A friend of mine who was TA’ing for an AmLit course found a copy of Moby Dick a student had left behind. It had only one marginal annotation, around page 100, that simply said “whale is important.”

"It is unclear why a high-throughput imaging system is needed in the first place"

Who assigned: a group report, a group presentation, 3 exams, 5 quizzes, 4 in class practice quizzes (checked on completion), and a team eval essay to evaluate this one course... It was me. The past version of me did it. Thank you for the gift Prior Siavash 🥲

I am curious how much Canvas cost for schools. A quick search suggests 5-30 per student per year. I wish for better alternatives. I find the use of modules unintuitive (and even poor). The majority of the features are bad or unhelpful IMO. I like Gradescope in contrast.

CSULB earlier today.

The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈 Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."

Nothing is more rewarding than lab members' success. First medschool (USC) acceptance for the (now former) lab members. Proud and thankful PI! (still feel a lot like the cat here these days)

Whenever I start a new project/proposal, I relearn that writting is hard 😅📝👨🏻‍💻🖍️ + happy belated spring and Nowruz (I have been writting --- poorly).

No but this is entirely correct

One last shot taken while packing up the exhibition.

Baby Bao ate his very first shrimp and absolutely crushed it. 🦐 Watching him figure it out is even cuter! 💙 📹: Animal care staff Katie

The 2025-2026 BME TT Faculty jobs list has 114 positions. #FacultySearch #BME #BMEJobsList Add a job: forms.gle/bwEzwHAEehBj... Jobs list: ericaprattlab.com/bme_jobs_list/

Best bday card any PI can wish for - folks in my lab are amazing! Tabby cats doing science is the best!!

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🚨 POSTDOC OPENING 🚨 NIH-funded Bio-Fluid Mechanics Postdoc in my lab @univmiami.bsky.social Hofstenia miamia | cilia-driven flows | behavior & neuroscience Collab w/ Mansi Srivastava @harvard.edu 🕒 Start: Jan–Feb 2026 ⏳ 1 yr, renewable | Email me ASAP! #Postdoc #Biophysics #FluidDynamics

Happy holidays from our lab to yours (Missing 3 folks in the photo). It has been... well a year for research. But proud and thankful for all we got done. Two submitted GRFP proposals is the big highlight imho.

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is a pair of people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it. PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to!

Good view (+ ok macchiato) after a long day (week) of exams / ongoing grading. Happy end of the semester to all the educators.

Our dispatch: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225014691 on the recent Hydra volume EM paper by Zhang, Rafa Yuste and colleagues: #connectomics, without synapses https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225013090 #neuroscience

I guess this has probably already gone viral somewhere but I am simply dying at this picture of a bear that looks like it hired a photographer to do a glamour shoot

Our week of finals go from Friday to Thursday this Fall. I have an exam on Friday (10AM) and another on Monday (8 AM!) and then the last one on Thursday (not in the AM thankfully) 😬 Final gods were not happy with me this Fall. Well the last class has no final thankfully.

From thanksgiving day. Sunset at Dana Point.

From earlier this semester at CSULB upper campus.

$135 gradschool application fee per application is honestly too much.

The Fudge Lab at Chapman University is recruiting a postdoc for an NSF-funded project on the biophysics of hagfish defensive slime deployment. Please repost! Apply here: tinyurl.com/4p937dn5

if you are food insecure for both the humans and pets in your household there is a tool called Pet Help Finder that can help locate pet food banks nearby and other free or reduced price assistance and supplies for pets. no one, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, should have to give up their pet bc of this.

Warning. ⚠️ If you are writing an NSF GRFP, new this year, you need official transcripts to apply. Beware. They will not review applications without official transcripts. ‼️

Is it already the season for the GRFP recletters ? Congrats to all the students applying - independent of the outcome! 👨🏻‍💻📧📝

not now, highly aggressive infected monkeys

Call for papers: In Vitro Models of Human Disease to Inform Mechanism and Drug Discovery Deadline approaching: Monday 3 November 2025 journals.biologists.com/dmm/pages/in... #Biology #Research #Disease #Discovery #Organoids #Tumours #Gastruloids #Assembloids

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"captain's log supplemental: This week I have submitted my tenure packet, proposal (NIH resubmission), and a manuscript (for review) The holographic doctor tells me that I may be experiencing some elevated fatigue and should better take care of my sleep schedule." But yes to productive week!!

New: After a long wait, the GRFP solicitation is live! Deadlines have been extended to early November, so applicants have a bit over a month to submit. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

For last 10 years - we have worked with thousands of organizations around the world helping support them in integrating foldscope programs. To bring in a new cohort of organizations - we are re-launching “fast and curious” 2025 edition - apply and get a Foldscope trainer and Foldscopes for free!

One day, nearly 2000 years ago, a cat dashed across some drying tiles, somewhere near Hadrian's Wall. It's immortality of a kind, isn't it?

Happy to share our new pre-print using microfluidics to look into flow response of Hydra.

Our latest preprint on medRxiv: Identifying counterfeit medications using a $4 optical sensor meant for use in toy robots. 🧪💊🤖 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here's a fun bit of science history for you: Back before we could just download PDFs, if you wanted a paper and it wasn't in a journal in your library, you wrote to the author for a copy. So universities made these nice little post cards for requesting article reprints.

Our new company, K2 Therapeutics, is off to the races to develop new antibody drugs that target multipass membrane proteins. We are hiring so check us out! www.k2-tx.com/home#careers

My team has updated our free database of POSTDOC fellowships. This database contains 286 entries. For each entry, we provide a link, short description, deadline, amount, and eligibility criteria. Download this updated and expanded database here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Another great (cat-centric) paper 😸 I love figure 6.

Teaching this fall? Here is a handy webpage that will help you generate a list of the days your course(s) meet: wcaleb.rice.edu/syllabusmake...

Call for contributions to our symposium on animal collective movement in complex environments at SICB 2026 in Portland, OR! Submit your abstract to our complementary sessions and join us for two days of fun discussing and exchanging research on the biomechanics and energetics of animal movement!

One of the most fun papers (brief) I have read this year www.cell.com/action/showP... Cats prefer to sleep on their left side. Also they sleep 12-16 hrs/day. 😸💤

Fascinating new work on mechanics and tube feet dynamics during starfish locomotion, which reveals a robust, decentralized strategy for locomotion on challenging terrain involving modulation of foot-substrate contact time in response to mechanical load: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Biology Department at CSU Long Beach is now advertising for an Assistant Professor of Elasmobranch Biology. Refer to the attached flyer for details. @uwsafs.bsky.social @uwmarinebiology.bsky.social @misselasmo.bsky.social @whysharksmatter.bsky.social @official-bweems.bsky.social

Thanks to @shabbirsafdar.bsky.social and @safemedicines.bsky.social for having me on the Partnership for Safe Medicines podcast! I had a great time chatting with Shabbir about my lab's work developing tools for fighting fake medicines. Listen to the episode here: www.podbean.com/media/share/... 🧪