Benjamin
LightNews LightNews
benjamintv.bsky.social
Benjamin
@benjamintv.bsky.social
51 followers 120 following 7 posts
Bioinformatics, Rust, Python, etc. ✡️
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Benjamin
xkcd.com
PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081
April 25, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
chemotaxis.bsky.social
it is just so hard to wrap my head around what is going on but this is literally it. they're just destroying the american research enterprise and it feels fucking insane.
joshtpm.bsky.social Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · Apr 2
5/ off but most people don't realize it yet. It's like Bobby Kennedy and Elon and Trump just drove a big semi full of fertilizer Tim McVeigh-style up in front of the national labs and detonated it. The prospect of more life saving cures and treatments already got much bleaker. If you think you ...
April 2, 2025 at 2:43 AM
Reposted by Benjamin
mikefeigin.bsky.social
This will never stop blowing my mind.
synbio1.bsky.social Jake Wintermute @synbio1.bsky.social · Mar 3
I know that the mRNA is larger than the protein it codes for but I don't believe it
March 20, 2025 at 12:31 AM
Reposted by Benjamin
xkcd.com
Lungfish xkcd.com/3064
March 17, 2025 at 4:53 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
vickyharp.com
Watching Jurassic Park, where a computer nerd with a debt problem and delusions of grandeur tears down all the safety systems, with no understanding of the consequences, so he can better facilitate his planned espionage and theft.
March 15, 2025 at 3:21 AM
Reposted by Benjamin
docsirianni.bsky.social
This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH
March 15, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
c0nc0rdance.bsky.social
"You maniacs!!! You blew it up!"
A person in an inflatable T rex costume kneels in agony or rage or shock in front of Sue the T rex at the Fields Museum in Chicago. The scene is mock-emotional, the tiny hands of the T rex held up as if to entreat the heavens for mercy. It resembles the final scene in Planet of the Apes where Charleton Heston sees the ruins of the Statue of Liberty half-buried on a beach. There are some other people looking on in amusement. Sue the T rex is surrounded by a railing, and she's mounted on a faux stone platform. Stolen from the Internet. Not sure of attribution.
March 5, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
kgandersen.bsky.social
It is worth paying close attention to the new bill "Dangerous Viral Gain of Function Research Moratorium Act" introduced by Senator Roger Marshall.

If enacted, it will effectively stop all of virological research, including for vaccines.

www.marshall.senate.gov/wp-content/u...

🧵👇
February 27, 2025 at 7:37 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
erictopol.bsky.social
Today's @usatoday.com front page
First US death from measles in 10 years
First child to die from measles in 22 years in the US
All of this fully preventable
February 27, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
xkcd.com
RNA xkcd.com/3056
February 26, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
omgisme.bsky.social
February 23, 2025 at 6:38 AM
Reposted by Benjamin
digthatdata.bsky.social
You better download your data while the NCBI still exists..
February 23, 2025 at 5:34 AM
Reposted by Benjamin
harmitmalik.bsky.social
I think people both within science and outside science don’t fully appreciate the miracle that were the Covid-19 vaccines. How much courage it took to get the sequence out, how much work had already gone into figuring out the best viral antigen and how best to present it. 1/
February 23, 2025 at 7:23 AM
benjamintv.bsky.social
How do giant tortoises live so long? We sequenced the genome & methylome of 192-year-old Jonathan, revealing insights into his extreme longevity!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
February 19, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
prasad.bsky.social
the reason NIH exists -- and the reason American biomedicine is as strong as it is -- is to "buy" research that the government wants and needs but thinks it can't produce on its own
February 19, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
lethalityjane.bsky.social
The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.
Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.
February 15, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
johnprensner.bsky.social
So much insanity happening.
Saw this new article and thought, there's a creature that's lived through it all.

The mighty tortoise. 🐢

Let's try to learn from this creature.

🧪
🧬 💻
#genomics

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Epigenomic insights into extreme longevity in the world’s oldest terrestrial animal, Jonathan
Giant tortoises exhibit exceptional longevity, often exceeding the human lifespan. To understand the genomic and epigenomic basis of their longevity, awe analyzed the DNA sequence and methylome of Jon...
www.biorxiv.org
February 8, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Reposted by Benjamin
steveklabnik.com
For me, writing is a form of thinking. It really helps clarify what's going on in my brain, because I have to like, explain it to write it down.

So, if you're a beginner and you want to write a blog post on something you're learning? Please do! It will help you, and everyone else.
February 4, 2025 at 4:56 PM
benjamintv.bsky.social
Just pathetic
statnews.com STAT @statnews.com · Feb 3
The professional society for microbiologists began stripping content about Black, female, and LGBTQ+ scientists from its website in the last few days, angering its members and highlighting the reach of President Trump’s directives.
Removal of DEI content from a microbiology group’s website shows reach of Trump executive orders
The professional society for microbiologists stripped content about Black, female, and LGBTQ scientists from its website
buff.ly
February 5, 2025 at 1:53 AM
Reposted by Benjamin
punkrockscience.bsky.social
If you search “HIV data” on the CDC’s main page right now, the whole first two pages of results are nothing but broken links, a silent wasteland where there used to be data that helped keep Americans safe. 🧪
CDC Data Are Disappearing
The agency has already removed scientific data from public view. More could follow.
www.theatlantic.com
January 31, 2025 at 10:18 PM