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Reposted by Alex Crits-Christoph

Luis Javier Galindo @luisjagago.bsky.social · 12h

Our study on the first rhodopsin channels known to respond to UV light is now published in PNAS! And they come from our favourite protists, apusomonads! #protistonsky

www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

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Philipp Engel @pengellab.bsky.social · 9h

Happy to announce that our comparative metagenomic analysis of the gut microbiota of five honeybee species - spearheaded by @aiswarya.bsky.social - is finally published in a peer-reviewed journal! rdcu.be/eKMCs @fbm-unil.bsky.social @dmf-unil.bsky.social 🧵👇

Evolution of gut microbiota across honeybee species revealed by comparative metagenomics

Nature Communications - Here, the authors perform metagenomic analysis of honeybee gut microbes, uncovering many previously unidentified species and host specific differences in composition and...

rdcu.be

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Caroline Puente-Lelievre @cpuentelelievre.bsky.social · 6d

The case for useless knowledge by Betül Kaçar. In this 3 minute video she explains why the simple act of being curious and asking questions (without needing a reason) is one of the most powerful things a human can do. www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2k3...

The case for useless knowledge | Betül Kaçar

YouTube video by The Well

www.youtube.com

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Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 16h

Reshma Ramachandran “said the sequence of events is the antithesis of how the FDA is supposed to function.

“What we’re seeing here is, ‘We believe this and we’re going to find the evidence to support that’ …That’s just inherently wrong in terms of how a scientific agency like the FDA operates.”

Inside FDA, career staffers describe how political pressure is influencing their work

Current and former FDA staff said the level of involvement of political officials in nitty-gritty regulatory matters is unprecedented.

www.statnews.com

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Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 15h

On a brief skim, the experimenters do try to control for these sorts of things! But when you do them, you start to realize how tricky it can be. As with all mouse experiments there is at least a little tension btwn endless replication and animal well-being too.

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Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 15h

it's kind of hard to say when it's based on a couple cages of mice. It's the sort of thing that you'd want to see replicated. Not that it's noise, but that it's hard to control for in a single experiment: cage variability, unconscious biases, where the cages are in the room...

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Eric Turkheimer @ent3c.bsky.social · 1d

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are

Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

www.theatlantic.com

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Kathryn Paige Harden @kph3k.bsky.social · 1d

New from @ent3c.bsky.social in The Atlantic --

7 years (!) after Charles Murray made a bet with us that we'd "understand IQ genetically" by 2025, Eric describes how far we still are--and might always be--from that goal

www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are

Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

www.theatlantic.com

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Yehlin Cho @yehlincho.bsky.social · 1d

Thrilled to announce our new preprint, “Protein Hunter: Exploiting Structure Hallucination within Diffusion for Protein Design,” in collaboration with @Griffin, @GBhardwaj8 and @sokrypton.org

🧬Code and notebooks will be released by the end of this week.
🎧Golden- Kpop Demon Hunters

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Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 1d

Congrats, this looks really interesting! I know you just got it out but I noticed the repo above isn't public yet... 😅

I was wondering, when embarking on a new binder design project would you recommend Protein Hunter over boltzdesign2 at this point, or no? Especially for binders to multimers!

Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 1d

Great paper, and also nice evidence that you can create large+diverse RB-TnSeq libraries in liquid selection, without the need to scrape tons of plates for your library.

Typas Lab @typaslab.bsky.social · 1d

Excited to share our preprint led by Carlos Voogdt et al

We developed new genetic tools & genome-wide libraries for species of the Bacteroidales order; constructed saturated barcoded transposon libraries in key representatives of three genera.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Typas Lab @typaslab.bsky.social · 1d

Excited to share our preprint led by Carlos Voogdt et al

We developed new genetic tools & genome-wide libraries for species of the Bacteroidales order; constructed saturated barcoded transposon libraries in key representatives of three genera.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Frédérique Le Roux @fredoleroux.bsky.social · 2d

Phages evolve fast, or do they?
In oysters, some stay identical for years.
With >1,200 phages & 600 Vibrio genomes, we reveal long-term stability and new mobile elements.
Proud of this collaborative work across our teams (Roscoff-UdeM and @epcrocha.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Ecological constraints foster both extreme viral-host lineage stability and mobile element diversity in a marine community

Phages are typically viewed as very rapidly evolving biological entities. Little is known, however, about whether and how phages can establish long-term genetic stability. We addressed this eco-evolut...

www.biorxiv.org

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Nature Portfolio @natureportfolio.nature.com · 2d

Hopes of securing a UN treaty on plastic pollution are fading after the final round of negotiations ended without an agreement. Nature spoke to Samuel Winton, a researcher who is studying the treaty’s progress, about what went wrong, and what can be done to salvage the treaty. 🧪

The world’s first plastics treaty is in crisis: can it be salvaged?

