Mason Posner

I learned a lot writing this review of 200 years of aquatic ocular lens research. Classic comparative biology, significant discoveries in optics and gene/protein evolution, cool development and regeneration research, and discoveries to come. #zebrafish www.frontiersin.org/journals/oph...

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

43 years ago today When punk met hip hop 🤝 The Clash and Kurtis Blow at the Akron Civic Theater, August 17, 1982 #punk #punks #punkrock #hiphop #theclash #kurtisblow #history #punkrockhistory #otd

Who has gone out on a limb to challenge Trump? Lots of federal district court judges. Whom did the Supreme Court choose at this moment to rein in (having passed on doing so under Biden)? Federal district court judges.

No better way to build morale in the military than forcing troops to march down largely empty streets in a thunderstorm to celebrate a draft dodger’s birthday

If you love Daniocell, but wish it could generate analyses specific to YOUR genes & cell types of interest, check out DaniocellDesktop - a new point-and-click app for Mac and Windows that enables reanalysis of the Daniocell data without programming: daniocell.nichd.nih.gov/desktop/ (1/4)

"We are speaking on behalf of hundreds of NIH staff who are standing up together to say: WE DISSENT. I am so scared about doing this but I am trying to be brave for my kids because it's only gonna get harder to speak up." Thank you to Dr. Jenna Norton and NIH scientists for your courage!

I urge everyone to read Unbreaking’s new page on everything the govt is doing to destroy & diminish medical research funding. It’s the best thing I’ve read on this topic: @lizneeley.bsky.social & co have such done an incredible job. unbreaking.org/issues/medic...

McSweeney’s gets it.

I'm asking a favor of everyone here. Please click this AEVR/NAEVR (vision research advocacy group) link to oppose Schedule F Reclassification of Federal Science Roles by the Trump administration: www.votervoice.net/NAEVR/Campai... It will help you auto populate fields to your elected reps.

Experimental embryology postdoc available in my lab at the @biology.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk working on the evolution of vertebral counts. Reach out if you’re passionate about EvoDevo, enjoy lab work and microscopy and are into or could get into cichlid fishes. Deadline on the 16th June. Please share!

Cross-posting from LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/posts/kevin-... These are useful (and free!) websites that I found in my search for all things #zebrafish as part of my Bioinformatics Bootcamp. If there’s enough interest, I may do a blog post on the Node. Enjoy!

NIH just cancelled the STEP-UP summer research program and they alerted students today. One of my students accepted their offer, turned down other REUs, and is now screwed for this summer.

Very good description of how the Trump administration is dismantling US science and harming public health, and a message that we can't acquiesce. Supporting medical science in the USA - The Lancet www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

📊 tidyplots: Publication-Ready Plots for Scientific Papers By Jan Broder Engler — Create clean, consistent, and accessible plots in R with intuitive syntax. Great for scientific publishing! 🔗 Package: buff.ly/AEeUq0Z 🔍 Examples: buff.ly/vFpLqna More R resources 👉 buff.ly/MSQa1kh #RStats #DataViz

We've reached the point in our descent into fascism where the Jewish governor's house getting firebombed on Passover by a guy trying to bash his head in with a sledgehammer is overshadowed by the story of the President saying he wants to build foreign gulags for US citizens.

If you feel like being inspired by a big law firm, here's the opening to Sussman Godfrey's lawsuit against Trump and his executive order targeting the firm. It still is amazing other firms caved quickly to Trump's mob-like and unconstitutional shakedown. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The budget proposal eliminates: NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office Stops funding regional climate data, climate competitive research or sea grant programs Severely defunds the Natl Ocean Service & the NMFS www.cnn.com/2025/04/11/c...

This sounded even more ridiculous in the original North Korean.

The Fourth Circuit is famously succinct. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Playing around with CBP airport processing data this morning to see how much air travel by non-US passengers is cratering.

Wow! Three scholars at Columbia, Michigan, & Maryland just introduced a measure of the partisan leanings of employers in the U.S. The data is constructed by linking voter registrations to online worker profiles. VRscores capture the political affiliations of 21.8M workers across 2.6M employers.

We must stand up for all of our students. The federal government's targeting & treatment of international students is completely unacceptable. International students are core members of the Buckeye community and we won’t be silent as they are scapegoated in this way www.dispatch.com/story/news/e...

A mother and her three children were snatched by ICE from a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, a rural town in northern New York. But the location is no coincidence—Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, LIVES THERE. He allowed his own neighbors, including a third grader, to be jailed. Deplorable.

Folks wrapped around the entire town square today for #handsoff in Medina Ohio

BREAKING: We're suing the National Institutes of Health over their politically-motivated purge of research grants. This is an unlawful attack on scientific progress that puts lives at risk.

During the darkest days of Covid, Peter Marks briefed the world on the development of the vaccines that saved millions of lives, with calm command of the science that helped us all take a deep breath and believe we could get through it all.

Today was yet another sad day for science. All U-RISE training programs, including the one at SJSU, got stop work orders. We've had a version of this program at SJSU for 30+ yrs. Devastating for the students who got their stipends & tuition pulled w no notice & for the future of science 🧪 1/

Columbia President email confirms DHS raid tonight in University housing (dorms?). Truly, get us all the fuck out of this place.

My first research experience was because of a summer NSF REU. I learned to code (in FORTRAN 77!) as part of the KTeV high energy physics collaboration. It launched my passion for science & my entire career. Devastating to see this valuable program gutted. www.science.org/content/arti...

Someone at NIH signed this letter! WOW, I’m shocked.

It’s nice how they’ve replicated the middle school dynamic of the insecure bully and his sniveling sidekick picking on someone surrounded by a circle of scared little boys who also try to talk shit so the bully doesn’t come after them. Or as the right calls it, “masculinity.”

Zelensky is a wartime leader watching his people suffer and die under Russian attacks every day. To be lectured and lied to by Trump and Vance, as they defend the war criminal dictator committing these atrocities, is unimaginable agony. An everlasting shame for America.

Ashamed of my country. Slava Ukraini!

Rubio terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts. Here’s a list of just some of the lifesaving awards that were terminated. Nearly all were Congressionally mandated. They’ve saved millions of lives. 🧵

I talked to NIH officials, current and former, about what's been happening inside the agency since the Trump administration shut down their grantmaking pipeline in January. Their stories showed just how willing our new leaders are to break the law: www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

RNA xkcd.com/3056

Gen. CQ Brown signs off with a graceful message on LinkedIn:

My colleague @rnareylab.bsky.social wrote this editorial for her hometown area newspaper. Well done & more please! www.heraldbanner.com/opinion/colu...

"More than half of the 100 congressional districts with the largest proportion of federal workers are held by the GOP, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis." (@wsj.com chart below shows congressional districts in the South.) www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Want to go visit the national parks this year? Sorry. The reservation system is shut down, EMT personnel are gone, so don't get hurt or lost. No one can clean the bathrooms or cabins, so they'll be closed. Rangers are fired. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

This is CQ Brown: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaJN...

“DOGE has targeted a shocking sweep of basic government services with an unprecedented level of slash-and-burn nihilism. There’s no considered plan, just careless mass destruction — and Musk’s desire to control everything, whatever the risks.” www.theverge.com/elon-musk/61...

My weekly column and news roundup of our national crisis, written in the style of how the US media would—with more clear-eyed authority—cover these events if they were happening overseas: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/king-donal...

Graduate student admissions also paused at University of Southern California, Vanderbilt, etc. www.wesa.fm/health-scien...