Nanjiani: “We had a pandemic…we couldn’t leave the house because there was a new disease [and] we were waiting for science to catch up…we barely talk about it. None of us have have processed it…at least talk about it, rather than ignoring it like fart in an elevator” www.hulu.com/movie/kumail...

"revision requests can expand beyond what is feasible...we've been told reviews are unnecessarily harsh... reviews can seem formidable but usually represent constructive critiques" Interesting reflections and introspection from editors of Development 1/n journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

"hard to measure social and economic impacts of making papers and data free...little strong evidence of long-lasting and widespread effects [but] indicators remain to be fully developed" www.science.org/content/arti...

Check out this highly multidisciplinary approach to identifying new genes affecting color pattern, and more broadly, mechanisms driving cell fate diversification 🧪

Magic Johnson was the grand marshal of the Rose Parade today, and as someone who remembers his November 1991 HIV announcement: if you had told anybody that day that he would be alive and healthy 34+ years later, I don't think they would have believed you. Medicine and research—they work.

New director of FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research has "no expertise...no apparent experience in drug development, regulation or management..doesn’t seem to have any of the qualifications for running the drug-regulation department" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

“The Trump administration is closing NASA’s largest research library on Friday, a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.”

openRxiv - a year in review. @tracykteal.bsky.social looks back at how far we have come this year 😀 openrxiv.org/2025-year-in...

persistence of the identifier =/ persistence of the object. DOIs guarantee the former not the latter...

before I started my lab, I asked several senior PIs what their one piece of advice would be and PI pointedly said: “Know when to drop a project.” And that advice has been invaluable in my lab. There are always other projects to follow up on, dropping one isn’t a failure in and of itself.

I don't want to participate in a transmission chain that brings the virus to them. I also just don't want the disruption that even a mild case of flu (or whatever respiratory pathogen) would introduce into my life. Taking reasonable, evidence-based precautions for yourself has no bearing on others.

I have 0 risk factors for severe flu. I am up to date on my flu and COVID-19 vaccines. I am also in New York City, which just experienced a week with more flu cases than any other on record, and I am in contact with vulnerable people for whom flu would definitely not just be the sniffles.

I don't understand how we are still stigmatizing people for wearing masks during respiratory virus season in 2025. Really, people?

Did you know there are 2 types of avocado varieties? A-types switch from female to male, B-types male to female, within a single day. This reciprocal sex alternation promotes cross-pollination and has a simple genetic basis. Read more in this recent preprint from the final chapter of my PhD thesis 🥑

I’m beginning to question the scientific premises of Stranger Things

Remember the 1920s when nobody was left-handed

Make a Bond movie academic For Your Eyes Only: paywalled journals and global scientific inequity

Make a Bond movie academic Goldfinger: unintended, but not unforeseen, commercial consequences of APC models and mandates

Make a Bond movie academic Diamonds Are Forever: challenges in long-term sustainability for aspirational open access financial models

“if you ask [LLMs] for factual information you don't have any guarantee it's going to be correct…not a good idea to rely on them for information you can't verify and that's somehow important” www.bbc.com/news/article...

Reviving a Twitter tradition here: Happy Holidays @pracheeac.bsky.social @needhibhalla.bsky.social and other cocktail buddies!

Yep - data are not a democracy. Some are better than others…

On the training set for AI…

It is simply not true that “you can’t publish negative results”. 👇 [what people normally mean when they say this is they’re annoyed they can’t get a Nature paper saying someone else’s Nature paper is wrong]

I'm on the Board of @biologists.bsky.social. Many know them as publishers of @dev-journal.bsky.social, @jcellsci.bsky.social, @jexpbiol.bsky.social , DMM, and @biologyopen.bsky.social --but they also are a major funder of small grants that empower young biologists and enable scientific meetings 🧪

The Weiss-Dunning-Kruger-Streisand-Hanlon effect. Did I get that right?

