Cracking up at this guy's Wookieepedia entry. Glad we have this artistic depiction of the character.

Always delightful to read one sentence in a paper that you don't fully understand, so you start doing some math and just keep stumbling over insights that aren't necessarily deep or profound, but just hidden under a layer you never would have peeled back without that one sentence.

Love this change too. It's now telling students to violate instructors' copyright and upload our materials to it.

The passing of the gavel! At this morning’s Biophysical Society Business Meeting, now Past-President Lynmarie Thompson welcomed Karen Fleming into her new role as BPS President!

Nature's tiny little lightning rods

Carnegie Mellon, a school I haven't been affiliated with for almost 3 years, expects me to spend an hour of my day taking their online "security 101" course or else I'll be locked out of my alumni email account. lol. lmao, even.

I think we still need more FOSS developers, actually.

That drop is more than the entire NSF budget.

Lipid geeks rise up!

WARY

Who knew that GUT really stands for Grand Unified Tofu (screenshot from doi 10.64898/2025.12.10.693552)

Hot (?) take: "in order to" is a very useful phrase when applied judiciously, and the fact that MS Word universally recommends it be replaced by "to" is Very Bad.

Including this as a figure in my next NIH biosketch

In terms of what cures are being lost: - Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis - herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis - shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

Happy birthday to my middle namesake. I imagine if he were alive today he would say, "Really? This shit again?"

How your email finds me

Banting, Best, Collip, et al announced initial results on the use of insulin to treat diabetes #OTD in 1922. They later sold their patent to the University of Toronto for $1 each, hoping this would keep the lifesaving medication cheap and accessible. 🧪

Every time I visit Facebook (already a mistake, I know), they try to sell me on their stupid AI filters like the one here. But it's actually an amazing example of AI completely missing the point and deleting the one part of the picture that actually mattered: the punchline of the original photo.

Physicists vindicated

I'm sorry the guy changing the rules on the fly is named what

I wonder what percentage of current LLM usage is bot farms making fake social media posts? My intuition tells me it's probably in the realm of double-digit percentage of all LLM requests, but I have no way to back this up.

"The microtubule GTP-tubulin cap size is modulated during cell division" is now available on @biorxivpreprint! This video by Anna Cassidy shows the tips of growing microtubules (EB1) and DNA (histone 2B) during metaphase. #Cellbiology www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

An intracellular meteor shower. EB3 comets tracking growing microtubule plus-ends in a cultured cell.

The biggest issue is that, contrary to what many people who really should know better say, space is a bad place to vent heat. It is very hard to vent heat in near-vacuum. You may have heard that space is cold but "cold" is a very counterintuitive idea in an environment without much matter.

Plotting dark deeds

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

What a depressing future we live in where the "tech industry" is actually just the advertising industry.

Imo the arXiv should impose an automatic ban the first time someone submits a preprint with a hallucinated reference in it. Zero tolerance policy.

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

Am I asking too much to ask that the Director of the National Institutes of Health gets his facts approximately correct? There are examples that would illustrate his point, but this is not it. This really makes me crazy; it reflects lack of knowledge, scholarship, and care. 13/14

Why?? Why in the world would you impose this kind of idiotic restriction?

“You have been asleep since November,” said Frog. “Well then,” said Toad, “a little more sleep will not hurt me.”

Work from home status: comfy cozy

(Dude suddenly stops pushing his broom across the floor of the Death Star) Does this look like a big laser to anyone else

On Foundings: 254 years later, my town holds a parade every year celebrating the night fed up Rhode Islanders captured and burned a customs enforcement ship after heavy handed official harrassment. No one ever snitched. #GaspeeAffair

Imagine this in a trial. Devastating first-hand witness to Alex Pretti's killing Declaration filed in federal court: "I don't know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him."

What do you do when you know how to work with biological materials and are experts in 3D printing at small resolutions? Create this 10 µm long elephant inside a living cell, of course. Read more: cen.acs.org/materials/3-... #CENChemPics #chemsky 🧪

The propaganda machine is deploying now in Baltimore. Three different right-wing influencers, including Nick Shirley (the guy who pushed the fake story about daycare fraud in Minnesota) have all arrived on the same day and have been barging into community meetings to make "content"

The propaganda machine is deploying now in Baltimore. Three different right-wing influencers, including Nick Shirley (the guy who pushed the fake story about daycare fraud in Minnesota) have all arrived on the same day and have been barging into community meetings to make "content"

Why do they have to target me like this

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

He goes on to describe one of his officers being stopped when she was off-duty solely because she's non-white, harassed by ICE goons who slapped her phone out of her hand as she tried to record, only to be let go when she finally revealed she was a cop.

Okay everyone, take a break from doom scrolling and look at this Very Good opossum

Not as clumsy or random as a dry erase marker

Toad sat on the edge of his bed. “Blah,” said Toad. “I feel down in the dumps.” “Why?” asked Frog. “I am thinking about tomorrow,” said Toad.

Plans to sign proposed Ukraine “prosperity plan” worth $800B at Davos were scrapped. Greenland dispute derailed efforts to use the week to finalize security guarantees and reconstruction talks between US, Ukraine & Europe. US officials say no signing date was set and document still needs revision.