Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 4h

Tax incentives for folks who have children directly support those children bc, again, kids cannot work. Comparing children to owning property says more about you than any other weird links u try to dredge up

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 5h

There was some standup that popped into my insta feed that was similar to this. "I wike peanut butter n beef. Wanna see my muscles?" Can't seem to find it, but the 6-year old voice sold it.

Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Nicole Chung @nicolechung.bsky.social · 5h

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead

Every name on a list compiled by health authorities in Gaza of the child victims of Israel’s offensive

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

April Wei @aprilwei.bsky.social · 8h

Excited to preprint our latest work (w/ Drew DeHaas, Zhibai Jia, Leo Speidel) on using ARGs for demographic inference. w/ applications using data from 1000 Genomes Project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Inference of complex demographic history using composite likelihood based on whole-genome genealogies

Accurate parametric inference on complex demographic models is a continuing challenge in population genetics. Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) provide richer information than simple population ge...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

April Wei @aprilwei.bsky.social · 8h

Method works from simple and complex scenarios in jointly estimating epoch time, population size, migration rate (symmetric or asymmetric), growth rate, and admixture proportion. Software integrated with msprime, demes, tsinfer/tsdate, relate, and singer. github.com/aprilweilab/...

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 5h

Hey Tom, do children incur extra financial costs? Also, can children work? Thx.

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

PUMPKIN SPICE SLUGGO @saintsluggo.bsky.social · 7h

Holy shit, AI can do my job after all. I work in retail and I lie to people all the time to make them stop bothering me.

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

ghost malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social · 7h

New Normal Men! @golikehellmachine.com returns to tell us about Portland, we break down the shutdown, and @ed3d.net talks @rickywlmsbong.bsky.social into buying Hades 2.

Episode 27 - Frog in the Streets and a Freak in the Sheets

Podcast Episode · Normal Men · 10/08/2025 · 1h 2m

podcasts.apple.com

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 9h

The elimination of USAID is a moral atrocity and all involved made a choice to enable, and then lie about, ending the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) - Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family's food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food.
On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher's little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: "No one has died" because of his government's decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: "No children are dying on my watch."
That, Taher says, "is a lie."

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 1d

Right? The blog does an -excellent- job of walking through results.

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 1d

This paper is bananas and shows there is still so much to be learned about gradient descent behavior. [ODEs are so hot right now]

centralflows.github.io

Understanding Optimization in Deep Learning with Central Flows

centralflows.github.io

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 1d

Yesterday's Academic Senate meeting was amazing. Zoom was at capacity, and once I was finally able to join, I was met with a unified front and consistent message from faculty. We fully reject this compact!

I'm sure the board of trustees will recc the right decision

www.latimes.com/california/s...

USC faculty members denounce Trump compact that would shift university to the right

The USC Academic Senate held a special meeting to discuss the Trump administration's education compact, which was presented to the school last week.

www.latimes.com

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Siva @sivav.bsky.social · 1d

I wrote about the “compact” for higher education

newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down

How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

newrepublic.com

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Megan Dennis @mydennis.bsky.social · 1d

Happy to share work spearheaded by former grad student Colin Shew testing shared duplicated cis regulatory elements (CREs) using an MPRA. While we find some high effect CREs, collectively paralog differences represent modest effects accounting for observed gene expression divergence.

bioRxiv Genomics @biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · 3d

Influence of cis-regulatory elements on regulatory divergence in human segmental duplications https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.03.680410v1

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Edda Schulz @eddaschulz.bsky.social · 2d

⚠️ Paper alert: Using a novel CRISPR screening approach, we mapped the entire regulatory network controlling Xist—key for X-chromosome inactivation.
👉 We discover how sex and development signals are decoded at a single gene locus.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
👇 Bluetorial

Reporter CRISPR screens decipher cis-regulatory and trans-regulatory principles at the Xist locus - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology

Here Schwämmle et al. develop CRISPR reporter screens to map transcription-factor-regulatory element interactions at the Xist locus, revealing a two-step mechanism integrating developmental and X-dosage signals to initiate X-chromosome inactivation.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Jonathan Pritchard @jkpritch.bsky.social · 1d

Another possible topic is that we typically hire 1-2 postdocs per year. This year I'd like to add at least one person with functional genomics/single cell/perturb-seq interests, especially relating to immune cells. Our broader lab interests are in popgen and complex traits.

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 2d

The NYC Bar has issued an opinion concluding that the Trump-ordered attacks on Venezuelan fishing boats constitute unlawful summary executions. This is a very big deal. And it explains why the DOD can't find lawyers to say the attacks are lawful. www.nycbar.org/press-releas...

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 1d

I am proud of MIT, where our branch of AAUP has voted unanimously to endorse this statement urging MIT leadership and the MIT Corporation to reject the Compact wholesale
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Letter Regarding Compact

MIT Chapter of the American Association of University Professors October 6, 2025 Statement on the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” MIT has been invited by the federal governmen...

docs.google.com

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Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Elizabeth Atkinson @egatkinson.bsky.social · 2d

Thrilled to share our new @natcomms.nature.com paper on local ancestry informed allele frequencies in gnomAD, which are live now on the browser! Check out my stellar PhD student @pragskore.bsky.social’s Bluetorial on how this brings finer detail to variant interpretation 🧬🖥️

Pragati Kore @pragskore.bsky.social · 2d

📃 We’re excited to share our latest work, now published in Nature Communications — a major update to the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) that improves allele frequency resolution for two gnomAD-defined genetic ancestry groups using local ancestry inference (LAI).

Improved allele frequencies in gnomAD through local ancestry inference - Nature Communications

This study incorporates local ancestry into the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) to improve allele frequency estimates for admixed populations, enhancing variant interpretation and enabling more accurate and equitable genomic research and clinical care.

www.nature.com

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 2d

Floating point arithmetic?

Reposted by Nicholas Mancuso

Gen Wojcik @genandgenes.bsky.social · 2d

Are you going to #ASHG2025 next week in Boston? Interested in getting some mentorship from leading figures in the field (and me)?

Check out our speed mentoring event on Thursday! Sign-ups are online so reserve a spot ASAP.

site.pheedloop.com/event/ASHG25...

PheedLoop

PheedLoop: Hybrid, In-Person & Virtual Event Software

site.pheedloop.com

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 3d

Holy moly this is the vermouth to get y'all. Kings won, letting that vibe continue

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 5d

Imagine how much more annoying I could be if I had a cuica drum

Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 5d

Okay I think its time to finally upgrade my laptop from Big Sur. Slack won't load anymore :(

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Nicholas Mancuso @nmancuso.bsky.social · 5d

Silence is the bare minimum. We should be rejecting these demands in clear terms

The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 5d

The Trump administration offered a select group of universities the opportunity to score priority access for federal funding.

Many of those schools were largely silent, as they considered the conservative terms that could upend university life.

Colleges weigh whether to sign onto Trump plan or forgo federal benefits

A new proposal from the Trump administration would give colleges funding advantages if they adopt conservative priorities.

www.washingtonpost.com

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