Variations in annual dengue intensities are explained by temperature anomalies Our new work led by Abbey Porzucek, @rafalpx.bsky.social, @colincarlson.bsky.social, Dan Weinberger to develop a method to compare relative dengue intensity between years and countries. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

"in-house editors...undoubtedly have biases, as all humans do, but they aren’t reliant on getting a good grant review from authors whose work they assess" Those who attack professional editors rarely acknowledge that the big COI for academic editors 1/2 newsletter.journalology.com/p/journalolo...

ChatGPTzero says my abstract (written preLLMs) has a "high" probability of being written by AI: "consistently formal tone, smooth logical progression...lack of idiosyncratic stylistic variation...coherent and well-structured" IOW written by an editor... journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Siri, what was the Tuskegee experiment?

The US is not Denmark. Denmark is not the US. The Danish immunization schedule is not adapted for the realities of the American Healthcare system and population. Let me explain. This is a long thread so buckle up 🧵

Aligning different spatial omic data (histology, spatial proteomics, spatial transcriptomics, etc) is challenging. PhD students André Forjaz and Valentina Matos Romero developed PIVOT to do this really well and rapidly. Read about PIVOT here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks to those who support CSH Perpectives in Biology, whose contents are published online in the journal and are also offered in print. I'm an editor at the journal and I'm always looking for ideas for collections, so if you have one, please let me know!

Tens of thousands of annual cases of chickenpox, rotavirus, and other vaccine preventable diseases a year - in a country of six million people. Not only will Denmark’s vaccine schedule not work for the US, it already isn’t working for Denmark.

“NIH is in crisis, grants are being terminated, labs are closing….but they found $1.6 million for an unsolicited proposal to study whether we should delay a vaccine we’ve been safely giving for 40 years, in a country where infants are at high risk of infection” www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-va...

"officials describe [the NIH Director] as a largely ineffectual figurehead, often absent from leadership meetings...fixated more on cultivating his media image...Memoli, by contrast, knows just enough about the agency to help destroy it" www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

plus all sorts of distracting stuff in the HTML most readers have no interest in. this is one reason we opted for a minimalist design at bioRxiv [which prompts constant demands from some quarters to fancify]

yep - this is the real challenge. And it's why despite my point above, I often argue with futurists who demand we move beyond the PDF. Because so many readers, particularly those doing deep reading, read the PDF, so little point in fancy HTML visualizations if noone's looking at them...

The obsession with a print-era portable format (PDF) is the only reason we have figures like this. Makes no sense on the Web. 1/2

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscopic slide. 🫧🐻🧪

Continues to astound me that this administration's scientific leadership is literally a list of people we were told not to listen during the pandemic.

Oh for the days when science social media was full of people mildly irritated about Francis Collins...

Vaults. They are cell biology's greatest puzzle! This preprint from Martin Beck's lab shows them docked on ER membranes with a ribosome inside. What on earth is going on there?? #CellBiology #WTFology www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The only reason Twitter remains relevant is the residue of the period pre-2022 where it was the place that all the writers, academics and publishers had to be, with the result that some of them are still there and so Twitter influences coverage in other forums and even this effect is dying.

Epigenetic slop

The problem is, LLMs may not be drawing from the sources they formally cite.

LLMs should provide sources so authors can check/cite them. But I'm also reminded of what someone told me ages ago: "If you have a good idea; someone else's almost certainly had it too...Everyone has ideas; they're not the limiting factor". So maybe we shouldn't be too eager to claim ownership.

I learned that Makary & his top vaccine regulator Vinay Prasad forced FDA scientists to withdraw a paper from Vaccine. I am co-Editor-in-Chief of Vaccine. The data had been presented publicly. It showed the benefits outweigh the risks of COVID vaccines for all ages. bsky.app/profile/save...

* vaccines keep kids from dying * guns cause kids to die these are unassailable conclusions based on mountains of evidence it is a crying shame that politicians pretend otherwise, endangering our kids and everyone else’s

Love the caption of Fig. 3 in this impressive preprint: "A Goodsell-esque 3D orthogonal rendering of an IsoNet2-processed FIB-milled tomogram of C. reinhardtii" doi.org/10.64898/202... Since I am no expert, what does the cryoET community think of IsoNet? @cellarchlab.com doi.org/10.1038/s414...