Jesse McNichol

A graphic comparing rent trends shows average rent in Nova Scotia up 1.8% and average rent across Canada down 2.3%. Text at the top reads “Breaking,” with arrows indicating the increase and decrease.

🚨BREAKING🚨
Rents are falling across Canada — but not in Nova Scotia. While the Houston government refuses to create real rent control and build homes people can actually afford, renters are paying the price.

Hybridization breaks species barriers in long-term coevolution of a cyanobacterial population Analysis of hundreds of single-cell genomes from Yellowstone National Park shows bacterial species are less cohesive than previously thought.

Happy that our work on the evolution of Yellowstone cyanobacteria is now published in @elife.bsky.social: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...! Did a lot of work in revision—many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for great suggestions! Also see the eLife digest for a summary: elifesciences.org/digests/9084...

École Polytechnique Tragedy (Montreal Massacre) On 6 December 1989, a man entered a mechanical engineering classroom at Montreal’s École Polytechnique armed with a semi-automatic weapon. After separating t...

Today is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women. On this day, we honour those killed and injured during the École Polytechnique tragedy, and all women who experience violence. It is also a day to commit to ending gender-based violence.

Gender-based violence is an everyday reality, and it starts with minimizing misogyny As we highlight 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence and the upcoming anniversary of the Montreal massacre, can we take a moment to reflect on all the different forms this violence takes?

“Every year, when I see 14 beams of light projected into the sky above Mount Royal, I have to catch my breath.

“36 years ago, 14 young women were murdered in one of the most violent examples of misogynistic terrorism Canada has ever known.”

An editorial by @mtltoula.bsky.social.

#December6

This nice summary by @michiwagner4.bsky.social makes it easy to fit my post in a few characters.
Amplicon sequencing is still an affordable and quick way to get good insights into who lives in your samples. Our new primers make sure your vision is 20/20.
Try em, and contact me if you have questions!

Let me excerpt the concluding paragraph:

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

Signs of latest massacres in Darfur are visible in satellite imagery Analysis concludes paramilitary soldiers are conducting mass killings in house-to-house operations

Horrific details emerging from El Fasher, Sudan: pools of blood so large they’re visible by satellite, people being killed systematically. Last week, MSF teams assessed 165 children under 5 fleeing the area and found 75% were acutely malnourished. An accelerating genocide before our eyes.

#MakeItFair #FairnessForCAS

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

― George Orwell, 1984

Expansion of aerobic methanotrophy to the phylum of Actinomycetota and its environmental implications | Applied and Environmental Microbiology The climate crisis is one of the most imminent threats to humanity and all life on our planet. Methane is not only the second most potent greenhouse gas (GHG) and is responsible for approximately 31% of GHG-induced global warming since the start of the industrial revolution (1) but is also the most rapid increasing GHG in the atmosphere (2). The latter is likely caused by increased microbiological production of methane from, e.g., wetlands (2). This fact stresses the importance of methanotrophic microbes that can degrade methane with and without oxygen (3, 4) and thereby fulfill a crucial role in our global climate.

Wow, our AEM paper on a new methane-oxidizing bacterium just got a Commentary! 🎉
Congrats Kambara-san—so happy to see the work getting recognized!
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

I’m excited to share our effort to obtain one of the first estimates of the net rate, in physical time, of lateral gene transfer (LGT) – nature’s own genetic engineering - across a complex, global microbiome:
doi.org/10.1093/isme...

'I just want to learn': Students in limbo as many Dalhousie classes cancelled amid strike | CBC News Classes at Dalhousie University are supposed to start on Tuesday, but most have been cancelled due to a strike.

Not just classes are cancelled. DFA members have been locked out by the admin since August 20th: we can't sign students in from waitlists, can't advise them, can't share syllabi, can't help them with scholarship applications, etc. etc.

#KeepDalStrong

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change. Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

Wow. Check this out.
Politicians actually trying to solve problems can achieve a lot!
www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solu...

Hip-Hop as a Contemplative Practice Jessica Angima talks with Buddhist teacher and rapper Born I about Lyrical Dharma, the limits of language, and how we all contain the seeds of our ancestors.

