Satyaki PRV

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

Nobelist George Smoot, whose satellite experiments validated the Big Bang theory, dies at 80 - Berkeley News Smoot, a physicist at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting minute temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, a prediction of the Big Bang ...

Aww man, Smoot died.

One of my dad's small points of pride that he handed a very special bottle of photoresist under the table as "test sample" to a pair of researchers who were never gonna order industrial quantities, but was enough to make COBE's detectors. news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/29/n...?

Just an outrageous amount of structural variation in pennycress. While not yet reproductively isolated, its likely these shredded pericentromeres contribute to some reproductive incompatibilities.

Congratulations!!

Out today in JAERE! We measure water pollution released at India's industrial clusters. Does it hurt agriculture? Surprisingly: Not by much

Come for how we published a paper of null results & with no regression tables

Stay for new ways to proxy for crop yields & map hydrological relationships

🧵

A single-cell rice atlas integrates multi-species data to reveal cis-regulatory evolution - Nature Plants This study maps chromatin accessibility at single-cell resolution in rice and related grasses, revealing how regulatory DNA elements evolve across cell types and species and identifying potential sile...

Some more cool single-cell powered gene regulatory atlases from the Schmitz lab.

Rapid emergence of non-autonomous elements may stop P-element invasions in the absence of a piRNA-based host defence Author summary Transposable elements (TEs) are short, self-replicating DNA sequences found in nearly all genomes. While they can be harmful to their hosts, many organisms have evolved defence systems,...

Germline defence from TEs largely relies on piRNAs. Yet, @divyaselvaraju.bsky.social and I monitored a P-element invasion in Drosophila that was stopped by an internally deleted copy, no host intervention required!
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Many thanks to @rpianezza.bsky.social & @rokofler.bsky.social

Is this the future of food? 'Sexless' seeds that could transform farming Scientists are tinkering with plant genes to create crops that seed their own clones, with a host of benefits for farmers.

Nature reports on the development of “sexless seeds,” which are crops that seed their own clones and have a host of benefits for farmers. #plantscience 🧪

University closures and declining regional innovation: evidence from South Korea Abstract. This paper empirically examines the impact of university closures on local innovation in South Korea from 2011 to 2021, against the backdrop of d

This is a very cool article on a deeply under-researched topic.

Please share! I'm looking for a postdoc. The position is to lead one of the following projects: 1) regulation of plant specialized metabolism by cell fate, or 2) foliar embryogenesis in the succulent plant Kalanchoe.

Learn more abt projects: cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/res...

Inactivation of β-1,3-glucan synthase-like 5 confers broad-spectrum resistance to Plasmodiophora brassicae pathotypes in cruciferous plants - Nature Genetics This study implicates GSL5 inactivation in high, broad-spectrum resistance to the clubroot pathogen Plasmodiophora brassicae in Arabidopsis thaliana, Brassica napus, Brassica oleracea and Brassica rap...

Inactivation of β-1,3-glucan synthase-like 5 confers broad-spectrum resistance to Plasmodiophora brassicae pathotypes in cruciferous plants
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Transgenerational decline through insidious effects of drought memory Click on the article title to read more.

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thrilled to announce our new paper is now out in @bmc.springernature.com

rdcu.be/eCB2t

In Other Journals Editors’ selections from the current scientific literature

My pick for In Other Journals this week:
MSH1 suppresses organelle mutation - an investigation of how many plants maintain very low mitochondrial mutation rates

My summary here:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Paper here: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
@sloanevolab.bsky.social
#PlantScience

Emerging evidence of abrupt changes in the Antarctic environment - Nature Abrupt changes are developing across Antarctica’s ice, ocean and biological systems; some of these changes are intensifying faster than equivalent Arctic changes, potentially irreversibly, and their i...

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

How can England possibly be running out of water? While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible

How can England possibly be running out of water?

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Last week I requested a tech and a postdoc position to be created and submitted the ads for those positions. Stay tuned for the official ad. For inquiries, my contact can be found here: cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/

A reminder you/your lab can support FlyBase at Cambridge through the following link. Every bit helps. Please share if you yourself can't donate.

www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

What’s your favorite food fact that is true but sounds totally made up?

I’ll start: about half of the mushrooms produced across the United States of America each year (more than 300 million pounds of mushrooms in recent years) are produced in *one county* in Pennsylvania.

Haha

Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose The Trump administration has asked NASA staffers to draw up plans to end at least two satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to current and former NASA employees.

Head of NASA Sean Duffy intends to destroy a satellite that collects key data on carbon dioxide and plant health, by causing it to burn up in the atmosphere. The U.S. Dept of Agriculture and private agriculture firms use the data to forecast crop yield, drought conditions and more.

Kinda curious why drosophila, but not arabidopsis,is allowed to have circular chromosomes

Sterility and structural variation in an arabidopsis pedigree carrying a ring minichromosome - Chromosome Research Circular minichromosomes could be useful tools for plant biotechnology, yet their long-term structural stability, heritability, and effects on phenotype remain poorly understood. In this study, we rep...

Some cool stuff from the Comai lab.

it's strange *how little* consciousness of the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh there is in the West, given how awful it was. a combination of racism and Cold War alliances with Pakistan, I suppose, but you'd think that there would have been *some* breakthrough book of the "Rape of Nanking" scale by now

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premier techno-superpower may be over.

This is an excellent explainer about the US scientific ecosystem. It covers a lot of points I often hear non-scientists asking about: about talent, the dynamics of the academic research environment, Germany, the USSR, history of NSF, NIH. Worth a read.

1/

“Staggering” Water Loss Driven by Groundwater Mining Poses Global Threat A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid “mega” regions and causing sea levels to rise.

See also

www.propublica.org/article/wate...

Congratulations! May the odds forever be in your favor.

📣 New paper alert! Just out in Cell Reports! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40644298/
Thrilled to share that we have discovered a brand-new anti-phage defense system! Bacteria have evolved various defense strategies (CRISPR etc) to counter phage attacks. We found a new one - fascinating and dramatic
⚔️🦠❄️🔬