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Bianca M. Sacchi

@bmsacchi.bsky.social
1.2K followers 872 following 66 posts

Fond of genomes big and small 🌱🦠🧬 Currently: postdoc working on phylodynamics and genomic epidemiology Formerly: PhD in plant sex chromosome evolution @ U of T Opinions my own!

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Bianca M. Sacchi @bmsacchi.bsky.social · 22h
why would I need infinite personalized music when I can already do this by making up silly songs about my cat with the power of my mind
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Melissa Johnson, PhD @ladyhistorian.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Running for president as a single-issue candidate: Requiring websites to make Boolean searches work again
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Jorts (and Jean) @jortsthecat.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
The world is bereft to have lost Dolly Parton
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
You cannot appeal to rigorous academic standards and argue for the inclusion of racist pseudoscience, the most fallacious, damaging, and discredited idea of the past 500 years. You might as well teach doctors to recognize the four humors.
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Bianca M. Sacchi @bmsacchi.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
“Distinct society” only if we consider the Albertan impulse to do the Cadillac ranch at any large gathering
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MwahahahahahadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
STOP ATTACKING BIORXIV SO I CAN DOWNLOAD PDFs OF PAPERS I WILL NEVER READ
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Mark Hibbins, Great Lakes Swashbuckler @rejectresubmit.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I'm recruiting a PhD student to work on an NSF-funded project developing new models of trait evolution for phylogenetic comparative methods! Info about the lab here: mhibbins.github.io Applications to our grad program are due December 1. Please share!
mhibbins.github.io
Hibbins Lab
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Bianca M. Sacchi @bmsacchi.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
iCloud sync might be what puts me over the edge as a longtime Mac/iOS user.
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Ella Brockway @ellabrockway.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
What is in Fifa's 25-page sales pitch: a reference to more than doubling the number of global tournaments held each year, from 200 to 450 What is not in Fifa's 25-page sales pitch: a single reference to women's football
theguardian.com
Fifa’s sales pitch revealed: more tournaments, more debt … but no mention of women’s game
Fifa’s sales pitch to persuade members to approve the sale of the World Cup’s commercial rights clearly states that their plans for financial growth will be achieved by staging more tournaments, havin...
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Mateusz Fafinski @calthalas.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.
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Star Trek Minus Context @nocontexttrek1.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
Star Trek The Next Generation scene. Data (pale fella, looks like a guy, also a robot) is standing on the bridge looking towards the view screen. Next to him is for some reason a tall plant standing where there isn't normally plants and several pieces of art laying against a command chair and against the back wall area. Also an orange cat is laying in the captains chair. Closed caption reads ,"My cat is present..."
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Bianca M. Sacchi @bmsacchi.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Highly amusing that people think the hantavirus outbreak 'doesn't line up' because they don't believe someone would go birding at a landfill
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Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 20/04/2026
I am excited beyond description to lift the veil on what we have been working on in 2026: Please meet ggsql! A new extension of the SQL language for creating visualisations using the grammar of graphics. Read all about it in the blog post or visit the website at ggsql.org
opensource.posit.co
ggsql: A grammar of graphics for SQL
Introducing ggsql, a grammar of graphics for SQL that lets you describe visualizations directly inside SQL queries.
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Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 @helenbranswell.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis is a rare but fatal side effect of #measles infection, which manifests years after a kid recovers. This story of a family who lost a 10-year old to it is heartbreaking. Renae was too young to be vaccinated when she caught measles. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Measles Took My Daughter. This Is What I Want Everyone to Know.
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Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
This isn't shortread data, but alignments of genome assemblies with N50 > 100Mb. The plot is the # of bp per 100Kb window that are dropped because of missing data -- because those bp physically are not there in one of the other 25 genomes. This is what normal plant genomes look like, folks.
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Catherine Frieman @cjfrieman.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
This is a big part of why basically every archaeologist who gets asked "when in the past would you want to have been alive?" will answer "the present please and thank you"
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Aaron Quinlan (he/him) @aaronquinlan.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n
quinlanlab.org
Intro to Bedder – The Quinlan Lab
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Niklas Wahlberg @lepphylo.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
One of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved in: Project Psyche! Read all about our ambitions and aims. It's ground breaking stuff, just mind blowing and even surreal (27 years ago we did single genes for lep phylogenetics)! @projectpsyche.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...
cell.com
Project Psyche: reference genomes for all Lepidoptera in Europe
Project Psyche is a transnational initiative to generate and study chromosome-level reference genomes of all ~11 000 species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) found in Europe. Here, we describe t...
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Joshua G. Schraiber @jgschraiber.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
We've got a really cool preprint out in collaboration with @lpachter.bsky.social's awesome student Cat Felce. Using biophysical models and RNA-seq data, we explore the mechanisms of selective constraint on mRNA abundance, finding constraint on decay rate www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Biophysical constraints on mRNA decay rates shape macroevolutionary divergence in steady-state abundances
Evolutionary changes to gene expression are understood to be a major driver of phenotypic divergence between species. Researchers have investigated the drivers of this divergence by fitting evolutiona...
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 21/11/2025
It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.
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Dr. Arun Sethuraman @arunsethuraman.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
Aaah! New preprint from the Sethuraman Lab has dropped! Tamsen and I have been working on this for a while, and we can’t wait for your feedback. Short thread on our swanky new polyploid genome simulator, DemographiKs, and its functionality.
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Andrea Thompson @andreatweather.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
More really cool science news: Scientists have extracted the oldest known RNA! This is a particularly amazing feat because RNA degrades very quickly. (Also, we learned that Yuka here was a male, not a female as previously thought.) 🧪 (by @humbertobasilio.bsky.social for @sciam.bsky.social)
scientificamerican.com
A Frozen Woolly Mammoth Reveals the World’s Oldest RNA
RNA has been extracted from an ancient woolly mammoth, providing insight into its last moments on Earth
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Stephen Collins @stephencollins.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
Every ad now
[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.]