“Suffering is not a death sentence; it can be confronted, it can be overcome. And we can be creative in how we address the human condition.” —Ofosu Jones-Quartey

‘Challenges and uncertainty:’ Dalhousie University faculty lockout leaves students worried The lockout of Dalhousie University faculty is inching closer to the start of the school year, and it's fuelling concerns among students.

I am increasingly frustrated, even angry, about the hypocrisy—tempted to say disinformation—from @dalhousie.bsky.social’s administration. How can you say “the university’s priority is working with the DFA to reach a resolution” when they have not even tried to return to the table? #KeepDalStrong

Chris Algar, Assoc Prof, Oceanography @dalhousieu.bsky.social Lessons in solidarity from the picket lines. This isn’t just a fight to #KeepDalStrong; it’s a fight against employer greed. @ansut.bsky.social @caut.bsky.social

Sequestration by the biological carbon pump: Do we really know what we are talking about? aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #jcampubs 🌊

Detergent-based separation of microbes from marine particles Marine particles, typically composed of organic detritus and cellular debris, harbor microbial communities that are distinct from the planktonic, or free-living, communities in the pelagic ocean. Howe...

Our latest, and the second paper led by Jordan Coelho this year. Want to remove bacteria from POM for single-cell microbiology/culturing/'omics applications? We've got some data:

Detergent-based separation of microbes from marine particles www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs 🌊

Logo for the Sandpiper website

Out in @natbiotech.nature.com: Metagenome taxonomy profilers usually ignore unknown species. SingleM is an accurate profiler which doesn't, even detecting phyla with no MAGs. Profiles of 700,000 metagenomes at sandpiper.qut.edu.au. A 🧵

GRUMP Presentation 2025 CBIOMES 2025, GRUMP

For a handy summary of what GRUMP is, feel free to view and share the following presentation from the CBIOMES 2025 annual meeting: slides.com/jcmcnch/cbio...

GRUMP Presentation 2025 CBIOMES 2025, GRUMP

For a handy summary of what GRUMP is, feel free to view and share the following presentation from the CBIOMES 2025 annual meeting: slides.com/jcmcnch/cbio...

Characterizing organisms from three domains of life with universal primers from throughout the global ocean - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Characterizing organisms from three domains of life with universal primers from throughout the global ocean

You might try BLASTing against GRUMP ASVs: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We don't have a web tool but pros of GRUMP are good coverage of the ocean, unfractionated samples (>0.2 μm), and you can access the data through CMAP here: simonscmap.com/catalog/data...

Characterizing organisms from three domains of life with universal primers from throughout the global ocean - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Characterizing organisms from three domains of life with universal primers from throughout the global ocean

Please Re-Post. Our global GRUMP microbial ocean database is out in Scientific Data! Unfractionated, single universal PCR, with Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryotes all on the same scale with the same denominator. Pole to pole, depths to 6000m. Lots of metadata. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It was great to have you guys on board! Cheers from Nova Scotia!

Thanks Augustus! Will be great to see your study and glad you find the 3-domain primers useful to your research 😀

Thanks for carrying the baton across the finish line gentlemen. Keep an eye out in the next few years for papers from Yubin and Lexi Jones-Kellett, a new-and-improved bioinformatic pipeline (snakemake!), as well as GRUMP 2.0 (now with internal standards!).

This was a huge team effort - many thanks to our collaborators, especially "early adopters" including Craig/Ellie (UCSB), Paul/‪@stevenbiller.bsky.social‬ (MIT/Wellesley), Wade/Joe (USF) as well as my "partners in crime" Nathan Williams and Yubin Raut!

The GRUMP project began in 2018 when I started as a postdoc in @jedfuhrman.bsky.social's lab and was funded by the @simonsfoundation.org as part of the CBIOMES collaboration.

Characterizing organisms from three domains of life with universal primers from throughout the global ocean - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Characterizing organisms from three domains of life with universal primers from throughout the global ocean

So excited to announce the GRUMP paper is published! This global dataset provides relative abundances for plankton spanning Archaea to Zooplankton from unfractionated (>0.2µm) water samples using 3-domain universal primers that amplify 16S and 18S in one PCR reaction.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...