Hopes of securing a United Nations treaty on plastic pollution are fading after the final round of negotiations ended without an agreement.

go.nature.com

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T&E @transportenvironment.org · 5d

NEW: Biofuels globally emit more than the fossil fuels they replace, our latest study shows.

The first-of-a-kind study looks at global biofuels production today and the potential impacts of government biofuel targets.
🧵⤵️

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Joel Selkrig @jselkrig.bsky.social · 3d

Important (and meticulous) genetic groundwork by the @typaslab.bsky.social and Carlos Voogt on gut microbiome Bacteroides species! Enormous value for the functional microbiome research community

bioRxiv Microbiology @biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 4d

A toolkit for transposon libraries and functional genomics in intestinal Bacteroidales https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.10.681549v1

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Samir Giri @isamirgiri.bsky.social · 3d

New Preprint from Voogdt et al 👇

Establishes efficient genome-wide transposon mutagenesis & barcode mutant libraries for three Bacteroidales gut bacteria, identifying shared & species-specific essential genes, non-coding elements, & toxin pathways, advancing gut microbiome functional genomics

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Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 3d

www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/...

From the AskReddit community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the AskReddit community

www.reddit.com

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Johannes Cairns @jcairns.bsky.social · 3d

Massive undertaking with @teppo-h.bsky.social and others out. We studied 4 years (!!!) of synthetic 23 microbial species community evolution with/without antibiotic. Resistance mutations occurring over years led to stepwise restructuring and ultimately recovery of undisturbed community composition.

Teppo Hiltunen @teppo-h.bsky.social · 3d

Evolution induced state shifts in a long-term microbial community experiment www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Evolution induced state shifts in a long-term microbial community experiment

Biological communities are complex, dynamic systems that underpin ecosystem functionality, yet their long-term dynamics and predictability remain poorly understood. Understanding how Darwinian evoluti...

www.biorxiv.org

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 4d

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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Jeremy Faust, MD @jeremyfaust.bsky.social · 4d

We have breaking news in Inside Medicine.

We had heard rumors of RIFs to CDC.

But this is the first visual confirmation that it has occurred tonight, and at high levels in the agency.

Here is what we know...and then some well-sourced rumors (but rumors, nonetheless, not confirmed) 🧵...

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Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 4d

Because when some audiences hear "Make the proof" they do not hear "Make up the proof" because they don't have the (correct) prior intuition that everything he does is a scam.

So when a comment *assumes* someone hears "make up", it misses the mark with the audience most important to reach

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Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 4d

HOWEVER, we also know his process is going to be irrevocably flawed and politically motivated, and so in practice everything he does we should assume is in fact going to be "making up the proof".

Imo it can be good to push back on short viral gotchas like this bc they can hurt with some audiences.

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Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 4d

Yeah "make the proof" vs "make up the proof" is key.

RFK isn't consciously saying he's going to make up evidence here, he pretty clearly genuinely believes he's searching for confirmatory truth and means as much. It's silly to think he meant "We're gonna make up data to fit our beliefs", he didn't!

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Kevin Zollman @kevinzollman.com · 4d

A reoccurring frustration for philosophers of science: Many scientists know how to do science like people know how to ride a bike. When they reflect on the practice of science, they repeat platitudes about how science works. Those platitudes are often wrong, sometimes even about their own field

D. J. Hicks @danhicks.bsky.social · 5d

*sighs in philosopher of science*

Looking for confirmatory evidence is an entirely normal part of science. The primary problem here is the eugenics and the fascism, not the lies to children about "the scientific method."

One Bluesky account is quoting another. Inner post has a video of RFK Jr., some person I don't recognize (Tylenol and autism guy, maybe?), Marco Rubio (I think), and Trump. Post text: "RFK Jr on Tylenol and autism: 'It is not proof. We're doing the studies to make the proof."

Outer post text: "We're doing studies to prove it (* not how studies work)"

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