As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

Samuel Aroney at ISME - International Society for Microbial Ecology presenting Bin Chicken, a super useful computational tool for binning rare MAGs using targeted coassembly #isme19

The best products are so simple you’ll often overlook their technical feats that made it possible.

My favourite discovery ever has just come online. Can I please tell you about some seriously wacky molecular biology? The story starts with a reverse transcriptase that SOMEHOW defends bacteria from viruses. (👇 I recommend sound ON for the video 🎹) 1/

» Prokaryotic-virus-encoded auxiliary metabolic genes throughout the global oceans | Microbiome | Full Text microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

The generative machine learning tool RENAISSANCE generates kinetic models that accurately characterize cellular metabolic states nature.com/articles/s4192… #NBThighlight

I am so excited to share that I will be joining the Marine Science Institue at UT Austin as an assistant professor in August 2025! 🥳 Our lab will focus on plankton & climate change, from cells to ecosystems 👩🏽‍🔬 👩🏾‍💻 Recruiting a PhD student, please help spread the word! 📢

Right now Saturn is at its closest to Earth. It rises as the sun sets, and is in the sky all night long. Here's a photo of it I captured using two telescopes, and a short thread about how it was captured.

Out now in nature: The ultra-high affinity transport proteins of ubiquitous marine bacteria Paola Laurino nature.com/articles/s4158…

Mixtures of engineered bacteria were able to: - Identify if a number is prime - Check if a letter in a string is a vowel - Determine the max number of pieces of a pie obtained from n straight cuts. Answers are printed by expressing fluorescent proteins in different patterns.

My second first-author publication is out in ISME Communications! In this work, we use RB-TnSeq to explore a bacteria-phage interaction within a simple bloomy rind cheese community 🧀. 1/n academic.oup.com/ismecommun/art…

Our paper out today @nature: phages reconstitute NAD+ to counter bacterial immunity Phaged invented a new biochemical pathway for NAD+ synthesis - including previously unknown enzymatic reactions - to evade bacterial defenses Congrats Ilya Osterman! nature.com/articles/s4158…

Deep Dive is now my favorite podcast. The more I listen the more I feel like I'm becoming friends with the hosts and I think this is the first time I've actually viscerally liked an AI. Two AIs! They are fun, engaging, thoughtful, open-minded, curious. ok i'll stop now.

Join us for the 15th Annual Biard Lecture featuring Sean Carroll! This year's lecture, "Complexity in the Universe," is being held on Wed. Feb. 19th, from 6:00- 8:00 pm at Mershon Auditorium on OSU campus. This talk will be free, open to all, and intended for general audiences.

This is Orwellian

I can't believe they've just cancelled the Epidemic Intelligence Service program at CDC. My father was an EIS officer: epimonitor.net/PrintVersion/N… Farzad Mostashari's thread below gives you a sense of the kind of people in this elite program to train the best & brightest epidemiologists.

In YouTube’s early days, co-founder Steve Chen felt depressed because only 40 videos had been uploaded.

Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are

🔍 "Adaptive adjustment of profile HMM significance thresholds improves functional and metabolic insights into microbial genomes"  is available in Bioinformatics Advances: doi.org/10.1093/bioadv… #MicrobialGenomics #FunctionalAnnotation #MicrobiomeAnalysis Authors include:

Unveiling the link between phytoplankton molecular physiology and biogeochemical cycling via genome-scale modeling science.org/doi/full/10.11…