Also l, I volunteered as a faculty marshal this year and I got to wield the scepter (temporarily)

Congratulations, KU graduates! Especially KU-graduating Slusky lab members, Teja Nimmagadda, Sam Brunclik, and Cameron Ernst!

Interested in what NIH grants have been cancelled to date? You can see award numbers, institutions and titles here. Not sure how often this list is being updated but seems to reflect only those that have received "official" notices from NIH (some of us haven't yet) taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data...

Ya know? I really thought that we were just going to hang out and make slime.

there is something marvelously perverse in the position that biological sex is an immutable characteristic but also that it has no biological effects worthy of scientific acknowledgement

How soon till we have gifs in grant proposals? 🤞🙏

Every single stupid conversation I’ve had with a scientist about anticipatory obedience and historical comparisons over the last week has had me thinking about how scientists’ political incompetence is one of the major arguments for a liberal arts education Like you’re literally a tool without it

I dunno about you guys but this is one of those very rare times when neighbors and mothers-in-law suddenly and unsolicitedly ask about our business, ie “is that IDC thing going to ruin science”. It matters that you convey the right message and the accurate message. Not your unverified grievances.

It’s been a tough few weeks. My 10yo daughter was diagnosed with a very rare, aggressive cancer called interdigitating dendritic cell sarcoma (IDCS). I’m reaching out to identify clinicians/patients who have encountered pediatric IDCS or other (non-LCH) dendritic or histiocytic sarcomas cases.

Cool paper using LLM to discover a protein sequence code for subcellular localization 👏 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

If you have been affected by the fires in LA, or are concerned about your ability to keep precious Drosophila strains going during the latest funding crisis, we will host your strains as a backup. Please email me. Please amplify. If you are also able to host fly strains, add your name as well.

A teenager has recreated the Venus de Milo out of snow in her back garden. Emily Bates, 17, sculpted the frozen goddess in her Leeds garden when her school had an inset day. www.bbc.com/news/article...

I just learned of the passing of my colleague Jie Liang from cancer on December 23. I cannot overstate the effect Jie had on my research. Jie's work was inspirational for the founding of my lab. Whenever we start a OMP bioinformatics project, the rule is to double check that Jie hasn't done it. 1/3

Celebrating the blizzard with our first fire in the new (to us) house.

How are we feeling about letters of recommendation where the first page is about the recommender?

Happy Hanukkah 🕎

What electronic notebook is your lab using? Do you like it?

🧬🧶🙌

It’s funny how the word “opportunity” used to be exciting, and now when I see it I’m filled with dread.

CAPRI conclusions from the CASP16 assembly session

BLUESKY MEGA-THREAD Altmetric is thrilled and also LITERALLY RELIEVED to officially announce: We are now tracking research attention as it happens on Bluesky! We have been picking up posts on the site since late Oct. Our team is on Bluesky all day answering questions. Let's get into it!

Warm Water Baths and Three Biophysics Departments A long and somewhat twisted (and very personal) path (with bits of science sprinkled in) (Apologies for the length, lots to cover)

An amazing example of mistaking your own perspective for the perspective of the intended audience. I’ll be giggling about this all day 😂

I think about using MALDI to verify fish identity at least once a week.

Pretraining PLMs with both the standard MLM loss and a growth temperature loss dramatically improves prediction of thermostability, as well as identification of thermostabilizing point mutants. Lots of wet lab evaluation www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I’m sure Berg was precocious even for his time (as demonstrated later in his NIGMS stewardship), but it’s hard to imagine recruiting a 32 yo for a chair position. Today that’s < 1st yr biophysics faculty member. We’re missing out on creative faculty yrs by capturing them as creative postdoc yrs.

From Berg’s Deanship Bluetorial. Worth noting that Eisenhower spent the 5 years before his US presidency as President of Columbia University.

Another great bluetorial from Jeremy Berg (with promises of 4 more!) this one about deanships.

We finally got a lab eyewash (after 10 years)! I made a “plaque”. Thanks, Alex!

If you ask me for a talk title 6 months in advance, I’m giving the title of the last talk I gave. I’m sorry. But how can anyone predict what science their lab will have produced in 6 months?

Listen! By Vladimir Mayakovsky Listen, if stars are lit it means - there is someone who needs it. It means - someone wants them to be, that someone deems those specks of spit magnificent. 1/n

If deposition becomes the norm in the field so much information will be unlocked.

In the past 24h I taught how to put headers on a formal letter and *for a different task*, where to put the address on an envelope. These skills are oldies but still important. Definitely feeling my age ☎️📟💾📠

A thread on NIH Reorganization and the Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB) Disclosure: I was involved with the SMRB since its inception and have very strong feelings about how it was used, misused, and abandoned. My passion on these issues will undoubtably show through. 1/n

🚨Travel awards for Early Career Researchers to attend ASM Microbe🧫 1. Awarded through ASM Branches 2. $1650 per award, 3 per branch 3. Apps open now! 4. Named for Peggy Cotter, ASM past president & advocate 5. A proud accomplishment when I was COMS Chair 6. Apply / share! asm.org/Travel-Award...

It’s an ensemble of protein designers…

Happy World Antimicrobial Awareness Week! Look what our amazing stewardship pharmacist Kristi made! 😍 #WAAW #AMR #AMSky @gurujosh.bsky.social How are you celebrating?

Happy to announce that the latest UniProt NAR paper is now out. Find out what we've been up to here academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

🎨🎭🎶 Check out this starter pack I just started putting together, with creatives working at the interface between science & art: go.bsky.app/HRTeEaX 👇Comment below if you think you should be added to it!

We strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics

When applying to NSF for funding, each senior personnel has to provide a “Collaborators and Other Affiliations” (COA) form, which can be quite onerous. A couple of years ago I created a tool bit.ly/NSF_COA for automating this, and recently hardened it. I hope it is of use, and feedback is welcome! 🧪

Here you go...

This was a disturbing thing to learn as an editor.

On Twitter, you tweeted. On Blue Sky, do you BS?

Thrilled to announce Boltz-1, the first open-source and commercially available model to achieve AlphaFold3-level accuracy on biomolecular structure prediction! An exciting collaboration with Jeremy, Saro, and an amazing team at MIT and Genesis Therapeutics. A thread!

I started a #NativesinSTEM starter pack. If you want to be added, tell me a little bit about yourself, including who your people are and what you study go.bsky.app/4hoZMPV @taramcallister.bsky.social I'll try to figure out how to turn this into a feed too.

Here are some free/open-source sites for the preparation of scientific illustrations, including icon libraries: bioicons.com, scidraw.io, bioart.niaid.nih.gov, inkscape.org, biogdp.com, reactome.org/icon-lib

I want to share a #datahound analysis I have been working on for some time with this newly forming community. The NIH Modular Cap: A Once-Sensible Policy Destroyed by Active Inaction 1/n