Never could’ve predicted I’d spend so much time in my career talking about toilets, but there’s just no way around it, we can’t take people anywhere without a toilet. For all critical systems, we have to have failure tolerance which general,y results in having 2 of just about everything.

We tested the efficacy of semi-permeable capsules to capture protists from cultures and environmental samples using the Onyx from @atrandi.bsky.social. Tremendous effort from everyone in the lab and led by Marco Fantini and Nik Brask - check out the videos here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is what baby eels looks like. The long trailing tail is its *stomach* (nope, we scientists have no idea why) Eels hold their mysteries close 📽️ by Fan Zhang

If all goes according to plan, in a few hours, a crew of astronauts will begin a journey that will take them on a loop around the moon. Here's a video that NASA put together to help people visualize the journey through space, first orbiting the earth before looping around the moon and flying home 🔭

The Artemis II mission will be piloted by Victor Glover, who will fly further into space than any Black person has before. Christina Koch, a white woman, will be flying the furthest into space that a woman has ever flown before. The mission is a test run for a future moon landing trip.

If anyone is wondering what space news I'm very excited about in 2026: it's the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named for the scientifically accomplished infrared astronomer who also made sure the Hubble Space Telescope got built and launched 🔭 science.nasa.gov/mission/roma...

We are continuing our efforts at iterative expansion microscopy of loricate choanos. Not only does the lorica expand, it seems you can iterate expansion pretty much infinitely. Here’s our latest - incredibly, it expanded to macroscopic size! #ProtistsOnSky

Want to hear *more* about our research trip to Antarctica to study the effects of melting sea ice on the microbes, zooplankton, and chemistry of the Weddell Sea (😉)? Carlyn Scott from the @cmarinescience.bsky.social communication office interviewed me and put together this Q&A. 🌊🇦🇶🦠 #oceanography

"men continued to publish the same number of papers after becoming fathers, women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers 8 years after the birth of their first child)"

Friendly registration deadline reminder. It's TOMORROW! (...and I heard that the short video is in fact not mandatory ;) )

www.nature.com/articles/s41... #protistsonsky

Elementary School Career Day! My favorite day of the year. Today I spoke to the 1st graders about geoscientist detective skills and career paths. I brought the @geolsoc.bsky.social Geoscience for the Future poster for the students to ask questions about and, of course, my favorite rocks.

Anna's hummingbird seen at my mom's house yesterday in #DavisCA #birds

whoa. stunning siphonophore by @schmidtocean.bsky.social ! youtube.com/shorts/G218j...

Meet Hexatilemonas jangsaensis a new uncultured apusomonad clade by Jeong et al. doi 10.1111/1462-2920.70282. #protistsonsky. Mark the trunk 🐘 (sleeve around base of flagellum) and laterally consumed bacterium in 🟥 .

#Ichthyosporea are not just the 5–6 species we and others have helped establish as models. Our recent synthesis suggests that ~95% of their species-level diversity remains uncultivated. In other words, we still know only a fraction of the map! #protistsonSky @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social @prbb.org

Birth of a crustacean. [Presumably some kind of copepod?]

I just got this wonderful surprise in the mail. I gave some feedback to the Author a few years ago and they sent me this beautiful copy with 16 symbioses represented with poems in 2 voices and fun, brief descriptions. Really beautiful 😍 #symbiosky www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803205...

#molluskmonday A well-preserved clam (Macoma sp.) with a naticid snail boring, protruding from a fine sandstone concretion. Middle Pleistocene Port Orford Formation, Oregon.

Rave worm! What a gorgeous display this polychaete worm’s setae is giving under UV light! #marineplankton 🦑

Saying this is ‘so good’ does not do it justice.

