Ran Blekhman @blekhman Twitter profile

Pinned Tweet

Ran Blekhman

1 year

Mother’s milk is a critical, dynamic biological system We show that maternal genetics controls milk gene expression and composition, which in turn shape the infant gut microbiome Our latest, led by @kelsey_EJ , great collab w/ @frankwalbert @DemerathE

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Last Seen Profiles

@OskarLBender

@selipse4

@fandetv

@anomaly8_3

@teknopartija

@mei_gbp

@Mirage_amuro

@demianvonosten

@professortax

@StrawbeeJasmin

@its_carrie2685

@VMI1839

@Elon_musk_x156

@SaulatFatimi

@CorpoelecInfo

@Mamannet3

@pillarsfc

@saviorcomplex_x

@BTPScotland

@seth_mgreen

@Rapgbee

@CITYBOYS_ikuta

@sp_automation

@WisethugTV

@pohrous

@dagospia3

@MasonSoftball

@hijiya_ryo

@hazalhms

@Xenseiai

@kyhsbca

@xiaoooo21

@CinemaTRE

@andrii_soloviov

@celltinels

@Xenseiai

Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

5 years

Congratulations, you invented taxes and public education

The New York Times

@nytimes

5 years

Silicon Valley is backing a novel idea: Instead of charging students tuition, students go to school for free and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation, but only if they get a job with a good salary

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Elon Musk

Abeba Birhane

@Abebab

3 years

What's something that seems scientific but isn't?

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Do US citizens understand how stressful it is to be an immigrant scientist in the US? Far from family/friends, never ending visa bureaucracy & payments, constant fear of not being allowed back in the US, or being forced to leave your home/job/PhD due to some ban

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

As a professor at a public university, my job is 60% research, 20% teaching, 20% service, 20% paperwork, 20% grant writing, 20% mentoring, 10% reviewing, 5% organizing, and 5% letter writing, so there's really not a lot of time for radical left indoctrination

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Stuck at home with small kids due to #COVID19 ? Here are some fun activities you can enjoy together: - Write a research paper - Teach a class via zoom - Write a grant proposal - Email

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

My biologist origin story is that when I was a young child I found out I was fascinated by grant applications

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

reading about people taking ivermectin for covid and the stories are really heartworming

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

telling students in my class about the history of genomics

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Just got an email that one of my grants got an automatic 1 year no-cost extension, without even requesting it, due to #COVID19 Grant admins and funding agencies: this is a great way to support your investigators during this crisis

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Basically how machine learning works

Massimo

@Rainmaker1973

4 years

The story of Nigel Richards, the man from New Zealand who memorized every French word in the French scrabble dictionary and won the French Scrabble Championship without speaking any French

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

7 years

There's no cure for polio. There's a highly effective vaccine. This vaccine, by the way, was developed by a son of immigrants.

Gov. Mike Huckabee

@GovMikeHuckabee

7 years

Take on 4 big diseases that cost the BULK of $$: Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers, diabetes; find CURES like we did with polio in 50's.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

I am not an expert in epidemiology or virology, have never researched vaccination strategies, and find immunology uninterpretable, but here is my thoughts on whether we should delay the 2nd vaccine dose (1/79)

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

If you are annoyed by being called a trainee as a PhD student, wait till you're a professor and still called "early career" in your 40s

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Just did the calculation: my household has saved $4,932 by not paying for parking on campus over the last 18 months The university parking system -- making employees pay large amounts to park at work -- is a scam, plain and simple

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Not to mention a constant uphill battle to advance your career. You think writing papers or giving talks is hard? Try doing it in a different language. Oh, and you're ineligible for most fellowships and funding opportunities

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Why does every computer science professor have a webpage that looks like it was built in 1995 by writing HTML from scratch?

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

1 year

Breakdown of PhD student cost on a grant: tuition $45K stipend $35K fringe $10K indirects $60K -- total paid by NIH to university: $150K total paid by university to student: $35K (this is just a toy example to illustrate a point, not real numbers but same ballpark)

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

The first 90% of a paper takes 90% of the work. The remaining 10% of a paper accounts for the other 90% of the work.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

1 year

New proposed postdoc salary scale in the Boston area, based on data from a salary and benefits survey

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Work from home update -- Number of papers I've read: 0 Number of times I've watched Frozen 2: 137

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Imagine a job where once you're hired your boss says "welcome! Now go do whatever you want. We'll check back in 5 years, and then either fire you or give you the job for life"

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Received dozens of replies that say "go back to your country, free up your job for Americans" If I go, I take my lab with me. This not only won't free up jobs, but would actually take away several job opportunities for Americans. (Also I'm not going anywhere)

Theodore Beza

@theodore_beza

4 years

@blekhman Time to relieve your stress. Return to your country of origin. Use your skills to help develop your own country. There you will live close to your family and within your traditions and culture. Especially during this time of high unemployment, we need those jobs for Americans.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

As a reviewer, my goal is to find critical flaws, not to "improve" the paper. Every paper can be improved in 100 different ways, many of them subjective. The authors have already decided they're happy with the paper as is. A reviewer is not a co-author or a collaborator.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Strong move by University of Minnesota President. This is the type of leadership we need - I support @JoanGabel .

