🇨🇦 Rob Beiko
Professor (Bioinformatics of Small and/or Fishy Things) in Computer Science at Dalhousie University; environmental 🧬 enthusiast. Trying and failing to not post about politics. he/him
- Scroll down to "A dispatch from the Poilievre campaign" "But the extreme message control makes it all but impossible to bring the same level of accountability to the Poilievre campaign that other campaigns are subject to." www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
- "It also protects the campaign from having to answer tough questions and is a marked departure from previous Conservative campaigns I have covered."
- "After many years of covering election campaigns in Canada, USA and Europe, the Conservative Party of Canada is the most outwardly aggressive and uncivilized that I’ve witnessed." canadianjournalist.ca/poilievre-ca...
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoCBC is public media—owned by Canadians, not the government. If it were propaganda, Poilievre wouldn’t want to kill it—he’d want to use it. CBC holds power to account. That’s why they fear it. #SaveTheCBC #MediaFreedom #CdnPoli #OurVoiceOurCBC
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob Beiko❤️ We don’t care if your gender identity is more free than a fart in a fan factory. Be you, be happy, be free. #colonythatcares
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoInspired by @mark-carney.bsky.social and Canadians everywhere. We’re all fighting back on our home ice!
- Profound question for 12:20 AM: Why, when I ask Midjourney to create an image of Bert from Sesame Street as a visual pun for deep learning, do I get a set of characters that range from "Ernie-ish" to "WTF", but no Bert?
- The Ernie mugshot is especially intriguing.
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoA dangerous precedent. This is a cowardly folding by CTV. The right instigated an online troll attack campaign, offering no evidence of their claims, and the network folded. Viewers and Rachel deserve better.
- I would tell a 21-hour long academic shaggy dog joke. "I can't tell you, you're not a professor"
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoThe latest discovery from the lab and great colleagues at McMaster and U Illinois, Chicago. Lariocidin, a new lasso peptide antibiotic that inhibits the ribosome. rdcu.be/efdha
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoI am I'm this picture and I don't like it
- Political ad, but a good one.
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoLe Monde reporting that a French scientist traveling to Houston to attend a conference was denied entry to US after a search of his phone & computer revealed messages critical of Trump's science cuts, "which [says CPB] conveyed hatred of Trump & could be qualified as terrorism". Computer confiscated
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob Beiko🚨 The Whelan lab is currently recruiting for a 6-week summer undergraduate student as part of the Lister Institute's Summer Studentship scheme. 🚨 The student will work along side a Postdoc to study interactions between pathogens from the cystic fibrosis microbiome. More info & to apply please see:
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob Beiko
- From the Royal Society preprint ferver: "Part of a letter to Dr Sloane, wherein is an account of a Double Pear" "THe Errors of Nature defervedly claim a place in her Hiftory, being of great ufe to illuftrate her Ordinary and more Regular Motions". royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10....
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoThis is sad but true. I need to work to develop a network of friends in real life as my own life starts to change. PS: I am beyond grateful for my electronic friends.
- source .aishrc
- The @nytimes.com just discovered parallel computing.
- I hope you're all having as a good a day as Asymptomatic Guy. (adapted from www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm...)
- Absolute garbage article (not gonna link) in G&Mthis morning about "waaahh leave Musk and Tesla alone". - Intentionally conflates violent anti-Tesla protestors (who should be condemned) with all Tesla opponents - About DOGE: "The worthiness of the quest...should be applauded by all taxpayers"
- And oh yeah, author is identified as a "US-based columnist" without disclosure of extensive business connections in the US.
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob Beiko‘Horizontal ARG transfers deducible from current genome sequence repositories have predominately happened in the human and wastewater microbiomes…and are strongly limited by genetic incompatibility between the hosts’ genomes, the acquired gene & the recipient’s genome’ www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoSo much this!! I feel for our US colleagues, but there are plenty of underemployed or even unemployed scientists, not to mention active researchers experiencing lack of funding in Canada and Europe.
- tracing one worn lie
- How many other "Take normal security precautions" countries are putting Canadians in illegal detention at the border?
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoI'm pleased to introduce our new paper rooting the eukaryote Tree of Life (eToL) that resulted from a collaboration led by PhD student Kelsey Williamson and a large group of collaborators doi.org/10.1038/s415...htt
- www.isthemajorityofcanadianmediastillamericanowned.com YES Guess I'll check again tomorrow.
- Not a real URL as you might have guessed.
- Don't blame me - I voted for Chrétien.
- "I've done everything the Bible says! Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!"
- The latest dodgy proposal floating around is West Virginia's House Joint Resolution 31, which seeks to amend the state constitution to declare the Bible as their foundational document for society and government, and as an accurate record of human and natural history. ncse.ngo/proposal-wes... #nope
- What a time to be alive for now. www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/...
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoJD Vance going at Zelensky over never saying thank you had a major abusive partner in a dysfunctional relationship vibe. I bet he's had practice.
- Is today the worst day so far?
