Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.
Microbiologist and former science policy fellow. Co-host and co-author of Archaeacast rss.com/podcasts/archaeacast/
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Water your tree.
- Hypersaline ecosystems display remarkable consistency across the world, but how do they change over time? Our new preprint shows off our first foray into investigating this with 16S seq and hydrodynamic modeling in Great Salt Lake during an especially variable water year. tinyurl.com/hc3zkvrf
- One of the more interesting things is seasonal cycling of taxa related to known predators and parasites, a novel observation in hypersaline water! If you know about these bugs, we'd love to hear from you.
- This study was done in collaboration with the Great Salt Lake Institute, students at Westminster U, folks at USGS, and Prof. Som Dutta’s lab at Utah State University.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Some keen Observations in Our October issue! 🦠 Cancer microbiome 🌊 Marine microbes in warming oceans 🌐 broad-range phages 🧬 genetically minimised Salmonella 🔧 Viral infection mechanisms 🧪 Oxaloacetate antiviral defence and more, here: www.nature.com/nmicrobiol/v...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.CoE Deputy Director of Research, @chmoei.bsky.social @medunigraz.at, was on ArchaeaCast! She discussed human #Archaea, why there are no pathogenic Archaea (yet!), and her favorite topic – the human cow 🐄. Tune in! rss.com/podcasts/arc... @fwf-at.bsky.social #archaeasky #microsky
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.We're getting a wave of articles that are like, "gee willikers it sure seems like the people who complained about 'cancel culture' for years really like canceling people." Yes! This was extremely obvious at the time and a lot of us pointed it out!
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.this is the last physics video for a bit. and I didn't even get to do any physics.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Our article on equitable reuse of public sequencing data is out! Led by @alexjprobst.bsky.social, @lhug.bsky.social, Cristina Moraru, @geomicrosoares.bsky.social, @folker.bsky.social and myself -, co-authored by Anke Heyder, and developed in consultation with 167 scientists. tinyurl.com/n6yeanmk
- This new video by @hankgreen.bsky.social is one of the best arguments for better science policy I’ve ever seen. Also I learned a ton about where these autism numbers are coming from. Necessary viewing IMO m.youtube.com/watch?v=BdpS...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.I can't believe I have spent my entire life being told to shut up about feminism and now it's 2025 and women are not allowed to have acetaminophen.
- Instant watch when the nebula notification came through.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change. Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned
- Not an original observation but I’m remembering that he internet is a machine that distributes information, collects every possible take, and delivers the most viral and engagement-baiting ones right to your senses in a death spiral that is driving the world insane.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Here's a new episode of Archaeacast! Listen to @archaealex.bsky.social and Priyanka discuss the many unique viruses which affect Archaea. Afterward Dr. Rachel Whitaker tells us about her labs work investigating these infectious virions! rss.com/podcasts/arc... #SciSky #AcademicSky #Microbiology
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.MAHA gold-standard science. By @glaucomflecken.bsky.social
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.
ArchaeaCast: A podcast about the coolest domain of life: Archaea. rss.com/podcasts/arc... - Back at my old postdoc after my science policy fellowship and, boy lemme tell you, turns out I really do love looking at DNA on the computer and then writing about it.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.The White House is taking new steps to undermine every international student at our universities. It has approved a new rule restricting student visas to 4 years max. That's not long enough for PhD students, or about half of undergrads, to finish their degree. Likely to enter force within days.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Just to give the TL;DR on this one: *The* main purpose of the EO is to move funding priorities and decisions away from experts and career professionals over to political appointees. With the ultimate power held by Vought / OMB.
- This is literally some of the craziest shit I have ever read. And that's saying a lot. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
- Boosting because Drew is brilliant as well as being a very good hang.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Flood risk Thursday bumped to a Level 3 out of 4. NWS warns of localized 8-inch totals possible, with 2-3 inches in an hour in some spots. Details on the rain and heat @ cwg.live.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.The Central Collection of Algal Cultures (CCAC) at @unidue.bsky.social is advertising a 3-year PhD position supervised by the current Curator, Dr. Olga Matantseva! This PhD will take place in close collaboration with the @jgi.doe.gov. 🦠🧬💻 Apply here: www.uni-due.de/karriere/ste...
- Today is my last day as an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow contracting with USDA. I was laid off a month early as part of cost saving efforts. I rolled the dice applying for the fellowship this year and.. wow.. they certainly came up a certain way.
- One thing I can say is that my world is so, so much larger than it was a year ago. New knowledge on agriculture, trade, diplomacy, policy, politics… all now letting me see the world in a deeper and richer way. And the network is invaluable; I’ve met such amazing colleagues in DC and worldwide.