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

A gentle reminder that graduate students who are immigrants/international are ineligible for the GRFP -- just like they're excluded from almost all other graduate and postdoc fellowships in the US.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Mind blowing. The FTO gene is associated with obesity in humans. Plants don't have a homolog. What happens when you transgenically express the human FTO in plants? Giant potatoes and rice

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Both of these can be true: 1. Grad students and postdocs are underpaid 2. Faculty are underpaid Instead of fighting each other, faculty and trainees should work together to raise salaries in academia

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Incoming PhD students: joining a new PI's lab as their first graduate student could be one of your best career choices. Lots of 1:1 mentoring, seeing how a lab is built first hand, tons of other advantages. The opposite of a red flag.

𝘿𝙧. 𝘾𝙧𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙡 𝙍𝙤𝙜𝙚𝙧𝙨 ≽(◕ ᴗ ◕)≼ 🐥🐸

@RogersLabUCD

3 years

Imposter syndrome is hitting hard this morning. I recently found out that graduate students have been told by more established PIs that I am a “red flag” because I have not yet secured external funding and because I haven’t recruited other graduate students. 1/

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

In my experience a CNS is required for a faculty position, so far I haven't seen anyone hired without a central nervous system

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

It sucks not being able to visit your family Just ask immigrant scientists who haven't seen their family in years because of visa issues & costs, and the very real possibility they would not be allowed back in the country It's time to fix the US visa system

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Instead of saying "they got covid despite of being vaccinated", say "they got covid with only mild/no symptoms thanks to being vaccinated" 👍

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

If you ever read a paper and get to a part where you ask yourself "why is this part even here? Seems unrelated to the rest of the paper" the answer is almost always "because a reviewer asked for it"

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 months

Weird getting an email with a $10K bill for a journal publication fee, followed by an email requesting to review a paper for the same journal for free. Feels like being a victim in some kind of a pyramid scheme

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

7 years

RT if you went to a public school and was never attacked by a bear #DeVosHearing

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

#FireFauci implies the existence of an Earth Fauci and a Wind Fauci

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Kamala Harris's mother immigrated from India to pursue a PhD & stayed to work as a cancer researcher Kamala Harris's father immigrated from Jamaica to pursue a PhD & stayed to work as a professor Not sure if they would have been able to do this under the current administration

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Is it just me? When I complete a task and realize it was not on my to-do list, I add it to the list so I can immediately check it off.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

There's a confusion, seems that Pence was referring to a different company, Pfizer Total Landscaping

Geoff Bennett

@GeoffRBennett

3 years

As Pence claims credit, Pfizer says it did NOT join in the administration's partnership. Pfizer head of vaccine development Dr. Kathrin Jansen told the NY Times: “We were never part of the Warp Speed ... We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone.”

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

📢Big news: my lab is moving to @UChicago ! I'm thrilled to join the superb genomics and microbiome research community at UChicago, and beyond excited about new research directions and collaborations! And we're recruiting at all levels! 👇

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

1 year

Research labs at UChicago tonight

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

6 years

I can't even read a paper every 5 days

Eric Topol

@EricTopol

6 years

Publish a paper every 5 days?! Profile of the 9000 hyper-prolific researchers @NatureNews by John Ioannidis @METRICStanford @StanfordMed R Klavans K Boyack #OA

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

About 50% of my lab's collaborative papers started from discussions in in-person conferences So far we have 0 new collaborations that started in a virtual conference Not saying virtual meetings don't have advantages, but for driving collaborative science, in-person >>> virtual

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Wow -- faculty are 25 times more likely to have a parent with a PhD. Almost 50 times more likely in "prestigious universities"

@aaronclauset.bsky.social

@aaronclauset

3 years

1/ New preprint! The “Socioeconomic Roots of Academic Faculty,” with @alliecmorgan @laberge_nick @DanLarremore Mirta Galesic: We surveyed 7000 U.S. faculty from 8 disciplines to study how socioeconomic status shapes the academic workforce. 🪴 A summary:

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Really appreciate editors who, when sending you back the reviews for your paper, also include a summary of critical points to address -- and more importantly, points you _don't_ have to address, despite what reviewer 3 says

