Justin Blumenstiel

#NoKings - Topeka, KS. Here I declare myself a proud member of Amphifa. Democracy! Not Tyranny!

holy crap -- Roger Marshall is somehow more orange than Trump now

Check out the dozens of Drosophila pseudoobscura genomes we sequenced to study genetic variation in natural populations.

In case you didn't know: we are acting as guest editors of this special collection on TEs and Development for Mobile DNA. It would be amazing if you could share with relevant researchers 🙏 link.springer.com/collections/...

He returns

So Abdul El-Sayed and Bernie Sanders went to my rural Michigan hometown yesterday and managed to drum up *1,000 people* out of a town of 10,000. A tenth of the population came to this event. The mayor endorsed Abdul. The town went overwhelmingly for Trump in the last election. This is how it's done.

I emailed Patrick Healy, assistant managing editor for standards and trust at NYT, to ask why their story about a House report with new details of rape allegations against the President of the United States included neither those details, nor a single use of the word "rape." archive.is/1s9AM

When I was a student moving from engineering to biology, I often heard that I was moving to a ‘soft science.’ Whereas physics and chemistry and mathematics had ground truth rules that were true no matter what, biology seemed like anarchy by comparison.

Current Anarchy has a nice ring to it...

Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days dynomight.net/math/

"Dominance labels describe the assay as much as the biology." - Claude (I can't find that specific phrasing anywhere. There are similar statements such as "Dominance is a property of the phenotype, not the gene." But honestly, I like this turn of phrase even more)

Early mammalian embryos accumulate dsRNA, mimicking viral infection. Our two-step purification protocol reveals young LINE and LTR retrotransposons as the main dsRNA source bit.ly/4i3dhGc

“Pete broke the world Eisenhower built.”

Don't worry. The metaphor police have been alerted. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Provocative new preprint examines 14 published meta-analyses claiming AI improves student learning and concludes... Not a single one provides a valid basis for its claims, citing widespread methodological flaws. osf.io/preprints/ed... Watch a webinar from yesterday about the findings:

Next talk: Alex Cope (Vanderbilt University) on "Unlocking the rules of proteome evolution" Tuesday, November 10, 2026 at 9:00 AM PST

Ban this entire evil industry.

El-Sayed Calmly and Pointedly Explains Freedom of Religion and Separation of Church and State to Gormless, Bigoted Chud

Me, about to go on a long road trip in my 2005 Corolla: I have determined the underlying mechanism which explains rapid evolution of the piRNA machinery and the synaptonemal complex of Drosophila. Hardy (of Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium): www.nytimes.com/2002/07/02/s...

I'm just starting to dig into this stuff finally, and I find this YouTuber really great. The boundaries between models and harnesses and agents have always seemed fuzzy, and this helped me understand how they interact and shape each other over cycles. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEHf...

;-)

Katie Zacharia has learned her lesson. by Susan Collins

New preprint from the Gurney Lab, on bioRxiv: The Phage Time Continuum: Genome Organization Constrains Anti-CRISPR Success. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... I think this is one of the cooler things I'll ever do. Work lead by @sczerwinski.bsky.social he coined the term Phage Time Continuum. 1/10

A study of wild orangutans now suggests that mothers go out of their way to arrange play dates for their offspring go.nature.com/4yQ9G4x

A Paul Noth cartoon that goes harder than it first appears

A colleague of mine said to me that dogs reached the singularity about 20,000 years ago and I can't stop thinking about that.

I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.

Middle-aged guy in the BMW blasting TLC's Unpretty, I salute you

Hey @gavinnewsom.bsky.social you might find this interesting! Hey everyone else: Vote Yes on Prop 40 to tax billionaires and NO on Props 41-42 which are designed to defeat Prop 40. Share this to your California friends!

republicans used to complain about the violence in gangster rap and now they want to livestream an execution

The concluding paragraph of today's FT column on America's moral decay under Trump by @edwardluce.bsky.social

If more of them talked like that, more of them would.

Which STEM field, in the next couple years, will be least impacted by AI? Two years ago, I might have said math. Now, I am thinking it's profoundly empirical fields where new data is lord AND hard to obtain. But I am interested in hearing what others think. What a time to be alive!

It takes a special kind of magic for a Democrat to begin an answer with “Georgia has Voter ID and that’s good” and follow that pragmatic concession to statewide sentiment with an answer so merciless against the neoconfederates that his opening heresy is immediately forgotten and forgiven

I've been immersed in research on Reconstruction in Lousiana and it's a very difficult truth to absorb that the white terrorist movement in the South was among the most successful terrorist movements in global history. Took 10 years but it won a total & complete victory through murder and atrocity.

Hello World ! Its pre-print time ! Awesome collaboration led by Michel Cohen-Tannoudji (not on Bsky) and the one and only @deborahbourchis.bsky.social. #BFF We solved the molecular mechanism underlying a mysterious hybrid incompatibility in mice: the DDK syndrome. 🧵🍿 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Evolution of mechanical chromatin insulators from selfish genetic elements #Drosophila

Holy shit.