Cardiac Adaptations in the Cave Nectar Bat Eonycteris spelaea: Insights into Metabolic Resilience and Stress Response https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.15.653669v1

I work in grants. From my POV, the solution is not to compete for crumbs, but to put that effort into banding together across institutions to stand up for research. We need to yell at politicians and make sure Americans know what they’ll lose if university research ends.

PIs who think their research isn’t political: yes it is, it always is

A graphic for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), showing a historical portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie overlaid with an image of four young researchers walking down a hallway. The European Commission logo is in the top left. Text reads: "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – €404.3 million to support postdoctoral researchers”

Choose Science. Choose Europe.

A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open.

With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond.

Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

Comparative single-cell analysis of transcriptional bursting reveals the role of genome organization in de novo transcript origination | PNAS Spermatogenesis is a key developmental process underlying the origination of newly evolved genes. However, rapid cell type–specific transcriptomic ...

I’m very glad to share our recent publication
@pnas.org
, led by UnJin Lee from our lab at
@rockefelleruniv.bsky.social
: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/.... In this work, he 1) developed a method to efficiently compare single-cell RNA-seq data from rapidly evolving tissues across multiple species, and

University of Georgia Bulldog outside the Georgia Center at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA.

I'm thrilled to share that I'll be joining the Department of Genetics at UGA as an Assistant Professor in January! @universityofga.bsky.social Genetics@UGA #newPI