Tom Murphy 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸

Brazil’s President Lula won his bid for re-election on 25 October, to the relief of many scientists who feared for the future of Brazilian research if his opponent prevailed. go.nature.com/4yI0XjI

I just want to name that people overcame this. Even against a stacked deck, the good fight is worth it. Win or lose, it's worth it. And sometimes the good guys win.

I’m very excited to share the first big project from my PhD (my first proper-first, yay!) where we use cryoET and a fun new flavour of CLEM to study the re-organisation of photosynthetic machinery of cyanobacteria growing beyond the red limit of light. doi.org/10.64898/202...

“It’s another reminder that you have to be really careful with predictions about how viruses that are introduced into new areas will behave,” Beer says. 🧪 #IDsky www.science.org/content/arti...

In new study, we show that SARS-CoV-2 has evolved decreased inherent antigenicity in humans, as quantified by a ~3-fold decrease in the number of naïve human B cells that can bind the spike RBD. doi.org/10.64898/202...

BREAKING: The Supreme Court rejected the Trump Administration’s request to cut off medical care for transgender people in federal prison. This ruling affirms that federal prison officials can’t deny transgender people essential health care.

Nature research paper: Enzyme-embedded polyesters for accelerated biodegradation in the deep sea go.nature.com/4id5k0a

BREAKING: SCOTUS rejects Trump admin's request to allow it to end gender-affirming medical care in prisons — a significant, if tentative, rejection of one of the admin's most extreme anti-trans arguments. Only Thomas and Alito noted they would have granted the stay. More to come: www.lawdork.com

These are amazing. www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20...

Prop 38 in California is just so bad: calmatters.org/politics/ele...

Physicists trap and cool down positron for months to measure its 'magnetic moment' with extraordinary precision go.nature.com/4dPttIT

from 1850-1890s, the US military and settlers murdered millions of Bison in the American West--itself an unthinkable crime--to deprive western Native people of their means of subsistence. Today, Israel similarly seeks to ethnically cleanse by depriving Palestinians of their subsistence 🫒🇵🇸

For harvesting olives. They should all be released immediately. To be clear: Palestinians face far worse consequences every day. These detentions by the IDF are one more attempt to undermine Palestinians’ right to harvest their olive groves, travel on their roads, and live in their homes.

I’ve been released from IDF custody with a “warning,” apparently because of my public profile (I told them I wasn’t even a congressmember yet, just a nominee). But several dozen rabbis & participants harvesting olives with me are still in detention.

Confiscatory taxes and aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws

the weird thing is that they’re really good universities

Nature research paper: Computational design of metalloproteases go.nature.com/3Ut8tRx

the gleeful enjoyment of cruelty toward women shown by the administration is among the most under-discussed aspects of the regime

the secret is to microdose LSD and estrogen at the same time

in my experience they do not come with noble intentions they literally will always tell you "I'm here for networking"

look at this beautiful amazon that visited me this morning. parasitoids are amazing

So many missing child support payments are ready to be wasted on this

Kenya has announced a second Ebola case, a family member of the first case, who was already under quarantine.

Meanwhile the epidemic in the DRC is continuing to grow rapidly. There have been more than 9000 cases, about half of them deaths. And while you will hear way more about a single suspected plague case in most outlets, this outbreak is now by far the largest Ebola Outbreak the DRC has ever seen.

Decades without serious electoral competition due to the Constitution's countermajoritarian features and partisan gerrymandering have created for Republicans the political equivalent of inbreeding. Our broken media ecosystem could hide the defects for only so long.

1/5 Telomerase has long been linked to chromosome maintenance in eukaryotes. Now, we show that telomerase-like activity is also present in bacteria, shedding new light on its ancient origins. Excited to share that our work on DRT10 is now out in @nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here's a close-up version of the goddamn champ who disrupted Trump's Syracuse rally, gave the president both middle fingers, and told the crowd off as they pulled her out of the venue. Sidebar: 🖕🏻Play the video at half speed for optimal peak viewing enjoyment.🖕🏻

It really can’t be said enough how cool this experiment was

My group's paper out on the cover of Science! Native Hawaiians are most closely related to the Rapanui of distant Easter Island 😮 Proud of my students the two co-first authors Cole Shanks & former MS student Edward Huang and 3rd author group member Chris Thomassin. www.science.org/eprint/4HAYG...

Remarkable how consistently the Trump administration has adopted the aesthetics of mass shooters, from their schizophrenic social media aesthetic to livestreamed executions to masked men with long guns roaming our streets with impunity. Nihilist violent extremism as statecraft

So close! I'm at $1,940 of my $2,000 goal for UNRWA mental health services for refugee children in Gaza. Just $60 to go before I run the Gaza 5K on Sunday. Can you help me cross the finish line? getinvolved.unrwausa.org/fundraiser/7... #Gaza5k

RFK Jr is funding a grotesquely unethical study on newborn babies in Guinea-Bissau; ethicists, pediatricians, clinical trial experts, & infectious disease experts are calling this horrific trial The New Tuskegee. It is unethical to withhold a life saving intervention from half of newborns FFS.

Susan Collins claims that our reporting about CEO Martin Kao’s bribery allegations took him at his word. That’s not true. We reviewed a trove of FBI evidence and legal records. Here’s how we independently corroborated much of Kao’s account.

Oh my god

Yes, she knew it was a helix and even concluded there were 10 bp/turn, with bases separated by 34 Å. For an explanation of how you can deduce all that (and more) from these patterns, see youtu.be/2tMuMRY1oDo?...

Exclusive: A new analysis refutes James Watson’s claim that he was the first to recognize the significance of the famed photograph 51. https://scim.ag/4rTKck8

Such an exciting and cool experiment, love when the Nobels are an opportunity to learn something new

Learn more about the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Press release: bit.ly/4AjKpkg Popular information: bit.ly/4hdgfGG Advanced information: bit.ly/4hfNrgM

Congrats!

Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for figuring out how living organisms create molecules that are just one of two possible mirror-image variants go.nature.com/4j4DKUZ

the Perspective is a super interesting read. I haven't waded into the arcana of evolutionary theory since my days as an EEB major in college but this new data is a tremendously interesting intervention in the field and really shows how technology and statistics can overdetermine questions of theory

Thrilled to share our paper "A conserved GTPase complex gates exocytosis for defence and parasitism across alveolates" Ciliates are fantastic to understand rhoptry exocytosis, and cryo-ET once again reveals so much🤩 Thanks to all who contributed. @martacova.bsky.social @yiweichang.bsky.social

We need all hands on deck over the next 32 days to defeat the fascists and reclaim the power of the pro-democracy majority. Anyone can help get out the vote in the states and districts that will decide the midterms: indivisible2026.org?utm_source=b...

The Trump administration has moved to cripple Title IX protections against sexual assault and harassment on the same day New York prosecutors reopened the investigation into heinous allegations of a fraternity gang rape at Cornell University. trib.al/QewniBV

Our paper on the dynamics of Asgard archaea (Promethearchaeota) is now out in Nature! Huge thanks to the reviewers for helping make the manuscript stronger. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Two “Lokis” stained for Lokiactin (FastAct, magenta), reaching toward each other to celebrate 🎉 #archaea

I love living in a country where a politician can sign a law banning the health care I need to live and be greeted as a hero of comity and good sense

BREAKING NEWS: “Do geese see God” is a palindrome

5 potatoes cubed is still 5 potatoes because potatoes are root vegetables