Charlie Vaske

The best time in life to read Hannah Arendt is early adulthood. The second best time is now. This entire thread is a great explanation of why the NYT is letting down its readership yet again, and proving to be merely a paper of the times, rather than the paper of record.

Zelenskyy: While our teams are meeting in Florida, US President is having conversation with Kremlin leader responsible for this war. I believe they are simply using our team as a cover...clearly not acting in good faith as a partner. And this, in my view, is a weak decision from strong partners.

This is treason

I think there's a couple of historic reasons the current Left is not focused on schools. The biggest one being that since the pandemic, I feel like society at large has given up on schools. We gave up on trying address learning loss, performance is declining, and no one cares - why should the Left?

A great overview of how the Trump admin cultivated fear inside NIH to force compliance, even with harmful, unethical & unlawful orders. Also covers origins of the Bethesda Declaration community. From my friend & co-organizer Dr. Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou. www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

This is the YIMBYest politician ever elected.

Thomas Jefferson’s genome has been sequenced to substantiate the idea that the president fathered children with Sally Hemings, a Black woman he enslaved. But one of Hemings’s descendants has criticized the work and withdrawn her participation in the study. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4iKdSxA

I love this representation of scRNA data, showing yet again that compression leads to some of the best insights on data.

In 2024 the US Department of Energy proposed these routes for electrification. No time like the present to get to work making it a reality.

Fewer than 20% of EHR data sits in coded fields; the rest stays trapped in clinician notes. A new framework extracts atomic facts into an 88M-node knowledge graph across 1M visits, matching physician review with a 99.4% F1 score to reconstruct longitudinal patient journeys. #MedSky

I am an actual scientist and I did the math badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2022/12/urba...

This is a fascinating and beautiful new visualization for single-cell RNA datasets as an alternative to UMAP. I will definitely be trying it out soon...

We need a vacancy tax on all that wasted space.

If Zachary Blount had one dollar for every cell he plated in his dissertation looking for new Cit+ mutations, he could single handedly pay off the US debt of $40,000,000,000,000. www.npr.org/2026/08/19/n...

Bigger picture: LLMs are perfectly fine tools to use to automate drudgery and to augment skills you already have. The problem is that they present a gigantic marshmallow test for those with no impulse control to never learn how to do anything and to remove all friction from their lives.

After weeks of brow-beating Claude about "load-bearing," I finally got it to self censor: "already load-bear– already central..."

Ticklish areas of the body appear to be shared across cultures, according to a study of individuals with Chinese, Dutch, and Greek backgrounds published in Nature Human Behaviour. 🧪

Our paper on the active form of human protein kinases is out in Biochemical Journal from @biochemsoc.bsky.social . Great experience with the journal, unlike another journal that begins with "Nat" and ends with "omms." doi.org/10.1042/BCJ2... Made the cover in August (paper came out in July)...

For the dozen people out there into urban planning and cloud computing arcana: Inclusionary availability zoning will finally solve our affordability problems.

Yale President McInnis and the trustees are out of step with their faculty, including the current and present deans of the law school, in seeking a settlement from the Trump administration. Students and alumni also oppose. Who does Yale leadership actually represent? www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/u...

Hey look, our paper about the Single-cell Pediatric Cancer Atlas that we at @cancerdatalab.bsky.social have been working on for a while is out! www.cell.com/cell-genomic... It's a pretty good resource, if I do say so myself, and we are expanding: if you have data you want to share, get in touch!

Fans of #RNA should check out the RNA Futures Meeting at UCSC in the fall, looks to be a great lineup of speakers, including Mark Akeson, Laurence Ettwiller, and Miten Jain: rnacenter.ucsc.edu/rna-futures-...

Thanks to @jmcoller.bsky.social for writing this important piece. Describes exactly what we stand to lose from the Lysenkoization of US science. 💪🏼

One for the bioinformaticians

Spoke at The Australian Society for Microbiology 2026 Annual Meeting earlier this week. I covered our work on >100k carbapenemase-encoding genomes. Also here's a gimmick slide I spent way too much time on: "The Microbe's Digest". It's carba-pandemonium out there folks 🙏 @aussocmic.bsky.social

The end of Roe coincided with the near-complete destruction of feminist organizing or women's issues as a salient issue. Nobody in politics talks about abortion or gender equality, and the discourse is all about how "the Left is failing men". Hard to succinctly explain why but it's not salient.

Just how bad is housing affordability in Santa Cruz? Median house prices are currently 9.3x the median wage here, and though housing prices fluctuate, the average increase is 1.2% per year. Can any social scientists comment on my use of FHFA house price data and SAIPE household income?

Santa Cruz County is so NIMBY that it even $117k/year for a single person is considered "low-income." SC wages are far lower than SF or Silicon Valley, but HUD has to apply a special correction for exceptional housing-cost-to-income ratio. Even a median incomes qualifies for subsidized housing!

If you follow energy at all, you're probably familiar with the fact that the IEA and other energy analysts have a long record of underestimating the growth of solar and batteries. But did you know that they also have a long record of *overestimating* the growth of nuclear?

"we're willing to trade kidnapped children for POWs" is a completely insane admission of guilt

This newly-discovered DNA recognition system is a perfect fit for matching gene sequences that produce the same protein, by skipping over the wobble base in the protein code. Very cool system...

Have you wondered what the wet lab success rates are for current AI-driven protein design models? Look no further! In our new review, @kevinkaichuang.bsky.social @avapamini.bsky.social, @sarahalamdari.bsky.social, and I report wet lab success rates for *over 200* different protein design tasks 🧬💻

There was a time when the dictatorial and punitive power of Steve Jobs ensured that Apple would never let this sort of "I have two Outlooks" problem persist:

Currently trying to translate dinner discussion about Orban's defeat to our 7yo, and landed on the metaphor of JD Vance as Bowser Jr. This feels very right.

Ben Patton: "They [the Ukrainians] need us a lot less than we [the US] need them right now." US support to Ukraine has been cut off for more than a year, and in that year Ukraine has shifted the tide of the war. The US is blockading the Strait of Hormuz while Ukraine fights for freedom.

Very Ukrainian accent: "Oh Mr Vance, is it hard to negotiate peace? Is it difficult to come to a deal when both sides have fundamentally irreconcilable positions on key issues? Does not being able to trust your counterparty make things tricky? Why do you hate peace, Mr Vance?"

Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak “This country has given me endless opportunities…: The America we inhabit today bears almost no resemblance to the country I chose all those years ago” newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-nobel...

The neoantigen vaccine selection logic at the end of the OpenVax pipeline (code behind Mount Sinai PGV trials) is called Vaxrank inputs: HLA + VCF + RNA BAM outputs: vaccine design output Hadn't changed much since 2010s Just shipped 2.0 (new predictors, per-trial configs, &c)

Oh my god, this is my job!!! I can finally add something back to all the people who’ve given me knowledge

Chromosomes stuck behind the spindle are ticking time bombs for aneuploidy. We uncovered a mechanical rescue mechanism where microtubule pivoting repositions these high-risk chromosomes! Out last week in @natcomms.nature.com, here's a thread 🧵 shorturl.at/OD89x

I'm Josh Hawn, and I support this message.

Everyone I know with practically any knowledge of global supply chains be like:

Most cloud infrastructure engineering amounts to this, but is a bit less fun

Epistasis and co-adaptation in bacterial genome evolution www.nature.com/articles/s41... #epistasis #microbiology #evolution #genomics