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoThe world has witnessed the most disgraceful political tantrum of all time. Trump is not the leader of the "free world." He is convicted felon who doesn't deserve to be in the same room as President Zelenskyy. There is no going along to get along with this thug. Canada needs to stand with Ukraine.
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoHINTERLAND WHO’S WHO The HRM Pothole Goose in its natural habitat.
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob Beiko
Faculty position opening in bioinformatics at the University of Montreal! There is a great bioinfo and comp bio community in Montreal. www.umontreal.ca/carrieres/pr... - Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoI appreciate how scary it can be for young parents to give their baby vaccines - they hear so much about reactions. But as vaccination rates go down its becoming more and more important to vaccinate to protect your child.
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoThis is AMAZING work
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoNew paper out that (we hope) will be useful to anyone with an interest in Antarctic soil microbial communities: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoOver on LinkedIn, the head of the Executive Secretariat of the NIH -- a central part of NIH leadership 🧪🩺-- resigned with a lettter worth reading www.linkedin.com/posts/nathan...
- Birds, aeroplanes: check Earthquakes, snakes: pending Lenny Bruce: Unavailable for comment (implicitly not afraid)
- "Did someone say banana?"
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoPierre Poilievre’s policy on journalism, in one meme:
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoNew paper! doi.org/10.1098/rsos... Many of the world’s languages are endangered, but how we identify which are endangered is essentially by counting how many people speak that language. …but…
- Meanwhile in Nova Scotia, a government launches multiple attacks on transparency and accountability: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/.... One can only wonder what is behind this level of pettiness and paranoia.
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoWhat a gem the CBC is! Telling our stories. All the time. Everywhere. Poilievre promises to kill the CBC within 100 days and (plausibly) sell-off the radio and TV assets to Musk / Murdoch-type oligarchs? Let's #SavetheCBC & Vote strategically to stop the Cons from winning the next election. #Canada
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoMan who has spent entire political career attacking everybody promises he’ll attack Trump and Elon any minute now
- It's like Trofim Lysenko, but for public health! www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob Beiko'Bob’s true test of a perfectly structured presentation was that the speaker should be able to ditch the PowerPoint slides and successfully deliver the same message using only the blackboard (...) most talks would indeed be better when boiled down to the bare basics: chalk board, presenter, ideas.'
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoAnother wild and crazy mechanism of genetic exchange among bacteria! #MicroSky 🦠🧫🧪🔬🧬
- New mechanism of gene transfer! With @tcostalab.bsky.social @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social, we discovered that cf-PICIs form tail-less elements that, once released, spread among different bacterial species by hijacking tails from various phages. More exciting news soon! shorturl.at/kRJqE
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoSnow makes everything new and different
- I missed the publication of new bacterial kingdom names in IJSEM last year: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... Thus: Bacteria; Bacillati; Bacillota; Bacilli; Bacillales; Bacillaceae; Bacillus. All hail the humble rod/stick.
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoNewly discovered parasitic bacteria of methanogenic Archaea. Interesting stuff, another genome worth digging into. 🦠🧫 #archaeasky www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoJUST IN: Federal judges orders HHS, CDC, and FDA to restore “by no later than 11:59 pm” today their websites and datasets to pre-January 30th status. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
- Canada Research Chair Position in AI + Healthy Aging is closing soon!
- The position is designated for an early-career researcher who is female or gender diverse and identifies as having a disability (see www.dal.ca/dept/hr/empl...). To emphasize: EDI is a core value in our Faculty and will continue to be so, regardless of what people might shout in the wider world.
- Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, so I'll mention that the discipline of metagenomics was founded in large part by brilliant women including Claire Fraser, Jill Banfield, and Jo Handelsman.
- Fraser: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_... Banfield: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jillian... Handelsman: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Hand...
- And of course Joe Felsenstein's 1968 PhD thesis (felsenst.github.io/papers/thesis/), which basically anticipated all of phylogenetics:
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoDiscussing in EVE161 Class today at UC Davis - the sequencing by TIGR of the first genome. www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1.... And so pathetic that AAAS has paywalls for any articles, let alone ones from 1995. So here is a link to a PDF courses.cs.duke.edu/fall22/comps...
- Reposted by 🇨🇦 Rob BeikoA post on #Bioinformatics #History #phylogenetics #DNA #Protein #MultipleSequenceAlignments inspired by @martinsteinegger.bsky.social's post of an old Apple iMac video still able to run some old tools, such as PAUP, MacClade and TreeView.
- Wow, lots of bioinformatics history in my feed today. This coincides with my teaching of fundamentals in class: Smith-Waterman, MSA, PAM matrices, early phylogenetics, etc. I found this article, which is notable for a MAD magazine in the background: academic.oup.com/bib/article/...
- And Pedro's Tools: www.tbi.univie.ac.at/~ivo/rt95.06... which deserves a refresh in my opinion. The Wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... is useful but anemic.
- And even if you jerks forget my birthday AGAIN, 1977 was great for other reasons too: Sanger sequencing, first bacteriophage genome (oops, 1976), and of course Fox and Woese: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/270744/