JANET:
Ugh...

LIZ:
What's up?

JANET:
I am so bored of cooking peas!

LIZ:
Have you tried...

AI peas?

JANET:
AI peas?

LIZ:
They're peas with AI!

[Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI].

LIZ:
Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas

JANET:
What

LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines]

Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas?

[Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it]

LIZ:

Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine

[Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas]

LIZ:
With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas!

JANET:
What

LIZ:
Shut up

LIZ:
Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow

From opening the bag of peas

to boiling the peas

to eating the peas

To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means.

JANET:
Is it really necessary to-

LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]:
THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET

[Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan:

AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas.

[Ends]
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Janice Tullock @jtullock.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
No no no begs every archivist. You are never going to be able to find anything. Please don’t start using emojis in file names. Who asked for this? What fresh hell is next?
Screen grab from Dropbox saying Emojis in file names are finally here!
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Jedidiah Carlson @jedidiahcarlson.com · 06/11/2025
bro are you fucking kidding me
quote from the Economist article which says "[study authors] are now looking at whether AI facial analysis can give lenders useful clues about a person’s propensity to repay loans. For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing."
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
🚨 NEW: The majority holder of the world's genetic sequence data is a bad actor who can cut off access to critics and competing services. We've tolerated this for years, and now it threatens the pandemic treaty. Time for WHO to step in. With @ctrlalttim.com: www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/to-f...
thinkglobalhealth.org
To Finish the Pandemic Agreement, WHO Needs a Trustworthy Viral Database | Think Global Health
Online platforms for sharing virus sequences are in disarray. The World Health Organization has a chance to build something new
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 23/10/2025
At some point it has to become clear that this tech exists is to create a more toxic society and enrich its owners. These uses are not aberrations but rather the entire purpose.
rollingstone.com
OpenAI's Sora 2 Can Generate Videos of Celebrities Appearing to Shout Racial Slurs
OpenAI's Sora 2 video generation model can be exploited to push misinformation and depict public figures behaving badly despite promised guardrails.
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Jeff Groh @jeffgroh.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
Sharing our new paper, "Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts". Genomics & evolution of a mating type system involving two morphs with alternating sexes in walnut relatives www.cell.com/current-biol...
cell.com
Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts
In most species within the walnut family, two genetically determined morphs alternate between male and female flowering phases in time. Groh et al. identify a distinct locus for this dimorphism in two...
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Mark Hibbins, Great Lakes Swashbuckler @rejectresubmit.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Happy to chat with any potential applicants who want to work in plant phylogenomics!
simonsfoundation.org
Simons Postdoctoral Fellowships in Plant Biology
Simons Postdoctoral Fellowships in Plant Biology on Simons Foundation
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alex krokus @alexkrokus.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
tfw you think you're missing out on something but you're actually not
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Matt Cowgill @mattcowgill.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
probably my most deeply-held belief: it is not possible for a slide deck to be both (1) a good presentation aide; and (2) a standalone document that can be read and understood in isolation.
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Erol Akcay @akcay.theoretical.bio · 08/10/2025
Most chromosomes of any animal on Earth so far!
media.tenor.com
bart simpson from the simpsons says this is the worst day of my life
Alt: bart simpson from the simpsons says “this is the worst day of my life” and homer replies “the worst day of your life so far”
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Janet Hill @saskajanet.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Look at her go! #invertebrates 🌿
Screen shot of Project Monarch app map of progress of a monarch butterfly from southern Ontario to Oklahoma.