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

6 years

If there is a single advice I can give to grad students it will be this: Back up your computer. Every file. At least daily. In multiple locations. One of which is off-site or in the cloud.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Dear reviewers: please stop asking for RNA-seq data to be confirmed with qRT-PCR If the RNA-seq experiment is well-designed w/enough replicates and depth, the qPCR results wouldn't matter. And if the RNA-seq experiment is not well-designed, the qPCR results wouldn't matter

闵娅 (Min Ya | Minya), PhD

@0_minyaaa

4 years

Oops, being asked to confirm #RNAseq results with #qRT -PCR again by a reviewer. Although I have, um (check notes), EIGHT biological replicates per developmental stage. 😬

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Transitioning between scientific fields is challenging but twitter just did a seamless transition from epidemiology to explosives research

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

As a scientist, the best thing to hear from a colleague is "we discussed your paper in journal club and everyone liked it". Makes my day every time

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

An example of how useful twitter can be as a tool for scientists: After posting a postdoc ad here 4 days ago I've seen thousands of people visiting our lab website (100x more than usual) from all over the world. I did not post an ad anywhere else.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

16 years ago I moved to the U.S. to start grad school. Today I became a citizen 🇺🇸

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Wow, how did you get all of them in one zoom call

Dakota Smith

@weatherdak

4 years

Every Atlantic hurricane since 2017.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

This proves my hypothesis that not _everyone_ has imposter syndrome

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

This is taking off so on a serious note, a request: if you are evaluating colleagues for tenure/ promotion in the coming year, please be kind and mindful of this weird situation we are all living through

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

how it started, how it's going

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

6 years

To the reporters looking for comments on the space twin study: 1. There's no study, just a press release. 2. Changes are in RNA levels, not DNA (unless he came back as a different species) 3. Is this 7% difference a lot? No - literally everything causes changes in RNA levels

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

this street though

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Types of peer review: 1) 3 anonymous scientists write secret reviews in a process that takes a few months 2) dozens of known experts write comments that anyone in the world can see hours after a paper is posted (e.g this thread 👇) Explain to me again why is 1 >> 2?

Trevor Bedford

@trvrb

4 years

Based on the content of my mentions, I feel like I need to further debunk crazy #nCoV2019 / HIV conspiracy preprint. This is a thread doing so. 1/9

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

You think professors are scatterbrained or have a bad memory? Ask them about their grad school rejections from 30 years ago

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

Analysis of DNA methylation across 580 (!) animal species

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

If you were a professor of virology when the pandemic started, by now you either have 100,000 followers or you deleted your account

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

These are the most common questions about scientists?? I'll try to answer: no no no no no no no no no yes

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

How do bacteria and host genes interact in the gut? How do these interactions change across disease? We integrating microbiome and host RNA-seq data to find out! Our latest is now out @NatureMicrobiol :

Identification of shared and disease-specific host gene–microbiome associations across human...

Nature Microbiology - A machine learning framework for integrating multi-omic high-dimensional datasets identified disease-specific and shared host gene–microbiome associations across three...

www.nature.com

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Something that's almost never discussed here, and maybe should be: the experiences of trainees when the PI moves to another institution or leaves academia.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 months

"How did this get past the reviewers??" I am again asking that we stop blaming reviewers for bad papers. Reviewers spend time & effort with no compensation, and their suggestions are often overlooked. The people responsible are those who actually wrote the paper -- the authors

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

6 years

Say you pick 100 random bioinformatics software tools -- how many will you actually be able to access, install, and run? Our new paper:

Serghei Mangul #UkraineWillWin 🇺🇦🇲🇩🇺🇸

@serghei_mangul

6 years

1/5 Our preprint about software crisis in computational biology is live! We have performed a review of usability and archival stability of published omics tools and resources. We have found that 28% of the tools are impossible to install.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

7 months

Unpopular opinion (?): universities, scientific societies, and journals don't need to have a position or comment on geopolitical events All they should do is offer support to those impacted, and allow their members to express their opinions without fear of retaliation

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." - E. O. Wilson

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

Yes -- give every PhD a green card! This is exactly what the U.S needs to do to be competitive again for international scientists

Karin Fischer

@karinfischer

2 years

The America COMPETES Act would exempt STEM PhD graduates from green-card caps, effectively stapling a green card to the doctoral diploma of every international student in STEM. It also would charge these applicants an extra fee to fund scholarships for U.S. STEM students 2/

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Just checked the twitter bylaws and it is indeed required that a "CNS paper for faculty position" discussion is always followed by a "working on weekends" discussion

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

7 years

OK, this is going too far

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

I don’t get the concern about scientists moving to industry. 1. Having more career options is good for everyone! 2. It’s not like there’s a shortage of brilliant scientists who want a career in academia

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Every BioRxiv preprint includes a warning that it "has not been certified by peer review", but PNAS contributed papers have no disclaimer? How about "This paper has been through a fake peer review process to achieve the illusion of validity; skepticism is advised"

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

Thinking about all the international/immigrant scientists who haven't seen their family in years and had to cancel travel plans yet again this year. Such a discouraging situation.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

6 years

Looking at the full range of GRE scores --> no correlation between GRE and graduate outcomes

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Definitely happy that I finally caved in and got TSA precheck in November 2019 in anticipation for all the upcoming travel in 2020

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

6 years

Can we agree on this: if you think NSF is wasteful you should stop using things that were created using NSF funding. Like the internet.

