Rachel Hutto

Dr Kareem Carr man: i wish to publish @kareem_carr Jan 21 reviewer 2: your paper is no good man: i'll do anything to improve reviewer 2: it's simple. you must read the work of the great scientist Pagliarini man: *bursts into tears* but i am Pagliarini Andre Pagliarini @apagliar Jan 21 a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini Jan 21, 2026 • 3:47 PM UTC

I just thought everyone should see this

Cancer might evade immune defences by stealing mitochondria Hijacking the energy-producing organelles from immune cells seems to help tumours in mice to infiltrate lymph nodes.

New study suggests that metastatic cancer cells may evade the immune system by stealing mitochondria from immune cells and setting up a ‘shield’ that protects them from being killed by immune cells. Wiley little bastards.

#Science 🧪

Professor Fiesler's Brief Guide to Scholarly Citation Professor Fiesler’s Brief Guide to Scholarly Citation In any academic writing, it is important that you are properly citing your sources. This isn’t about formatting or making sure that you’re follow...

Sharing in case this is useful:
I teach courses where students have to write, but I am not teaching them to write. I have learned that especially for undergraduates (and sometimes grad students) I cannot assume that they understand how to cite, so I made this:
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

Scarce research funding is becoming more economically costly than the actual investment, especially when it’s a drop in the bucket for profoundly stupid fad topics like “GenAI to solve Africa’s problems.” This piece is SO important: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1

Old school cell division data hand drawn by Wacław Mayzel while he looked through his microscope; circa 1884. #CellBiology

A zebrafish embryo photographed through a microscope by Dr. James Hayes. 72 hours post fertilization. #CellBiology

From LSE… What makes students feel included in introductory STEM courses? An analysis of nearly 2,000 student responses shows that teaching practices, policies, and classroom interactions matter. www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/...

This story is absolutely wild. Did you know that avocados change sex over the course of a day? And that it's controlled by a single ancient balanced polymorphism? This is flat our crazy

Size of Life From an amoeba to a blue whale

and the winner of the "2025 best thing on Internet" has just arrived
neal.fun/size-of-life/

@carlbergstrom.com

This is actually the trippiest thing I've ever seen that was not deliberately created by M C Fucking Escher. It straight up took me over a minute to make sense of and now I can't go back.

This is the white-and-gold dress on a gram a week of trenbolone.

Allele Frequencies at Recessive Disease Genes are Mainly Determined by Pleiotropic Effects in Heterozygotes The classic theory of mutation-selection balance predicts the equilibrium frequency of genetic variation under negative selection. The model predicts a simple relationship between the total frequency ...

Well well. The standard model for how frequencies of recessive disease genes are established doesn't work. And that seems to be because recessive variants are visible to selection due to pleiotropy. (But still we teach Mendelian genetics...)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Come find out how to make your science more accessible. Hear and touch mitosis during my talk. @ascbiology.bsky.social #cellbio2025 #mitosis #midbody #tactilelearning

Polygenic embryo screening is being marketed commercially – but how do IVF clinicians view it?

• General approval is low (12%)

For specific uses:
• 59% approved of health-related embryo selection
• 6% approved of trait-based selection

🧵 Survey findings in NPJ Genomic Medicine

Lac operon: Wait… what?! Noise in the basement? by Christoph — If you've ever come across the topic of 'gene regulation in bacteria' in your biology classes at high school, college or university, you've inevitably learned about a classic: the lac operon of E. coli. Well, this it's not an exam here! Just ask yourself what you remember without the help of an AI.

Lac operon: Wait… what?! Noise in the basement?

by Christoph — If you've ever come across the topic of 'gene regulation in bacteria' in your biology classes at high school, college or university, you've inevitably learned about a classic: the lac operon of E. coli. Well, this it's not an exam…

So there you have it, twin study estimates were greatly inflated, and molecular data sets the record straight. I walk through possible counter-arguments, but ultimately the uncomfortable truth is that genes contribute to traits much less than we always thought.

Multiple Meds: Share of children on two or more psychiatric medications in 2023, based on wether or not they were prescribed ADHD drugs in 2019.

We need a total and complete shutdown of WSJ data graphics until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.

h/t @merz.bsky.social @drmikewiser.bsky.social

Life Finds a Way, Even on Inactive Hydrothermal Vents - bioGraphic In the darkness of the deep sea, animals flourish on hydrothermal vents that have gone cold.

