Isabel, haunting the orthoBOOOnyavirus stacks

Roadrunner and Wiley E Coyote. Coyote is floating in the air holding an "That's all folks" sign. For this, is the fate of the AI bubble.

NEJM and public health group are launching rival to CDC’s MMWR publication Two institutions are coming together to create an alternative to the CDC’s vaunted Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

New England Journal of Medicine & Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP) to begin publishing “public health alerts”

“...will basically serve to be a way to convey the info. that once was shared in the MMWR,” to be published in new section of NEJM Evidence as needed w/ free access🛟

Integrated environmental drivers and evolutionary history reveal conserved patterns of avian exposure to West Nile and Saint Louis encephalitis viruses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.22.683905v1

So who’s the hater and who’s the waiter?

RIP Dave Ball of the duo Soft Cell, will spin a track in tribute before my show ends at 6pm ET (www.bbc.com/news/article...)

Near-Hurricane Melissa Will Drop Mind-Boggling Rain on Jamaica Melissa is currently a slow-moving tropical storm that is expected to rapidly intensify to a major hurricane—a brutal combination will drench Jamaica and other Caribbean islands

“Getting hit by a hurricane is never good. But getting hit by a hurricane that’s not moving is so much worse.”
www.scientificamerican.com/article/hurr...

“The ballroom project is being funded by private donors. Comcast Corp., the parent company of NBCUniversal, was included on a list of top donors to the project. It is currently unclear how much Comcast and other donors have contributed.”

Quite the kicker:

SNAP benefits expire in one week.

“We Won’t Survive if You Don’t Support Us” ICE presence in Chicago has hurt the local economies in immigrant communities — which could in turn put a financial strain on the city at large.

This brilliant little article gets at what I’ve seen but haven’t yet read: Chicago locals, regardless of status, are apprehensive about venturing out to restaurants and food stalls targeted by ICE. The result is a whole sector in economic and social crisis.
www.chicagomag.com/news/we-wont...

Testing the "least-diverged ortholog” conjecture on >1M structs + expression across 16 animals & 20 plants, the LDO tends to retain ancestral function while the other copy specialises. Work led by @irenejulca.bsky.social. Paper: doi.org/10.1101/gr.2... Free preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

god, absolutely agreed. and figuring out where/how identical information/file subtypes are stored on canvas from class to class (always different somehow!!) adds so much time to navigation

mRNA initiation and termination are spatially coordinated Transcriptional initiation and termination decisions drive messenger RNA (mRNA) isoform diversity but the relationship between them remains poorly understood. By systematically profiling joint usage o...

Thrilled to share our work on transcription initiation and termination being spatially coordinated out today in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is a drum I've been banging for a while -- if it were true that higher taxes made rich people flee for low tax areas, there would be no rich people living in CA or NYC! It's a claim that's used a lot by anti-government types and it's long been visibly and demonstrably false.

I actually always appreciate the research that elegantly proves the obvious

absolutely shameful that the university has embraced the administration’s demand that it discriminate against its students. this is the board of visitors telling UVA students that if they aren’t white and cisgendered then they don’t belong.

This was such a neat study it got posted twice on our 'cool papers' channel in lab slack 😅

#ProtistsonSky

Hi just so I'm clear.

I wrote "donate to food banks" and do "food runs for mutual aid" because they are different things!

Food banks want your money! they can do more with your money than with stuff.

Mutual aid groups often want stuff! Mine has a food fridge!

'Irreparably Damaged': Former Senior Official Details the Darkest Days of the CDC Under RFK Jr. Demetre Daskalakis, the former director of CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, argues the public health agency has been weaponized into a political tool.

gizmodo.com/irreparably-...

My friend told me that her 14 year old son started doing laundry on Sundays for some of his elderly neighbors. He doesn't charge for the labor. And now he is the most popular person in the building and has non stop pies, cookies, and cake. The 14 year old should be our model of modern masculinity.

gift link to the original story:

A fun byproduct of unitary executive theory—if the president controls everyone under him, he can demand they transfer hundreds of millions in tax dollars into his bank account

“Once my colleague pulled out his camera, the agent put away the gun," Huynh told the Sun-Times Tuesday night. "[But] if they can do this in broad daylight to an elected official, and point a gun at someone, imagine what’s happening behind closed doors.”

We're going to do <less> w/ less at R1 universities, unless federal funding is restored, & the sooner R1 chancellors/presidents get in front of microphones & loudly, collectively start telling people that's the case, the better. The lack of doing this & not shaping the political debate is maddening.

This is even worse for the Harvards of the world, but it's true of EVERY R1 research university:

Parents: Be sure check your children's Halloween candy carefully! Last year we found a restriction enzyme from New England Biolabs with a Dec 2003 expiration date inside a Snickers bar

“This is entirely cronyism,” said biochemist Jeremy Berg, former director of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and previous editor-in-chief of Science magazine. Woychik had just been reappointed to another five-year term, Berg said, so Walsh’s hire didn’t have anything to do with the sitting director’s performance. “The fact that he was appointed without any sort of search is worrisome,” he said, adding that “his main credentials seem to be his connections with JD Vance.”

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Close Friend of JD Vance Skirts Normal Channels to Take Over NIH Environmental Health Institute - Inside Climate News Despite a federal hiring freeze, the Trump administration just appointed a scientist who calls Vance one of his “closest friends” to head the nation’s key environmental health research arm.

New story about the NIEHS Director appointment from Inside Climate News

insideclimatenews.org/news/2110202...

1/2

Mosquitoes arrive in Iceland - RÚV.is Three mosquitoes were found in Kjós in recent days. This has been confirmed by the Icelandic Institute of Natural History. It is the first time that mosquitoes have been discovered on Icelandic soil.

🦟 #Mosquitoes arrive in #Iceland 🇮🇸
"Three Culiseta annulata mosquitoes were found in Kjós in recent days. This has been confirmed by the Icelandic Institute of Natural History. It is the first time that mosquitoes have been discovered on Icelandic soil."

www.ruv.is/english/2025...

GitHub - mohsenzakeri/Movi: Fast, Cache-Efficient, and Scalable Queries on Pangenomes Fast, Cache-Efficient, and Scalable Queries on Pangenomes - mohsenzakeri/Movi

1/6 Movi 2 is here: faster and more space-efficient for pangenome queries. Its fastest mode uses half the memory of Movi 1 while running ~30% faster. github.com/mohsenzakeri...

Quantitative Genetics in Natural Populations Phenotypes evolve under natural selection if, and only if, they are genetically variable. While evolutionary ecologists have long studied natural sele…

Myself and Alastair Wilson wrote an updated version of our 2016 primer to quantitative genetics in the wild: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... Happy to share a copy if interested. It is also on research gate