"Stranger Things of the Microcosmos" is the talk I will give at Balticon this Sunday at 11:30 AM. I'll present exciting discoveries we made at UMBC Biology and other institutions.

I like to think that the worker who put that street sign on wanted us to stop and ponder the philosophical question "Is there really only one way?". This one goes straight into my list of Baltimore gems

The Struggle of Parts (Kampf der Theile im Organismus) by Wilhelm Roux is now published by Harvard University Press. A thread on why this is so exciting🧵

Two years ago we published about what we named "lytic deferment" in phages (doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.…). The concept is re-discussed in this recent review by Casters et al. "Phage transmission strategies: are phages framing their host?" doi.org/10.1016/j.mib.… Food for thought.

#ISM2024 ISCB News attendees: you can add events to your Google calendar 👇

A fascinating essay by Michael Atiyah about problem solving in math:

In my office hours today, a student suggested I look at the new "Math Notes" feature in the iPad's included Calculator app for iOS 18. See: support.apple.com/en-am/guide/ip…. The next three posts show screen-recording videos of me trying it out.

This seems to me a nice (new?) example of intragenomic conflict, where transposable elements that tune down the recombination rate are better at avoiding being purged. 👇

Unisciti a noi nel sostenere la cultura scientifica e partecipa al progetto “Diamond Open Access: scienze naturali accessibili a tutti” buff.ly/4dzXvgR

We discovered a universal scaling law linking copy number and plasmid size, which can be used to predict the PCN of your favorite plasmid! 6/7

The complexities of ecosystems and evolutionary processes demand more than quick conclusions—they require depth, patience & long-term commitment Register for our next webinar, where @Izzie_Hb will advocate for the principles of slow science events.humanitix.com/sortee-webinar… #SORTEEtools

Exciting and fantastic work - the new peak of recent studies reminding us that viruses are not the only mobile elements with their own evolutionary agenda! 🧬💪🏼👇🏼

Why operons? Gene copy number fluctuates depending on distance from ori due to DNA replication, perturbing gene expression. Operons keep a group of genes balanced in terms of copy number, reducing unbalance in expression level. A reason for the evolution of metabolic operons 👇

A 13th century prayer book sold for $2,000,000 at auction. Underneath the prayers, scraped off and written over, was the only copy of the one letter that Archimedes wrote to his friend to reveal his private method of finding properties of curved shapes. youtu.be/ZXNIgHov0Nk

President Trump and Elon Musk’s funding cuts to groundbreaking medical research do NOT Make America Great. That’s why I’m on the Senate floor introducing a resolution pledging support for NIH & asking for immediate passage. Watch. x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Together with Yseult Héjja-Brichard, I developed an interactive class for science #teachers to teach biological #evolution through a card game. We crash-tested it with #highschool students in Milan and made it available online for broader use: replicards.netlify.app #SciCom

.PhysicalPub, il Collegio di Milano e Pikaia organizzano la rassegna "The Evolutionary Weave" Con: Telmo Pievani, Maurizio Casiraghi, Marco Ferraguti ᑕᕼIᗩᖇᗩ ᑕEᑕI, Elena Canadelli, Mariagrazia Portera Fino al 9 marzo è possibile iscriversi alla prima conferenza pikaia.eu/evolutionary-w…