Mark Wanner

PO just confirmed that our 5th percentile R01 is not getting funded. Past NCI Payline at 4 percent. Cant believe it.

The Rhythms of the Sea and a Snail Researchers led by Elizabeth Fairchild are studying channeled whelk movement and behavior to support the growing whelk fishery along the New England coast.

After covering biomedical research and genetics/genomics for nearly 2 decades, I'm branching out into general life sciences and ag for UNH. First off, carnivorous sea snails, aka whelks, an increasingly important fishery off the NE coast: www.unh.edu/unhtoday/202...

Lead author Auke-Florian Hiemstra holds the oldest known caddisfly casing containing microplastic, dating to 1971. Photo: Liselotte Rambonnet.

A caddisfly casing with pieces of blue microplastic, dating 1986. Photo: Auke-Florian Hiemstra

NEW PAPER, JUST OUT! 👀

Insects from the '70s and '80s were already collecting microplastic, decades before the term microplastic even existed. 🤯

A thread on the surprising history of this pollutant and the incredible insect larvae that helped us uncover it. 🐛

Let's dive in! 🧵👇 1/x

NHGRI’s comm team was exceptionally good and if anyone is looking for a talented science communicator, you should snap up Jenny as soon as possible.

Appalling and infuriating. As a Maine resident, I cannot think of a reason not to take every cent of federal tax and apply it to Maine state taxes instead.

USDA halts funding for University of Maine programs The temporary spending pause comes two weeks after President Donald Trump threatened to cut all of Maine's federal funding following an altercation with Gov. Janet Mills over allowing transgender athl...

The USDA has halted funding for UMaine programs: www.pressherald.com/2025/03/11/u...

I want to keep fighting the good fight, but an institutional shift toward the hype side of things has put me on the sidelines. Will it be more successful than my approach? 🤷‍♂️ All I know is that it's vital to keep working together on the problem to help sustain our wonderful scientific communities.

A backwoods politician who mangled proverbs said "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't look him in the eye." I feel like in #SciComm we're desperately trying to drag more people to the water, but we're not successful at looking them in the eye to explain why. I don't have a solution for it.

What stories should we tell, via what media? How can we build a more effective, accurate scientist->comms->influential media->broader audience pipeline? Should we target those who might care or blast to everyone? Is it even possible within an influencer, TikTok, Insta, Meta culture?

Now we're ~waves around~ here. There's been a failure, but where? Current research is 🤯 but so few people know. In a society, whose responsibility is it to engage, educate and excite people about a subject they find opaque? It looks like whoever it is, we/they haven't done a good enough job.

Others focus on feel-good stories and mass media, which can lead to overselling. It's another way of doing it, but, as others have pointed out, it can backfire, e.g., HGP->"blueprint of life"->clinical nirvana. The HGP's huge positive effects can be overshadowed by the hype it didn't live up to.

I was in institutional comms. I covered basic biomedical science, important to document but only v rarely mass media fodder IMO. My main audience was those who understood the importance and implications of the small gains for medical progress, without hype or much "up close and personal" stuff.

A good thread about the attacks on science from someone who's been through the "lab leak" wringer. And it gets me thinking, not about scientists but about #Scicomm, my profession until v recently. I was passionate about making research more accessible to more people, but was it futile? 🧵

I know the work that goes into papers like this is painstaking and far from glamorous. But integrating global 'omics data--gnomad also comes to mind--provides fascinating insights and vital foundations for further inquiry, here for the gut #microbiome.

Integration of 168,000 samples reveals global patterns of the human gut microbiome The Human Microbiome Compendium is a unified database of publicly available human gut microbiome 16S samples, built with the integrated data from hundreds of independent projects. The compendium is us...

We’re thrilled that our first paper on the Human Microbiome Compendium, an integrated dataset of over 168,000 uniformly processed human gut microbiome samples, is officially out today in Cell! @richabdill.com @blekhman.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Analysis of lifespan across Diversity Outbred mouse studies identifies multiple longevity-associated loci Lifespan is an integrative phenotype whose genetic architecture is likely to highlight multiple processes with high impact on health and aging. Here, we conduct a genetic meta-analysis of longevity in...

In part, #aging research shows us how nature works to eliminate organisms, including us, after reproductive age. Immune response degradation is but one part of a complex system. Multiple studies with DO mice now provide some #genetic clues. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Getting used to #Bluesky after seeing Xwitter degrade from invaluable biomed research news resource to ... well, you know. V grateful to list generators -- particularly for #genetics and #genomics -- for giving us newbies a huge head start.