Arp2/3-dependent actin assembly shapes endosomes and promotes intracellular trafficking in fission yeast The work from Alejandro Melero @ameleroc.bsky.social and Miguel Basante-Bedoya just out in Current Biology. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @biology-unige.bsky.social

My new spiritual eukaryote is ciliate in Si helmet swimming towards North pole ⚔️. Definitely an amazing reading from Bolzoni et al. "Magnetoreception in a freshwater ciliate arises from endosymbiosis." 10.1038/s41467-026-70462-8 for #protistsonsky

Many cellular innovations later used by animals were assembled long before animals evolved.We show that aerobic plasmalogen biosynthesis likely entered eukaryotes early from Myxobacteria, highlighting how bacterial genes shaped the cellular landscape from which animals emerged. 🧬✨ #protistsOnSky

Great to see this work now out: doi.org/10.1002/anie... Here are some of the fantastic HS-AFM movies of DNA origami strand displacement dynamics 🎬 It was a pleasure collaborating and contributing to this work led by Chalmers Chau, Paolo Actis and Christoph Wälti.

NSF Update through March 13, 2026 1/2

“This is the systematic elimination of scientific stewardship at the world’s largest biomedical research funder.” open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Sir James Dewar, Scottish chemist, would be nominated for the Nobel 8 times, but you probably know him for his most famous invention, which never made him a penny, developed to hold ultra-cold liquified gases. You probably own a "Dewar vessel," but you know it as a Thermos™. Let's talk about it.

In a study led by @choannaflagellate.bsky.social and @evocellbio.bsky.social using samples from a local mudflat in Maine, we found evidence of a new lineage of #protistsonsky that helps fill in gaps in our understanding of breviate (+Obozoa) mitochondrial evolution. www.bigelow.org/news/article...

Ok fam, I am back with another episode of "read a fucking book" 📚💙 I present to you: **Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's Most Important Novel!!!!!!; or, This Book is An Important Text About Enslavement in the British Empire** earrings and paintings by Crystal Galindo

It is so amazing that we can study protists (single celled organisms) using an ROV. We collected one of these on the #LivingBioreactors cruise on the @schmidtocean.bsky.social R/V Falkor last month. It went to a colleague studying the chemistry of their calcium carbonate shells.

Teuthy pelluci for short? The squid squad came up w/ that. I'm not that clever.

My incubator died ☹️. With the help of a neighboring lab I saved my important cultures. This spare culture of the glaucophyte Cyanophora paradoxa didn't make it. In dying, the blue pigment complex phycocyanin diffused out of the cells creating a striking color in the flask 🤩

Morphological and behavioral diversity among Euplotes, as documented by the PhD students

I look at these kinds of protists ALL THE TIME. I have never seen them in situ like this. One cell. Absolutely remarkable. #protistsonsky

Dhugal provides info in this clip about how siphonophores swim. This one is Bargmannia. @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 402 part B. #edgegbr #MarineLife

Cute little Cranchiid. I appreciate the way these hold still for good zooms. @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 402 part B #edgegbr #MarineLife

Our phylogenetic classification of >400 diatom genera is now published in Journal of Phycology. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

(bacterial) chromosome segregationists take note 👇 membrane-anchoring of the 𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘊 region to ensure proper daughter chromosome segregation after replication initiation – proposed decades ago but never substantiated... 👉now shown for 𝘚. 𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘶𝘴 by mariana pinho's lab

Yes. Taxonomy is very much in danger of dying out. Simply because other scientists don't understand its importance and there is very little money for doing this work. 1/n www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Join @berasymbionts.bsky.social , @tatsuyanobori.bsky.social and us for a postdoc on the remarkable developmental biology of symbiosis! Applications are due March 25th 🪲🦠 @johninnescentre.bsky.social @thesainsburylab.bsky.social

#protistsonsky microlearning

That smile speaks volumes - as always. Congrats Felix Hol (a lab alum) to be selected for TEDFellows class of 2026. From the swamps at Stanford to villages in Madagascar - I have so many memories with Felix - but his joyful laugh is one that rings again and again. Let's go catch some mosquitoes.

UVs from last week’s sample! Harpacticoida, Cirripedia nauplius (with Asterionellopsis glacialis next to it), Pseudocalanus (with Trieres mobiliensis/regia), not sure - Harpacticoida or Cyclopoida (what do you think?). #marineplankton 🦑

Shadow dog making friends on the trail.

Come to BIOS this fall for an undergraduate #NSFREU internship! bios.asu.edu/education/ns...

We’ve extended the deadline!

Fascinating results. Maybe of interest for other types of developmental processes @dudinlab.bsky.social?