- So while I’m on the books as a continuing finalist, it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll be returning to #archaea genomics research. I’ve missed that community to and I can’t wait to continue to contribute in new and exciting ways.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Everyone is acting like US scientists will just go get science jobs elsewhere and sure some will but there are not anywhere close to enough science jobs elsewhere. The end result of this will be much, much, much less science, not science happening in different places.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.
- Congratulations, Miguel, this is super cool!
- Very happy to share the first publication from my PhD as a preprint!! Are you an archaea enthusiast? A network afficionado? Do you love the cell cycle? If you answered yes to any of those questions this preprint is for you! Little 🧵 (1/11) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Elated to have our pre-print now published in @natcomms.nature.com #ArchaeaSky #Microbiology #MEvoSky rdcu.be/euila Our main results stay the same: S. islandicus follows a cell cycle akin to that of some eukaryotes, like the budding yeast, with cellular processes cycling similarly. old🧵cited below👇
- Very happy to share the first publication from my PhD as a preprint!! Are you an archaea enthusiast? A network afficionado? Do you love the cell cycle? If you answered yes to any of those questions this preprint is for you! Little 🧵 (1/11) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Our preprint on estimating how many more prokaryotic taxa can be discovered in the unbinned fraction of metagenomic samples. We predict that there are 10 archaeal and 145 bacterial novel phyla across all habitats. #MicrobialDarkMatter #TreeOfLife #Microbiome #Archaea #Bacteria #Metagenomics
- Being a scientist on the job market right now means getting bombarded with AI training “jobs” and I cannot emphasize enough how much they need to fuck off. It’s probably 30% of listings on LinkedIn, and I get multiple messages per week (sometimes per day), it’s insane.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Why don’t people who live together have the same strains of microbes? Tami Lieberman (@contaminatedsci.bsky.social) and I put forward one underexplored reason in our new preprint: Intraspecies warfare restricts strain coexistence in human skin microbiomes
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.I'm not pointing fingers at anybody but I do see #USDA left out of a lot of the reporting on cuts to federal research funding, and USDA funds a LOT of research!!! Food safety! Ag sustainability! Making our food supply chains more resilient!!!
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Preprint🚨 #microsky 🦠 “Cultivation of Methanonezhaarchaeia, the third class of methanogens within the phylum Thermoproteota”, authored by @kohtzarchaeota.bsky.social & Sylvia Nupp, expands the diversity of methanogens! 90% enriched, methylotrophic culture from a hot spring. A 🧵 tinyurl.com/yw8ku2bj
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.The real AI arms race is between one another 🥰 nymag.com/intelligence...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.As historian David McCullough expressed in a 2003 interview: “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
- A few months ago, Nature published how-to guide for using ChatGPT to write your peer reviews in 30 minutes. This is, of course, a horrible idea. Here’s my response with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social .
- It was 90 with high humidity at 9 PM in Arlington yesterday, feeling like an actual sauna.
- Heat advisory today, 11a-9p. Lower alert level vs. Mon-Tue but temperatures about the same. Upper 90s to around 100 with heat index approaching 110 in the hottest spots. Details and forecast: www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Just few days left to apply to one of these postdoc positions in my infectious disease modelling Unit at @pasteur.fr in Paris!
- New postdoc positions with a number of exciting epidemic modelling projects opening in our Unit at @pasteur.fr in beautiful Paris. Deadline for applications: 26th June. research.pasteur.fr/en/job/postd...
- It’s 10000% cope; obviously it’s better to live in paradise than to suffer 8-10 months out of the year. That being said, the spring rush IS fucking incredible. Joy is always momentary and comparative and so I get why they say it.
- I’m haunted by John McCain’s ghost. Unbidden, I see him, a rictus grin stretched across his withered face, croaking out the bastardized lyrics of a Beach Boys song.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.When the smoke coming out of the Vatican is black and white checkerboard:
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.I hope everyone knows that it's very easy for any social content platform, including Bluesky, to be a misery machine and that if you aren't intentional about it, they will absolutely decrease the positive impact you have on the world while making you less happy.
- Between the heat and everything else, 🫠 is officially the top of my most-used emoji list.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.The ‘former gifted kid’ discourse is so sad to me. Schools cater to the lowest performers, kids on grade level get told they are just “really smart” instead of an education. Now those kids are adults and feel shame that ‘they used to be smart’ instead of realizing that the the school let them down.
