#Pluribus finale

Staring up at the aurora shimmering above. So beautiful.

If you need a last minute Christmas present, consider haunted shoe.

A new Nipah virus vaccine (HeV-sG-V) has cleared Phase 1, showing no serious safety issues and promising immune responses in 40 adult volunteers—an early but important step for global health security. Learn more: historyofvaccines.org/blog/phase-o...

Season’s Greetings from UCL🎄 UCL will be closed from 5:30pm on Tuesday 22 Dec 2025 to 9:00am on Monday 5 Jan 2026. Students can access support services during this time. 🔗 More details: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/support-and-wellbeing-services/about-us/closure-periods-2025-support-and-services

Yesterday morning, I spotted the razor-thin crescent of the 28-day-old #moon just above the horizon. It was invisible to the naked eye, but it was a magnificent view through binoculars. This morning, there was a spectacular #sunrise to enjoy – what a display of colour! 🔭

Reaching for the Sun A group of #Cedar #Trees in the little #Forest adjacent to the community where I live in #RidgefieldWA #PNW #WeekYForYearPast #Photography

🌳🍁🍂 #trees #woodland #treeclub

Winter Woodland #trees #treeclub #croydon

A revolutionary gene therapy called base editing, developed by @uclchildhealth.bsky.social's Prof Waseem Qasim & his team, is helping patients including Alyssa Tapley, 16, fight a previously incurable blood cancer @uclpophealthsci.bsky.social @greatormondst.bsky.social www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/de...

SEASON'S GREASONS

These single food exposure➡️specific diagnosis studies are often confounded to hell. But OTOH, when they feed my confirmation bias I find them extraordinarily valid, and I’m happy to infer a solid causal connection here.

Is a conjugative plasmid 'alive'? If you think so, apply for this PhD and design life Use LLMs to design a conjugative plasmid that spreads through bacteria as an AI-designed genetic Trojan horse to suppress AMR genes

This could well be the most important story on MNB this year. Did you know that South Korean gods of molecular biology have made the first TRUE hypoallergenic cat? Take my damn money! medicalnewsbulletin.com/hypoallergen... 🧪 VetMed #MolBiol #immunosky 🧬

Chrck out @ucl.ac.uk Doctoral Centre in fighting Antimicrobial Resistance for PhD studentship opportunities www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical...

🚨 #UCL is now offering 50 fully funded PhD studentships through the EPSRC Landscape Award 2026/27 — apply by 5 Jan 2026: wp.me/p23f03-hyp #UELA #PhDScholarship #FullyFunded #PhDOpportunities #STEMScholarships #StudyInTheUK #InternationalStudents #ResearchFunding

🧬🤖 NEW PhD opportunity in my group: Using AI genome design tools to halt antimicrobial resistance spread! Combining LLMs with synthetic biology to tackle one of medicine's biggest challenges! #SynBio #AMR #AI www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical... Project application: www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical...

🔬 Funded PhD 'Engineering self-regulating CAR-T cells' #SynBio #EngBio #iGEM2025 Work across mammalian synthetic biology & mathematical modelling. ⏰ Apply by 1pm UK, 5 Jan 2026 Project details: ucl-epsrc-dtp.github.io/2026-27-proj... Project application portal: www.ucl.ac.uk/epsrc-doctor...

A day in the life of UCL MRes Synthetic Biology student, Quratul Akyuni www.linkedin.com/posts/ucl-en... #EngBio #SynBio

Will religious communities accept the lab-grown meat of de-extincted animals? Or AI-designed meat? New paper from my group, lead by the excellent Farhaneen Mazlan, considers these questions & much more #CellAg #SynBio #CultivatedMeat #EngBio #Bioprocess authors.elsevier.com/a/1l1uG3I9F4...

For the first keynote, we happily welcome Howy Jacobs, emeritus professor of #MolecularBiology at #Tampere University in Finland 🇫🇮. He gave an inspiring and thoughtful talk regarding the future 🔮 of #science 🔬 and its role in #society, specifically aimed at young researchers!

