Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Arslan Zaidi @aazaidi.bsky.social · 1d

I will presenting a poster on Thursday on our recent work led by Kelsey Johnson (USC, not on Bluesky) on the genetic architecture of mtDNA copy number in human milk! Board #3049T!

2 3

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

PacBio @pacbio.bsky.social · 1d

Ahead of #ASHG25, we’re sharing some great news: South Korea has selected #PacBio HiFi sequencing as the core technology for its National Pangenome Project to generate 1,000+ high quality multi-omic Korean genomes and advance precision medicine.

Read the press release: bit.ly/4omiz06

1 3

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · 9d

So… you put SCalE on the day of a potential game 7 of the world series!?

1 1

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · 10d

Qin shi huang would probably be the most famous for commissioning expeditions to acquire elixirs of immortality, but that's > 2000 years ago, so take it what you will.

www.bbc.com/news/world-a...

How China's first emperor searched for elixir of life

New research shines light on the quest by Qin Shi Huang, who created the terracotta army.

www.bbc.com

2

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · 10d

There were a number of emperors believed to have died from consuming elixir for immortality. The more recent one might be (just so it's a bit more historically recorded, though they are probably still vague in official record): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiajing...

Jiajing Emperor - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

1 2

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · 10d

Sorry for the late reply, you know, it's grant deadline day... if it's still useful, I would look into "The eight immortal" for various folklores and stories of they themselves resurrecting, or resurrecting others. Like:

sacred-texts.com/cfu/mlc/mlc1...

Myths and Legends of China: Chapter XI. The Eight Immortals | Sacred Texts Archive

Confucianism: Either singly or in groups the Eight Immortals, Pa Hsien, of the Taoist religion are one of the most popular subjects of representation in...

sacred-texts.com

2 1 5

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · 15d

If it’s just “desire to escape death” there are plenty of examples in chinese… real emperors in history tried to obtain medicine to live forever, commissioning voyages to seek these meds, some even recorded in history to die from poison of these meds.

1 3

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · 15d

Pretty sure it’s not hard to find, though probably unlikely in english. Let me know if you’d like to know more.

1

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · 15d

There are a number in Chinese stories. The Daoists believed that with enough devotion and training one can become a deity, and associated with that are a number of stories of deities either revived people in act of kindness, or are themselves resurrected to demonstrate their power.

2 1

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Prasad Jallepalli, MD, PhD @prasad.bsky.social · 21d

in retrospect, it was a mistake to teach algebra and geometry but not "statistics for everyone" in high school

we are drowning in lies, partly because we never learned to swim

4 26 110

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 24d

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Within-family heritability estimates for behavioural and disease phenotypes from 500,000 sibling pairs of diverse ancestries

Quantification of the direct effect of genetic variation on human behavioural traits is important for understanding between-individual variation in socio-economic and health outcomes but estimates of ...

www.medrxiv.org

2 44 100

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · 25d

Not sure about this one… & and $ are harder to type. I would just mkdir blah cd bl+ tab

Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 26d

4/
Want to make a folder and go into it?
Don’t do:
mkdir blah
cd blah

Do this instead:
mkdir blah && cd $_

$_ = last argument.

2

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Kirk Lohmueller @klohmueller.bsky.social · 28d

In the midst of the darkness, I am pleased to announce that UCLA will be hosting the upcoming Southern California Evolutionary Genetics (SCalE) conference on November 1! Registration & abstract submission is here: www.scalemeeting.org/home Deadline is October 13! Hope to see you at UCLA!

Home

The SCalE Meeting is a free, one day regional academic meeting focused on evolutionary genetics and genomics. This year's SCalE Meeting is hosted by UCLA, sponsored by the Institute for Quantitative ...

www.scalemeeting.org

2 12 21

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Piali Sengupta @senguptalab.bsky.social · 29d

A huge shoutout to all the dedicated grants management specialists at the NIH who are working around the clock to push grants out before the Sep 30 deadline. And also to the POs responding to frantic emails.
Not an easy job under the best of circumstances and right now it's the pits.
Thank you!

