Are 90% of cancer-related deaths due to metastasis? Apparently the overuse of this percentage in reviews has created confusion and questioning of whether this is true. The answer, which is as always cancer type dependent, may be in these references that also people claim they cannot find.

This is what we lost with post-Musk Twitter. Such a bummer.

Congrats Maik! So glad to see this out.

great news! A bad thing went away, eventually.

At the CSHL Tumor Biology meeting I had the same conversation with several people: There are very few and constantly diminishing outlets to publish "cancer cell biology" i.e. basic findings on how cells work that apply to or arise from tumor biology. This was reiterated to me by several PIs!

Who will I see at @ascbiology.bsky.social #cellbio2025 ???

Proposal to make @elife.bsky.social use emoji instead of their very special buzzwords: “In this 😐 study…” “This 🤭 work shows…” “In a ☄️ finding…”

😍

Asking BlueSky for help: For a review, I am trying to accurately credit the first paper that measured pairwise 3D distances between 2 pieces of DNA on the same chromosome (or cosmid). Is Trask 1989 the first? I know of earlier single-locus papers (1982). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Lady day here #cshlcancer @cshlmeetings.bsky.social Congrats to @lsajournal.org travel award winner Debolina Ganguly from Judith Agudo’s group!! Debolina is exploring how tissue-specific differences in antigen presentation can modulate the systemic immune response. Excellent talk!!

Congrats to @lsajournal.org travel award winner Jess Hebert from Monte Winslow’s group!! Jess presented innovative new mouse models (already available at @jacksonlab.bsky.social) to engineer complex genotypes that modulate cancer metastasis. Presented here #cshlcancer @cshlmeetings.bsky.social

It’s literally the only way we will find out!!

Spending a few lovely days at @cshlmeetings.bsky.social for the tumor biology meeting. My second time here for this meeting, highly recommend!

Exploring the best practices on AI in peer review (for preprints in this case) is sorely needed. Author views seem polarized on use of AI in peer review more broadly. See discordant survey results for physicists:

Somehow I missed this tentative but important news -- extension of the NIGMS MIRA (R35) mechanism simpler.grants.gov/opportunity/...

Aggrieved editor post incoming... At @lsajournal.org we offer to consider manuscripts that have been declined after review at one of our partner journals. We have to be fast, fair, and accurate. It's hard! Instead of saying "no thanks" this author wanted to make a point.

Muscle weakness previously attributed to enterovirus D68 infection of motor neurons may actually represent direct infection and killing of muscle cells !

Fantastic work by Peter Murray and Matthias Mann on embryonic stem cells: Threonine starvation induces a completely unique form of cell death that is reversible by methionine withdrawal or inhibition of translation. Why are stem cells so weird??

Check out the latest issue of LSA! 👇

EMBO Reports @emboreports.org is old enough to rent a car (in the US)! Read about its origin and impressive services to authors and biology research more broadly: doi.org/10.1038/s443...

another banger from the Cheeseman lab!

#Metadata matters-deepening my discomfort w online catalogs: "Here lies the paradox of our moment: the same technological advances celebrated for their efficiency are erasing the human expertise that creates the high-quality metadata these systems depend on to function." #libraries #bookhistory 1/2

Lots of good stuff in our September issue 🥳

Read it, learn it, love it

Cells can be on the brink of death, showing many signs of early apoptosis, but then bring out the defibrillators (via NF-kB signaling) and recover from their near death experience! Super cool new work just out in EMBO J.

Congrats Ben and coauthors!

Congrats to @tanosbarbara.bsky.social and coauthors on this new work unveiling connections between SAS-6/ciliogenesis and cell motility, out now in LSA!

I just sent this in an email. I revisit this uncertainty soooo often.

This cool work makes structural comparisons of meiotic DNA binding protein Hop1 in two diverged Holozoa 👇

Very interesting read about downsizing at the org that maintains the Dewey decimal system. This quote applies to many other domains as well.

Very much deserved!!

Big day for our team: our pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma (PPGL) organoid paper is now up on bioRxiv! This was a tour de force across 6 institutions, 37 authors, building patient-derived organoids from 35 PPGL patients /🧵 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are getting closer to Toledo CellulART 2025! Please register early if you would like to be considered for a talk! More at www.toledocellulart.org

Having recently updated the AI use and disclosure policies at @lsajournal.org I found this really interesting! Curious if authors will use this tool... seems pretty helpful to me as an editor.

A skew towards human disease relevance in studying protists is understandable but this is insane !

Not all publishers are the same here... Sadly I know at least one case where a grant was held up because the publisher goofed on depositing the paper to PMC! *cough* Elsevier *cough cough* Right now is NOT the time for publishers to drop the ball on their deposition agreements!

Delighted to welcome @tracykteal.bsky.social as the CEO of @openrxiv.bsky.social - Tracy brings a wealth of experience in non-profit leadership and open science to the the team, and we're all so excited to be working with her openrxiv.org/announcing-c...

Congrats to this group 🎉

Here is the Democracy Now/ACLU brief for the Supreme Court. Thanks to all of the plaintiffs for standing up, and the attorneys and their staffs for all of their hard work. Let's win this thing (again) protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/u...

New policy at LSA: P-VALUES ARE BANNED (that was a joke) As argued in @jcb.org let's move on from what WE ALL KNOW is a flawed statistical test to embrace effect sizes. As the author notes: "Rejecting the no-effect hypothesis tells us about the experiment, not the biology" doi.org/10.1083/jcb....

Let's please keep the remaining staff at NIH, NSF, etc in our thoughts even as you lose sleep over your own lab and scientific career. They are enduring pure chaos to try to hold the fort. See snapshot from wapo.st/4feKKuu (gift 🔗) saying they are "barely holding it together"

Interested in science administration? Want to meet and work with senior members of the SDB? Want to help chart the future of the SDB? Then apply for the Strategic Planning Internship! @socdevbio.bsky.social www.sdbonline.org/strategic_pl...

Every editor and every journal has to decide on a policy towards AI use in manuscripts. It feels like a fundamentally unanswerable question at this point, but we have a duty to offer guidance to authors here. Pleased to say the @lsajournal.org now has an AI use policy on our site!

If you are an "FFPE expert", could I ask you a few questions? Let me know and I'll DM you 😊 Please RT

First proof that antisense RNA from HIV is expressed in patients, using ultra sensitive single cell sequencing. Important implications for the mechanism by which HIV "hides" in the human body during latency!

Pleased to see this out! I handled this initially before moving over to @lsajournal.org, but I left before the revisions arrived. Congrats to the @oweinerlab.bsky.social authors on this impressive meso-scale look at WAVE arrays!

Neat!

This is convincing me that @lsajournal.org should do a Special Issue not on ~an~ organelle, but on the Organelle War itself! Special Issue as gladiatorial arena 🤔

Authors in Vienna and Ghana created the first temperature-stable RT-LAMP pathogen detection kit that uses 100% non-proprietary reagents! Huge win for open-source and frugal science efforts to democratize disease outbreak responses. Press release here: www.eurekalert.org/news-release...