Sumaiya Nazeen

YouTube video by iVideoXD Disney's Recess - Gus's Last Stand

thought of this episode from Recess
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mLo...

No, AlphaFold has not completely solved protein folding Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

AlphaFold is great, but contrary to public opinion it has not completely solved the protein folding problem. Much work remains to be done.
clauswilke.substack.com/p/no-alphafo...

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States and there always has been.” — Isaac Asimov.

No you cannot determine which drugs are safe and effective with machine learning. You cannot. It will not work. People will die.

Pleased to share our ICML Spotlight with @eberleoliver.bsky.social, Thomas McGee, Hamza Giaffar, @taylorwwebb.bsky.social.

Position: We Need An Algorithmic Understanding of Generative AI

What algorithms do LLMs actually learn and use to solve problems?🧵1/n
openreview.net/forum?id=eax...

1/27 We have a new paper out! Turns out that snowflake yeast have been hiding a secret from us - they've evolved a (very!) crude circulatory system. Not with blood vessels or a heart, but through spontaneous fluid flows powered by their metabolism. 🧪🔬

www.science.org/doi/full/10....

The NIH has not issued a single new call for proposals since the end of January.

Eid mubarak to all who are celebrating!

More from @holdenthorp.bsky.social in @science.org "A world where the United States is no longer leading the scientific enterprise will still benefit from science [...] The global enterprise will adapt to the lack of American leadership, but the steep loss for the country itself is unambiguous."

Rachel Thomas, PhD - Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored an AI researcher going back to school for immunology

A case study on the challenges of evaluating AI predictions in biology and the implications for published results.

1/2
rachel.fast.ai/posts/2025-0...

Opinion | Is This the Beginning of the End of America’s National Parks?

“The group estimated that reducing the operating budget by $900 million, as the Trump administration wants to do, would require closing 350 of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites and other locations overseen by the Park Service… we would be witnessing the dismantling of a century-old system”

HEY!

The countdown is on—abstract submissions for #ASHG25 close in 11 days!

🔬 Share your research.
🤝 Build your network.
✨ Inspire your field.

🗓️ Submit now: www.ashg.org/meetings/202...
#ASHG #HumanGenetics

An emerging narrative on the right is that international students take seats away from deserving domestic students - a zero sum thinking about what universities do and their function

1/

Genome-wide association studies in a large Korean cohort identify quantitative trait loci for 36 traits and illuminate their genetic architectures - Nature Communications Here the authors identify hundreds of genetic loci linked to 36 traits in East Asians, revealing population-specific associations and emphasizing the importance of diverse ancestry groups in genome-wi...

Now published! Congrats Yon Ho on this huge lift conducting dozens of GWAS in Korea and performing meta-analyses with other Asian biobanks reaching a sample size comparable to UK Biobank. The fine-mapping, novel loci, and ancestry-enriched discoveries are very cool. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My father worked in a tire factory in Appalachia. Friends and family in the military. Used to vote Republican. Got into college on a diversity program for the underprivileged. Ended up a Harvard professor. And now my funding is terminated because we're trying to stick it to the elites.

NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.

Genuinely... quite excited about this. I think I might have to install it just for old skool x new school kicks.

(plus - great for controlled cloud environments!)

AI is not changing or improving work for the vast majority of early adopters - most of whom are adopting out of fear of being left behind.

The fear is being directly driven by the incessant hype produced by the same corporations benefitting from the hype cycle.

Corporate Centipede.

Corporate administrators who have only experienced jobs whose main benefit was pay cannot fathom that the very best find intrinsic value in excellence and are best left to do it without undue interference or burden

Judge Blocks Trump Effort to Bar International Students at Harvard

Breaking News: A judge blocked a Trump administration move to bar Harvard University from admitting international students, hours after the school filed suit.

Every company hiring Harvard graduates on OPTs had better fucking file an amicus brief

YouTube video by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) A message from MIT President Sally Kornbluth

youtu.be/KBmdxv29tog?...

It looks like everything in our existence is now deemed a "privilege" that can be taken back at a moment's notice, if we are not submissive enough. I am so tired of the use of the word "privilege" by those who have only known privilege their entire lives.

Title: SOME GRAMMATICAL VOICES FOR USE IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING ACTIVE VOICE e.g. Our team collected samples and then we tested them. CLICKBAIT VOICE e.g. We collected some samples... You won't believe what happened next! PASSIVE VOICE e.g. Samples were collected and tested. HAIKU VOICE e.g. Quiet science lab. Workers arrive with samples. The testing begins. PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE VOICE e.g. We did all the collecting and testing. No need to thank us. Just doing our job. CONSPIRACY VOICE e.g. Mysterious "Samples" were harvested and covertly "tested" by so-called scientists.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

Really impressive and moving interview by @baym.lol about the Harvard cuts.

HHMI made the decision to discontinue the Hanna Gray Fellows program (indefinitely, presumably).

There is, of course, something to be said about the volatile nature of academia (re: funding) in the US, but the flipside is that this is actively pushing away international scholars. 1/

Our "Atlas of Variant Effects 2030 Roadmap" is live: zenodo.org/records/1542...

1/n

Commission invests €1.25 billion in researchers and invites them to ‘Choose Europe for Science\' Europe is stepping up its ambition to cement the position of a global leader in research. New calls worth over €1.25 billion in 2025 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) open doors for new ...

New EU research funding "Choose Europe for Science"
ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

Evolved gene editor inserts entire genes in human cells The new system is the first to use a DNA-mobilizing enzyme called a CRISPR-associated transposase to make targeted gene-sized edits at therapeutically useful levels in human cells.

Using laboratory-evolved versions of enzymes called CASTs, researchers have achieved a long-standing goal of genome editing: inserting entire healthy genes into human cells efficiently enough for potential therapeutic applications. @isaacwitte.bsky.social @eitzingersimon.bsky.social

All NIH and NSF grants for my entire team--and for all of Harvard, I guess?--have been terminated.

As provocative as that sounds, the practical effect is probably not much. Everything was already frozen. 🤷‍♂️

On the upside, it makes tracking terminated grants easier. No more guesswork at Harvard!