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Shawn Micallef @shawnmicallef.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
Look the mayor of Vaughan and the Premier of Ontario have said drivers are hard done by. Give them a break.
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Buffalo Bills @buffalobillsnfl.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Ornithology is all about the process. #GoBills | #BillsMafia
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
being a cat person is so crazy bc you live with someone who is undeniably annoying and you're always thinking "maybe i should get another cat"
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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91
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Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com · 18/09/2025
This was from banning trans girls from girls sports. Just so you understand the reality of what's going on here.
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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
The new XKCD has to be a reference to the ant paper where ants just casually lay eggs of a different species, yes? Maybe? There are so many weird bugs its hard to know.
Line drawing of a two story institutional building with a sign in front, "Welcome to the BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT. It has been 3 days since we discovered something existentially horrifying about abugs that make you question your whole reality."
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Stephen I Wright @stepheniwright.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
Please share broadly: I am looking for a postdoctoral fellow to work on a collaborative project on the temporal population genomics of invasive Capeweed (using contemporary and herbarium genomics), with ‪‪@shaky-dingo.bsky.social‬ and colleagues
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Jay @duniagamemaster.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
It's Minnesota State Fair time! It's time for Minnesotan folk art! Here, for example, is Saturn Devouring His Corn, in the seed art category!
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Bianca M. Sacchi @bmsacchi.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
8 years of notes from research meetings, lab meetings, seminars, brainstorming sessions and to-do lists from 4th year undergrad to now. For most of this period finishing this PhD felt mostly impossible and overwhelming, glad to have made it through with the help of my slightly illegible scribbles.
stack of notebooks of various sizes and colours, the spines are labeled with dates from 2017-2024, along with the name of the post author
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Bianca M. Sacchi @bmsacchi.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
even more on the flight attendants' side after spending an hour on AC's website trying to rearrange my travel days
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The Beaverton @thebeaverton.com · 18/08/2025
Air Canada consoles stranded passengers with pictures of their executive bonuses
thebeaverton.com
Air Canada consoles stranded passengers with pictures of their executive bonuses
OTTAWA - With thousands of passengers still facing travel delays as flight attendants strike for fair working conditions, Air Canada executives have decided to comfort customers by sending photos of t...
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Bianca M. Sacchi @bmsacchi.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
I'm a Dr. now!!! Very grateful to my supervisor, committee, labmates and everyone else who helped me get to this stage!
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New Phytologist @newphyt.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
#Viewpoint: Measuring #NaturalSelection on the transcriptome John R. Stinchcombe & John K. Kelly 👇 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #LatestIssue
Schematic depicting the mapping from genotype to fitness.
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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Legend says the ancient Babylonians once tried to sequence and annotate God's own genome, and for their ambition and hubris they were forever cursed to have different annotation formats and standards so they could never do genomics with ease again.
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Laurie Belcher @lauriebelch.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
OrthoFinder just dropped a major update It’s faster, more accurate, and ready for thousands of genomes Let’s break it down (1/10) github.com/OrthoFinder/... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Marisa Ingemi @mingemi.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
chat are we cooked
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Bianca M. Sacchi @bmsacchi.bsky.social · 20/06/2025
Wrote a whole thesis, and not once did I spell 'dioecious' correctly on the first try
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