Michael Baym

New preprint on the limits of detecting higher-order interactions in microbial communities.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We find that the dominance of additive and pairwise interactions on community function may not reflect biological simplicity, but fundamental limits of statistical detection.

Oof

If you’re roughly my age, it’s wild to reflect on the optimism for the future Americans felt when Obama was elected — young Americans spontaneously took to the streets to celebrate! — and contrast with what we face today. The falloff over the past 18 years is hard to process.

Sabotaging the NSF fellowship is a blunder Over the last year, the Trump administration has sent one discouraging message after another to young people aspiring to a scientific career in the United States. The corrosive rhetoric that mocks sci...

There is no logic behind cutting NSF fellowships. None.

Sabotaging the NSF fellowship is a blunder | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

So it wasn't about waste and efficiency, eh? It was about firing all the well qualified people of color and to replace them with mediocre white doods.

Ambient RNA & barcode swapping is a serious issue in single-cell genomics. Tools such as CellBender, scAR, DecontX & SoupX. We have developed CellSweep which is faster (in some cases by a lot) and much more accurate. Extensively tested and benchmarked. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

the most annoying shift in my academic career

Not just any AI company, one whose explicit mission is cheating. I don’t know what investors expected

Possibly once councils meet that some of these (especially the single digit) will turn into NOAs eventually. Its not possible to plan anything on 'eventually' - projects/labs just stagnate because you don't want to hire, put out resources only to find out the grant won't be funded.

Yup, this is actively happening to every PI I know.

Below 10% paylines, you could apply 15 times - once per cycle, every cycle before your R01 lapses - and have <80% chance of getting 1 grant funded.

That's for 100% funding probablity at 10th percentile. 2025 was 50% probability at 10th percentile.

Unsustainable.

Lake Wobegone-ass funding lines.

"novel transformer-based model, Popformer, for learning encodings of general patterns of genetic variation...includes site-wise and haplotype-wise attention.... The model is pre-trained with an analog of the masked language modeling objective across a range of real human genomic data"

Does he have to dress like a chef all the time everywhere he goes, like the Mandalorian of gastronomy

Amy Goldberg, PhD - Join The Goldberg lab is moving to UCLA summer 2025, and recruiting postdocs and graduate students. We are a computational lab with occasional wet lab or field collaborators. We will be located in the Depa...

The Goldberg lab at UCLA is hiring one or more postdocs. Flexible start date.

We develop methods to study population genetics of humans, our primate relatives, and our pathogens.

www.goldberglab.org/join

New post-doctoral research position in my phage-host interactions (Phi) laboratory in @otagomicroimmuno.bsky.social at @universityofotago.bsky.social New Zealand. The project is focused on defences against jumbo phages. Please share and if interested apply using the link in the comments.

She’s such a goofball already, I truly can’t wait

Congratulations!!

Seen it on both sides of the political spectrum. Rarely moments of any real authenticity. Gives a distinct ick every time

There’s a specific type of online guy I’m not sure I’ve seen a word for: he picks some issue or group to champion or save and performatively posts about it but his real bit is making a big show of how he’s a victim for his ideological heroism

With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268

The model of unpaid academic labor required good jobs with ample unstructured time.

this seems like something we should be funding

how many were distinct conferences and not recombinants of others

Surprisingly there are only two "All the world's a phage"

Please tell me someone has written a paper about autophagy titled "Caveat mTOR"

A reminder that we are actively recruiting a geneticist to the Department of Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine

careers-einstein.icims.com/jobs/17847/a...

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).

A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

That we can see the asset and target map uncensored and tweeted out strikes me as even worse

However, more than that, he was an incredible mentor, training dozens of grad students and postdocs, many of whom went on to train another generation of scientists. His impact will continue to be felt for decades to come. I miss him, and his memory is a blessing. 2/