- This but grad school for me. I did quite well at my state undergraduate institution, but grad school was a real kick in the head. Impostor syndrome lessened when I (& the other working class people I gravitated to) realized that the people struggling less had doctor/lawyer parents & knew the rules.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Seriously, they should use pictures of what this actually would look like - elderly people being carried away in an ambulance, or like a friend of mine who lives in a home with flat roof no air con and broken down car having to sit in the bath all day on hot days due to a health condition
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.This *could* have happened but is very unlikely given a) 2 viral lineages at the market b) 0 confirmed cases among lab workers c) No clustering around lab location The entire argument for the lab leak is "it's weird that the virus emerged in a city with a lab" but this scenario is far weirder.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Dear fellow scientists, Please stop doing these smug unhelpful dunks. Don't pretend you don't know what they mean. It's a lazy strawman argument, and this kind of thing confirms all the worst stereotypes of scientists. Keep it in the group chat! Sincerely, PhD chemist and science communicator
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.i hated making this video but not as much as i hate billionaires
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Recently saw someone asking for a "White Mirror" show that would celebrate all the good things that technological advancement can give humanity and, my brother in Kahless, there are ELEVEN Star Trek series and THIRTEEN movies. We're good. We're beyond good. Though I could use more #LowerDecks.
- Paul Dirac was famous for taking his time to think before speaking slowly and deliberately. I read about this as a young teen aspiring scientist and decided it sounded like a good idea. This was not tolerated well by my peers.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D."Cyclists are always running stop signs!" Yes they make no sense for us, legalize treating them as yields
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.
- I want to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Right now, 1 in 8 teenagers has a friend who has been impacted by deepfake harassment in schools. We need urgent action to stop AI deepfake pornography. It’s why we need Take It Down, but we also need more legislation to protect survivors of AI abuse like my DEFIANCE Act.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.I say this every time de-extinction comes up: it makes no sense to devote science to bringing back extinct animals when we can’t be bothered to keep extant ones alive in the first place.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Y’all are upset at the marketing, which I completely understand. Not defending the marketing here, it’s ridiculous But the other way to look at it is that they CRISPR’d a puppy dog to make 20 genetic modifications which is pretty incredible
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.I'm delighted to share a useful FREE web-based app portal of powerful bioinformatics tools for microbial genomes and shotgun microbiome sequences! It's called Micromics and is built by Middle Author Bioinformatics, led by co-founder @ironark.bsky.social omix.midauthorbio.com
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.The origins of handedness | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/blog...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.
- It is actually insane how less enticing the phone is when the screen is in black and white.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D."CDs are an irrelevant technology." YES. Yes you're starting to get it. Look how stupid relevant technology is. You're so close to realizing that CDs are awesome
- An incredible way to watch people be competent and heroic on television. I cannot recommend it enough.
- “The Pitt,” an “E.R.” meets “24” medical drama, harkens back to a different era of television. It’s “a counterintuitive comfort watch,” @inkookang.bsky.social writes.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.i miss the early internet. people were like “you gotta see this dude. this cat sure is long.” and they were right. it was really long. it never shoulda gotten any more complicated than that.
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.THIS. I work with teens, am a parent, & live deep in tech bro region. At school parent meetings, dudes cheer AI for convenient summarization of required reading (yay shortcuts for critical thinking?)…ladies in those meetings voice concerns over deepfakes. We’re having wildly different conversations
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.“I’ll be 10 min late sorry!!!” -ashamed -fragile -unreliable “A thousand apologies. The relentless slog of time has overtaken my faculties.” -powerful -commanding -honest
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D."I think COVID leaked from a lab." Why? "Well, because... it could have."
- I feel validated as a certified soy boi™️
- Which milks have the lowest environmental impact? My colleague Raychel Santo provides an overview of her recent paper here: www.wri.org/insights/mil... 🧪
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.I am going to lose my mind. Every previous coronavirus spilled over from animals. A novel virus has never leaked from a lab. Peak Ted Talk Brain to suggest that something *which has never happened* is the occam's razor explanation. www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/b...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.Massive TDOV rally expected today from 4:00-6:00 at the National Mall between 3rd and 4th streets. Go there, I know many who will be there. Be with community and show your support for transgender people. www.dcnewsnow.com/news/local-n...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.The number of good points per minute in this video is extremely high, which is wild because it is 2 hours and 40 minutes long. youtu.be/teqkK0RLNkI?...
- Reposted by Alex P. R. Phillips, Ph.D.If you are interested in a postdoc opportunity in Europe, I'd suggest you to consider the EU Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship: ec.europa.eu/info/funding... If you are into marine microbial ecology and evolution, I'd love to support your application (see more at merenlab.org). E-MAIL ME NOW! :)