AI is helping scientists decode previously inscrutable proteins #Science #Biology #MolecularBiology #ArtificialIntelligence #ProteinResearch

The Sorrells Lab is hiring a recent college graduate interested in neurobiology of mosquitoes! The position is ideal for someone interested in gaining skills for graduate school. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/164849

Labeling your axes and then explaining them slowly is perhaps the biggest bang for the buck you can get for making your slides more understandable.

“Be careful. When a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.” Albert Camus

NIH-supported research saves lives: here are two "poster" human beings to prove it. Emily Whitehead: cured of her leukemia by CAR-T developed at Penn. Victoria Gray: major symptoms of her sickle cell disease resolved following CRISPR gene editing - path paved at Boston Childrens, UW, UC Berkeley.

🧬 Loved contributing to the latest @asianometry.bsky.social video on Chinese Hamster Ovary cells - the heroes of biopharmaceutical manufacturing. As always Asianometry does a great job of conveying technology development from industry to academia and back again www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xB1...

Some fascinating #CellAg presentations here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnbU... #CulturedMeat

⏩ "Societies need scaffolding that moves this decarbonization transition in a way that’s inclusive, just & efficient." 📺Catch up on the recent panel on ‘Financing the Ecological Transition’ chaired by IIPP's @jryancollins.bsky.social here: https://buff.ly/4fa9JgW

Fascinating Day 2 of the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein Scientific Kickoff - so many alt pathways to food proteins and ingredients #SynBio #EngBio #CulturedMeat (thanks @qkinebio.bsky.social for the chocolate)

Applications for the 2025 Crick Institute summer student programmes now open : www.crick.ac.uk/careers-and-...

Some fascinating Engineering Biology presentations here from @nicolabiologist.bsky.social & many more #SynBio luminaries www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeBz...

PSA to my friends in California near the fires: breathing in wildfire smoke is really bad for you (even if it’s not super thick where you are) but if you have face masks (N95, KN95, etc) those can help a lot

73 Questions with UCL students | UCL East campus www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM0E...

UCL Scholarships for international students www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NnE...

Are you ever confused by the different gene editing tools out there? The gene editing toolbox has rapidly expanded in the last few years, and base editing, prime editing, and now bridgeRNA have become common words in a scientist's vocabulary. Here is a handy reminder ! #crispr #crisprmed #cas9

Machine Learning Used To Classify Fossils Of Extinct Pollen - Offworld Astrobiology Applications? astrobiology.com/2024/12/mach... #astrobiology #tricorder #AI #MachineLearning #fossil #paleontology

New publication on Cell Reports! We describe a mechanism by which #microglia degrade amyloid-beta deposits that they can't phagocytose. Collaboration between the Tremblay lab and Rudy Jacquet, Santiago Solé-Domènech and Frederick Maxfield at Weill Cornell. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Also in this same issue--a fantastic deep dive into the prevalence of transposon exonization by @yarribas.bsky.social ! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

🦤🦣 We are very excited for our Associate Director for Conservation Genomics, Beth Shapiro, who is taking a leave of absence from @ucsantacruz.bsky.social to be the CSO of Colossal Biosciences and help with their de-extinction efforts. We wish her luck!

I’m proud to join more than 30 colleagues today in sharing our analysis of potential risks from “mirror life”. We summarize our findings in a @science.org article, and in greater detail in a 300pg technical report: Article: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Report: purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036

Interesting insights into structural changes in lipid droplets under nutrient-rich diet pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Our #CryoET paper on ciliary rootlet ultrastructure from mouse retina is now out in @elife.bsky.social! Have a peek with this video or dive deeper at bit.ly/3ZJzhgc. Big thanks to @carter-lab.bsky.social and #teamtomo. #CryoET #CryoEM #Cilia #Rootlet #Centriole #Research #Science

No one tells you before you start your career that 80% of research in the biological sciences 🧪 amounts to a never ending search for appropriate sample vials.

Europa Clipper Astrobiology Mission Is Deploying Instruments astrobiology.com/2024/11/euro... #astrobiology #Europa #EuropaClipper