iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

lexy @lvdlab.org · 14/04/2025

technically, it's a crop of this image, so I have to assume it's trying to parse the nuclei

figure 1 from our 2024 paper - not much that looks like a face tbh

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 14/04/2025

wow... AI really is so powerful

me posting a subpanel with two graphs into powerpoint. suggested alt text at bottom: "A collage of images of a person's face" with approve/edit buttons for my consideration

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 09/04/2025

Even still, Spring is beautiful.

Sunset from the East Bank campus last night, with a view of an art museum and train tracks running across the Mississippi. A thin (cirrus?) cloud cuts across horizontally.

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 05/04/2025

#handsoff the next generation of scientists!

Francesca Walsh, 28, is in the last six months of earning her Ph.D. in neuroscience and behavior. She wants to study how the brain functions when making economic decisions, in an effort to protect economic markets and consumers from financial harm. The postdoctoral jobs she planned to apply for have suddenly disappeared. “I felt the door of an entire sector of jobs, including federal research jobs, slam overnight,” she said. “It’s very disheartening, and sometimes I wish I just became an accountant.”

Young scientists’ careers are inextricably tied to the grant application cycle. Carole LaBonne, a molecular biologist at Northwestern University, recently told the podcast “Odd Lots” to think of labs as small businesses that run on very tight operating margins. A grant that provides funding for, say, four years would need to be renewed in the third year. And if they can’t do that, people must be let go quickly — which almost always means junior members of the lab. Peter Jacobs, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is unsure whether Department of Energy and National Science Foundation grants that help fund his program will be renewed; he’s not certain he can keep on his three postdocs, all of whom are already looking at other positions, including in Europe or Asia.

At Fort Lewis College in Colorado, where nearly 40 percent of the student population identifies as Native American, one researcher said he and his colleagues were told not to bother submitting a renewal application for an N.I.H.-associated grant that funds increased representation in the biomedical sciences and that has helped at least a dozen Native Americans earn Ph.D.s in the past 15 years. The Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University was expecting $7 million in National Science Foundation funding meant to train scientists and engineers with autism, but those awards have been rejected or are in limbo. “It is heartbreaking having to tell these students — who have persisted through challenges throughout their lives for the opportunity to apply their talents for their own careers but also for their country — that they aren’t so valued after all,” said Keivan Stassun, an astrophysics professor and the center’s founding director.

America had also been an attractive destination for science because of its express support for free inquiry — the ability of researchers to study what mattered most to them, even if there wasn’t a straight path to success and profit. That commitment appears to be crumbling. “I mourn a world in which science must defend itself through its end products, rather than its underlying search for truth and beauty,” said Daniel Bauman, a 25-year-old Stanford University graduate student studying evolution. “When efficiency is mandated, current and future careers are lost or abandoned. If science funding is made contingent on immediately beneficial results, who will be left to tell the story of nature? Will anyone even be listening?”

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 13/03/2025

Whatever else is going on, we've been getting some great data, and the world outside looks golden. Feeling grateful.

photo of the sunset in Minneapolis. an art museum, classroom, and the west bank skyline are visible.

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 19/01/2025

one of those days you could just leave your enzymes outside and they'd be fine

weather info in minneapolis, currently -24°C

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 02/04/2024

the world if we only worried about this stuff during official "worrying about stuff" hours

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 13/01/2024

at least we get this gem of reporting

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 12/01/2024

bizarre how the courts just roll over to enforce laws. gotta get rid of that loophole

“The courts have been really weak on this,” Kirk told the America Fest crowd. “Federal courts just yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it's the actual American Constitution.” The law is ultimately a way to “re-found the county” and “a way to get rid of the First Amendment,” according to Kirk.

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 10/01/2024

it's actually stupider than that: she didn't provide it in terms of "all other names you've used." the party of oppressive bureaucracy

context from https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/transgender-ohio-house-candidate-disqualified-for-not-listing-birth-name-loses-appeal/ar-AA1mI7q9
key line:
Last week, the board cited a rarely-invoked state law requiring anyone who files to run for public office in Ohio to list both their current name and any other names they went by in the past five years, with the exception of people who changed their name after getting married and/or any state or local elected officials who previously complied with the law.

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 01/01/2024

oh, so *that's* what we should call Parable of the Sower. Happy 2024 everybody :)))

excerpt from Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler 1993)

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Sunday, July 21, 2024
[...]
We got up early this morning because we had to go across town to church. Most Sundays, Dad holds church services in our front rooms. He’s a Baptist minister, and even though not all of the people who live within our neighborhood walls are Baptists, those who feel the need to go to church are glad to come to us. That way they don’t have to risk going outside where things are so dangerous and crazy. It’s bad enough that some people—my father for one—have to go out to work at least once a week. None of us goes out to school any more. Adults get nervous about kids going outside.

But today was special. For today, my father made arrangements with another minister—a friend of his who still had a real church building with a real baptistery.

