Blue Eyed Grass

Outstanding. Who wins?

The SOS response set the conceptual framework for virtually all subsequent work in eucaryotes, damage signaling to the cell cycle machinery, an extensive transcriptional response, ssDNA as the proximal signal for damage, all of that. The logic is the same.

11/ ...When people are being shot, detained inhumanely, deported, and abused for having the same identities we are removing from grants, it is abundantly clear we are participating in hate.”

- anonymous NIH program officer

The bright side of a tick is it could have been chiggers.

"It smells like DNA. Can you smell it?" Good grief. Jurassic Park cosplay.

WWMID-love it. Lived in Houston back in 1990's and Molly Ivins columns always gave me a laugh. Only had a chance to get down to Big Bend once. Beautiful. Remote. Enjoyed the newsletter.

Ask yourself, "what would Molly Ivins do?" and the way will be revealed.

Very nice! I buy stuff like that, like little ducks, and have students pick one when they turn in their exam. but I like your surprise approach.

David Botstein | 1942 - 2026 | Online-Tribute.com David was a beloved husband, father, brother, scientist, teacher, mentor, musician, friend, who touched the lives of thousands. David’s wide-ranging scientific career spanned decades with a legacy o…

Oh no. Just saw that David Botstein passed. Storied geneticist. I remember him for his analysis of yeast tubulin genes and the microtubule cytoskeleton, but he contributed much to the foundation of genome sequencing and genomics.

www.online-tribute.com/DavidBotstei...

A cookie cutter shark's teeth with nasty sharp teeth.

Cookie cutter sharks showed up in my feed. Sounded cute so I looked it up. Turns out its more like "I'm going to chew a hole through your skull and implant nightmares in your brain" shark. Yikes.

Not sure why precisely, but brings to mind Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilisation"

Well, after listening yesterday to some full grown faculty go on and on in our departmental meeting about how systems biology is the most transformative thing since sliced cheese I think that slide definitely stays in for now. Made it an easy choice really.

Great photo of a coot! Really captures the bird. They have what we might consider to be....cruel...parenting traits. And with their abundance occupy a crucial place in the food chain. I wrote a poem about coots once...strange maybe.

allpoetry.com/poem/1771089...

When I was a kid my dad had us do $10 word contests. It was back in the day so a $20 word still lay many cost of living adjustments in the future.

deciduous
marcesent
sempervirent

The scene: committee questions following public seminar of a Ph.D dissertation. Just a formality, a done deal. Except the student has been up 48 hrs making their slide deck and reformatting. You start to ask a softball question, and they say "Imma gonna stop you right there, cause I gotta say...

Been trying to decide to keep or cull this slide from my genetics course. I put in some quotes from late 1990's as transition from HGP to GWAS. Funny ones but this one maybe a bit on the nose. I mean sometimes things take awhile. On the other sometimes you just guess wrong.

My daughter has taken a box and cut out a door to make a cat fort. Our tuxedo cat is inside staring out, like , don't come in. Big saucer gold eyes.

mood

Thanks. I've liked picking up on the bits and pieces of other academic cultures from all over. It's interesting. But hasn't seemed practical-like with pragmatic information as you say.

Definitely. "Birder" should be a big tent, from "look at that" to citizen scientist. Birds need all the human advocates they can get.

On siblings, yeah, I think mine would be like "I like birds as much as the next person, but at some point ....it just gets nuts".

Wow, in my little corner of the world I'd never heard of apyrene meiosis. It sounds really interesting and like you made a big push into the mechanism here. Congrats on the paper!

Hmmm. sending pics of birds like that, I dunno. Our feathered friends are such great portals to the world around us. An interesting question, actually. At what point does one become a birder.

On the mystery bird, not to be Debbie Downer but with the short (maybe) squared off tail and (maybe) yellowish wash why not Banaquit, with curve of bill not possible to see from below? They are all over in PR. If they get a chance, Laguna Cartegena on east side island is amazing birding.

Definitely-great read, skillful writing. Addresses how current fascination with technology (gene editing, omics) is not grappling with complexity. And need for improved genetics pedagogy.

"Pleiotropy and polygenicity are...reflections of the immense complexity...between genotype and phenotype."

Ernest Boyer, arguing 30 years ago for re-weighting research, teaching, service in Univ. M&P.

"a scholarship of engagement...creating a...climate where...academic and civic cultures communicate... continuously and creatively.

Interesting what did/did not change.

www.jstor.org/stable/38244...

Curious-to what extent do you think the former Twitter culture has been replicated, improved, or is perhaps emergent on Bluesky? Especially the pragmatic part.

All the dark and light in adoption stories. For me, gotta say the whole process, was, and, in a different way, 13 years on, continues to be, incredibly eye opening and transformative. Parenting always is I suppose, but there is a special side to it in adoption.

Yep. Think of the students that could be supported. Think of the knowledge and clinical advances. We could work on equitability in bio sci funding. We could address structural issues in NIH/NSF without cutting into a starving patient. We could have nice things. And that has been true for awhile.

UCSD, facing federal cuts, will no longer guarantee funding for incoming grad students The school warns admitted first-year students that their support packages are contingent on state and federal funding.

It’s PhD admission season in the US and elsewhere. Is anyone collecting and sharing info about what admissions letters are saying this year, especially in the neuro/psych/bio space? Last year there were some (unfortunate) changes at some Unis, eg
www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/03/08/u....

So IMO a part of the larger problem has been declining state/Univ. support for TA positions . This makes it really hard to make promises. A wise chair one told me every TA $ is a three way win: supports undergrad teaching mission, supports grad training mission, supports research mission.

#2 used to be common, especially in programs/disciplines with rotations. With funding issues (which have been getting worse over many years) #1 has become more common. At non-rich places grad directors have been able to compensate by using TA positions (and small pots of money) to make it work.