Scientists long assumed that inactive vents, without the mineral-rich plumes that make active vents so mesmerizing, didn’t host unique lifeforms.

“It turns out that we just weren’t looking very closely,” says marine biologist Jason Sylvan.

www.biographic.com/life-finds-a...

Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Twists and turns in the story of learned avoidance Evidence that learned avoidance of a pathogenic bacterium can be transmitted to future generations in C. elegans is growing.

I wrote this insight for eLife. A friend said, "Why would you want to step on that rake?". Well, I guess that's just who I am. Enjoy. elifesciences.org/articles/109...

What a gem from @dudinlab.bsky.social @gautamdey.bsky.social @centriolelab.bsky.social in Cell! Expansion microscopy atlas of >200 eukaryotes comparing cytoskeletal architectures revealing structures not seen before. Stunning visualisation! Exactly the kind of transformative cell biology we need.

WHAT

University of California faculty push back against Big Brother cybersecurity mandate School officials defend software as bulwark against ransomware, but professors fear potential surveillance of their devices

The journal Science covers the UC spyware saga. The UC administrators’ policy assurances are like saying one does not have to lock one’s car because it is illegal for someone to steal the car or its contents. #highereducation 🧪⚛️🔭 #academicsky www.science.org/content/arti...

The data is from April but holy moly

Lost Science is a new NYT series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding. You can send your story to the Times here www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...

One of my favorite moments from Nobel Prize history:

The Nobel Committee couldn’t reach Stanford professor Paul Milgrom to let him know that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, so his fellow winner, Robert Wilson, went over to his house in the middle of the night to wake him up!

He Was Expected to Get Alzheimer’s 25 Years Ago. Why Hasn’t He?

“His mother & nine of her 13 siblings developed Alzheimer’s & died in the prime of their lives. So did his oldest brother, and other relatives going back generations. It is the largest family in the US known to have an Alzheimer’s-causing mutation…Something has shielded him from his genetic destiny”

Some good advice in here but one critical piece I always give is this:

Get a hobby. Preferably a mildly social one. One that has NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE. NOTHING.

You need friends. Not colleagues. FRIENDS. Friends who will love you no matter your research prospects...

27 things we wish we’d known when we started our PhDs Nature’s survey of PhD candidates reveals hard-won wisdom on choosing supervisors, managing mental health and surviving academic culture.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone considering a PhD?

We asked 3785 doctoral candidates across 107 countries for their hard-won wisdom
go.nature.com/4nDjJ7t

Image shows the first two printed pages of the paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” by Cecilia Lai and colleagues, published in Nature in 2001 (volume 413, pages 519-523). The abstract reads as follows: Individuals affected with developmental disorders of speech and language have substantial difficulty acquiring expressive and/or receptive language in the absence of any profound sensory or neurological impairment and despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. Although studies of twins consistently indicate that a significant genetic component is involved, most families segregating speech and language deficits show complex patterns of inheritance, and a gene that predisposes individuals to such disorders has not been identified. We have studied a unique three-generation pedigree, KE, in which a severe speech and language disorder is transmitted as an autosomal-dominant monogenic trait. Our previous work mapped the locus responsible, SPCH1, to a 5.6-cM interval of region 7q31 on chromosome 7. We also identified an unrelated individual, CS, in whom speech and language impairment is associated with a chromosomal translocation involving the SPCH1 interval. Here we show that the gene FOXP2, which encodes a putative transcription factor containing a polyglutamine tract and a forkhead DNA-binding domain, is directly disrupted by the translocation breakpoint in CS. In addition, we identify a point mutation in affected members of the KE family that alters an invariant amino-acid residue in the forkhead domain. Our findings suggest that FOXP2 is involved in the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.

Twenty-four years ago today, our paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” was published: www.nature.com/articles/350....
A personal thread about the ups & downs of the journey we took to get to that point....1/n
🗣️🧬🧪

An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health Interactions between metabolic interoception and regulation may drive comorbidity between mental and metabolic ill-health.

Mental and metabolic health are closely linked - but what drives this connection? In our new theory paper, we (w/ @camillanord.bsky.social & @hugofleming.bsky.social g.bsky.social) propose dysregulation of interoceptive energy allostasis as a key mechanism.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵 1/n