Dad once had a church just a few blocks outside our wall. He began it before there were so many walls....

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 13/10/2023

If you live in one of these states, ESPECIALLY consider telling your senator and other reps to fight this. it's pretty easy: act.eff.org/action/tell-...

Cosponsor Date Cosponsored
Sen. Lujan, Ben Ray [D-NM]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Baldwin, Tammy [D-WI]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Klobuchar, Amy [D-MN]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Peters, Gary C. [D-MI]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Hickenlooper, John W. [D-CO]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Warner, Mark R. [D-VA]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Coons, Christopher A. [D-DE]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Schatz, Brian [D-HI]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Murphy, Christopher [D-CT]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Welch, Peter [D-VT]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Hassan, Margaret Wood [D-NH]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Durbin, Richard J. [D-IL]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Casey, Robert P., Jr. [D-PA]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI]* 05/02/2023
Sen. Kelly, Mark [D-AZ] 06/06/2023
Sen. Manchin, Joe, III [D-WV] 06/13/2023
Sen. Carper, Thomas R. [D-DE] 07/20/2023
Sen. Kaine, Tim [D-VA] 07/26/2023
Sen. Cardin, Benjamin L. [D-MD] 07/26/2023
Sen. Shaheen, Jeanne [D-NH] 07/26/2023
Sen. Menendez, Robert [D-NJ] 07/27/2023
Sen. Warren, Elizabeth [D-MA] 09/27/2023

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 25/09/2023

trivia question of the day: what are these for? they're everywhere in lab, too small for pipettes... maybe tubing? 🤔 🧪

jackson immuno research branded stick-on thing mounted above the bench. there are like 8 of them around my lab

jackson immuno research branded stick-on thing mounted above the bench. there are like 8 of them around my lab. there is a red thing that can be pushed up next to some printed bits that say "out"

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 21/09/2023

my new intro to every c. elegans story 🪱🔬

meme:
(pic of clouds over ocean) the wild blue yonder
Almost makes you feel... insignificant, doesn't it?
(pic of earthworm in dirt)
NOW,
check out this worm
*Also impressive*
what arrogance hath man

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 21/09/2023

oh dang, good reminder

google calendar for th 9/21 with day long event "chase the clouds away"

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 18/09/2023

I can't believe my single molecule data is a Klee reference

grayscale image of a single fluorescent molecule. it appears as a noisy set of pixels with intensity distributed as a 2D Gaussian peak, similar to the intersecting gray levels of the Klee painting

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 17/09/2023

I really wish we could get to the 200-level topics already. there are so many juicy connections to draw

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 04/09/2023

still enjoying the high of this one (and not expecting to repeat it anytime soon)

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 03/09/2023

holy crap. the human eternal germline went down to ~1280 people, less than 10^6 years ago?? and persisted like that for more than 10^5 years??? w o w

title of article in Science dated 31 aug 2023: "Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition."

Editor’s summary

Today, there are more than 8 billion human beings on the planet. We dominate Earth’s landscapes, and our activities are driving large numbers of other species to extinction. Had a researcher looked at the world sometime between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, however, the picture would have been quite different. Hu et al. used a newly developed coalescent model to predict past human population sizes from more than 3000 present-day human genomes (see the Perspective by Ashton and Stringer). The model detected a reduction in the population size of our ancestors from about 100,000 to about 1000 individuals, which persisted for about 100,000 years. The decline appears to have coincided with both major climate change and subsequent speciation events. —Sacha Vignieri

Abstract

Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event.

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 01/09/2023

among other things, I'm delighted to report that "Precinct 41 Major Crime Unit" sounds like British Sea Power scoring a cowboy film

the outer jacket of the disco elysium soundtrack album. it shows the full thought cabinet background art and a tracklist.

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 22/08/2023

the poster I'm imagining

the poster for Antonioni's Blow-Out (1966) where the text is replaced with Make-Out

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 19/08/2023

reminds me of how I wanted to do a rundown of the inadvertently horny hobby shops on my block. this kind of thing

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 19/08/2023

wow Muzak® really IS the music of the 80s

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 19/08/2023

just one bike ride and two stops. 😭 my mental health is improving at breakneck pace now that I live somewhere I don't have to drive to have nice things (cc @weinberz.witchlab.org)

finds from the farmers' market and liquor store: strawberries, multicolored grape tomatoes, peanut brizzle, kale, sweet peas, records (Muzak, Holst), local rose gin, mango 막걸리

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 08/08/2023

the followup 😭

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 07/08/2023

she finally found her spot ☺️

a small pot of english ivy directed along a narrow windowsill, seen from inside

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 05/08/2023

thanks for the check-up; I'm feeling much better. also,

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lexy @lvdlab.org · 05/08/2023

still getting used to this app but I like the ethos I'm seeing

a screenshot of a bluesky conversation about being normal #onhere that involves the phrase "i have the type of memes that make you wanna Suck Toes"

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