5 94 430

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Yun S. Song @yun-s-song.bsky.social · Sep 11

SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online:

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...

Robust and accurate Bayesian inference of genome-wide genealogies for hundreds of genomes - Nature Genetics

SINGER is a method for creating ancestral recombination graphs to understand the genealogical history of genomes. The method has increased speed, and thus scalability, without sacrificing accuracy.

doi.org

1 52 99

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

PLOS Biology @plosbiology.org · Sep 3

What determines the human gut fungal community? @emilyvansyoc.bsky.social @erdavenport.bsky.social @symbionticism.bsky.social &co present the first #GWAS of human genetic loci that influence the abundance of gut #fungi, linking these to disease risk #mycobiome @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/42bCKou

Human fungi-associated variants (FAVs) associate with 9 fungal taxa and overlap protein-coding genes. A Manhattan plot shows all FAVs and their associated fungal taxa at the three significance levels (exploratory, black; genome-wide, red; study-wide, blue).

13 26

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Chase W. Nelson 倪誠志 @chasewnelson.bsky.social · Sep 3

Announcing SimHumanity, a baseline SLiM 5.0 model of the full human genome, replete with demographic history, autosomes, X/Y, and mtDNA. A shared starting point for reproducible evolutionary simulations. We’d love your feedback! #SLiM #evolution #genomics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

SimHumanity: Using SLiM 5.0 to run whole-genome simulations of human evolution

The reconstruction of human evolutionary history has undergone repeated advances, each made possible by methodological innovations. In recent decades, genetic and genomic data played a central role in...

www.biorxiv.org

22 30

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Erin Goley @goleylab.bsky.social · Aug 17

Beautiful mural honoring Henrietta Lacks painted by Baltimore community members popped up near Hopkins med campus recently.

Colorful mural painted on the side of a building with the likeness of Henrietta Lacks and the words “HeLa” and “Middle East” on it.

2 100 530

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · Aug 15

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

11 110 360

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Denis Mongin @denismongin.bsky.social · Aug 13

So if you take 1+2+3+4:
--> contact tracing does nothing (inverse swiss cheese as @dcourvoisier.bsky.social says)

But why simulation studies say it should work ?

Because nobody in the simulation studies dares taking number as bad as the reality.

Dear simu friends: consider that life is shitty
6/6

1 3

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · Aug 10

I wrote about how genetic risk works in the context of embryo selection and how people often think about it all wrong. A short 🧵:

What we talk about when we talk about risk

How embryo selection exploits our flawed intuitions about risk

open.substack.com

3 30 75

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · Aug 10

Maybe the level of the worst PhD student ever.

My worry isn’t so much AI can do PhD level work, but mentors will lose the motivation to train students to think, as it may be more efficient to tell AI to execute the analysis without thinking.

Stephen Hill @srhastraea.bsky.social · Aug 9

This is a great read - it nails a whole bunch of ways in which LLMs simply don’t ‘think’, let alone at a ‘PhD level’.

Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · Aug 9

clauswilke.substack.com/p/phd-level-...

1

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · Aug 7

whelp, school is pulling an NIH on us.

morningtrojan.com/p/live-usc-l...

Live: USC layoff and budget cut tracker

Morning, Trojan's live tracker of USC budget cuts and layoffs.

morningtrojan.com

2

Charleston Chiang @charleston.bsky.social · Aug 3

What happens to students and postdocs currently on payroll? Is there bridge funding for them?

1

Reposted by Charleston Chiang

Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · Aug 2

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

Text from an FAQ in Okbay et al 20222:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z
a similar same statement is made in an FAQ in 2025: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653986v1.supplementary-material
Text reads:
"The results of SSGAC studies have sometimes been used by online platforms, including some companies, to predict individual outcomes. We recognize that returning individual genomic “results” can be a fun way to engage people in research and other projects and to feed or stoke their interest in genomics. But it is important that participants/users understand that these individual results are not meaningful predictions and should be regarded essentially as entertainment. Failure to make this point clear risks sowing confusion and undermining trust in genetics research"

8 84 220