Rand Paul

@RandPaul

6 years

1. On page 207. 2000+ pages to go! Reading about the ever wasteful $6 billion National Science Foundation.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Impressive new results on COVID19 showing that 28% of the population are susceptible to trusting numbers reported in a tweet with no citation or link

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

A question I hear a lot is "what does a normal day of being a prof feels like?" This video perfectly answers it:

Simon Clavet

@profbof

4 years

@_Quazi_ @anorangeduck (3/5) After a day of training, he can withstand significant perturbations (but sometimes you just get too many cubes in the face…):

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

5 years

Dear editor, we have addressed reviewer 2's concerns and have revised figure 1 as requested

Mark Lisseman

@marklisseman

5 years

Is that diagram… accurate??

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

📣Postdoc positions available in my lab! Research at the interface of microbiome + human genomics. Exciting projects and collaborations, wonderful place to live, lots of flexibility (remote work ok) Informal inquiries welcome - email/DM me. Please RT!

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

FYI, all immigrants to the US are *required* to have these vaccines: Mumps Measles Rubella Polio Tetanus and diphtheria Pertussis Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) Hepatitis A Hepatitis B Rotavirus Meningococcal disease Varicella Pneumococcal disease Seasonal influenza

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

How heritable is the gut microbiome? What influences its heritability? Our latest, where we answer these questions using >16,000 microbiome profiles from wild baboons Work by @ferocious_sloth , wonderful collab with @ArchieLab @jtung5 @AmboseliBaboons

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 months

In -omics studies, understudied genes are systematically abandoned in favor of better-studied genes in the paper writing stage

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

So far, the only concrete steps by the federal government to fight COVID: 1) ban H1B and J1 visas 2) do less testing 3) cancel a funded NIH grant for bat coronavirus research Did I miss anything?

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 months

Mother's milk is often the sole source of nutrition for the baby. Milk also contains diverse bacterial communities -- but how to these bacteria impact the infant gut microbiome? Our latest:

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

We keep hearing that it's critical to take a long break after grad school So this is a gentle reminder that many can't do this, either because they don't have the financial ability to not work, or they're immigrant scientists whose legal visa status relies on employment

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Cool new paper with associations between gut microbes and specific dietary components Top associated foods: 1. Coffee 2. Unsalted nuts 3. Dark chocolate

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Very strange -- ordered some shrink-wrapped dead cats as usual, but instead got a bunch of conical tubes??? WTF

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Unpopular opinion: graphical abstracts are great! A good graphical abstract can be the most useful visual in a paper

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Confession: I don't really care about the origin of covid and whether or not it's a "lab leak" We should shift the discussion to the U.S fumbled response that lead to 600,000 dead and how we avoid this in future pandemics, which are definitely coming -- lab leak or otherwise

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

Comparing preprints to their final published versions: - 93% of articles do not change their main conclusions - only 1 out of 184 published papers contradicted a conclusion made by its preprint

Tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints in the biomedical sciences are being posted and accessed at unprecedented rates, but can we trust them? This study reveals that the majority of preprints...

journals.plos.org

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

5 years

Famous senior dude at a fancy university: "I don't know why you young folks are complaining about funding, when I started as PI the first 5 grant proposals I wrote were all funded on first try" Me:

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

profs emailing “sorry for the late reply” to each other

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

2 years

I've heard academics complain about almost everything imaginable, but I've never heard anyone complain that a talk was too short

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

Of course universities are happy to give tenure clock extension -- they get another year of highly productive junior faculty at much lower salary. Another option is to have it on time, with promotion & tenure committees adjusting their expectations.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

5 years

back up your computer

Giles Paley-Phillips

@eliistender10

5 years

Your best advice in 4 words or less

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

7 months

I've said it before, but a major issue with the current peer review system is that reviewers think their goal is to "improve" a paper that has no critical flaws and can be published as is

Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

4 years

As a reviewer, my goal is to find critical flaws, not to "improve" the paper. Every paper can be improved in 100 different ways, many of them subjective. The authors have already decided they're happy with the paper as is. A reviewer is not a co-author or a collaborator.

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Ran Blekhman

@blekhman

3 years

Reminded of advice I received as a junior PI: Them: Just write a strong grant proposal and it will be funded! Me: But my proposals are not funded Them: That means they're not strong enough! Me: How can I tell that a proposal is strong enough? Them: Because it will be funded!

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