🧵 After years out of the field, I and my lab are again working on bacterial type IV pili. We have just posted our first preprints, and I'm excited to share what we have discovered. This shows Neisseria gonorrheae bacteria infecting a human epithelical cell. Here, you can see the pili in red. 1/

🧪🧬New preprint We present cryo-EM structures of reconstituted CTCF–nucleosome complexes, showing CTCF dimerization drives nucleosome oligomerization into defined higher-order assemblies. Disrupting CTCF–CTCF interfaces in mESCs reduces looping and impairs differentiation. tinyurl.com/CTCF-nucleos...

woke up and chose linguistics violence today: the word 'queue' is just the letter Q followed by four silent letters waiting in line behind it. they're literally queuing. this is the most honest word in the english language and i will not be taking questions at this time

I'm thrilled to anounce that our latest study on ALS/FTD neurodegenerative diseases has been published. Very proud to be part of this excting project. Many thanks to Clotilde Lagier Tourenne for an amazing longlasting and fruitfull collaboration, #ALS #FTD #Ribosomes www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very cool paper measuring pedestrian volumes on NYC streets and examining crash risks: "Intersections with the highest pedestrian injury risk are often outside Manhattan, where exposure-adjusted danger is the greatest." www.nature.com/articles/s44...

The eastern shore of Lake Michigan - between South and Grand Haven - is loaded with mountain ranges of ice 😱

BLAZING SADDLES was released 52 years ago today. Acclaimed as one of the great comedies of the 1970s, and among the most popular of director Mel Brooks, the story of how it was made is a cascading waterfall of creative alternatives... 1/36

A sad day at NIH... The NIH Record was a great way for NIH folks to find out what was going on across NIH. Many important stories published there over the years. nihrecord.nih.gov/2026/01/30/n...

seriously: I really enjoy using matplotlib now. youtu.be/5ZxczGlrkyQ

My (now) weekly update on 2026 NIH funding. New and competitive renewal awards. 3 new awards (compared to ~100 expected based on recent years). No new ICs... still just NIA, NINDS, NIDCD, and NIDCR. 1/2

Holy hell, what an obituary

once again being driven insane by ML conference submissions

Excited to share this with #BlueAndGoldSky Hasek took us back to the rink he grew up on in Pardubice, Czechoslovakia and introduced us to the people who had the greatest influence on his young life.

Universal child care is coming to New York.

THREAD The first full year of tracking research on @bsky.app Hi, we are Altmetric, and we track how research is communicated across the web. We now have one full calendar year of Bluesky research data and thought we'd have a looksie.

If you can't find research on bluesky, I do not know what to tell you

NY is having a bad flu season. More hospitalizations last week than any week on record. Health authorities are encouraging everyone aged 6mo+ to get the flu vax (it's not too late). Find a provider here: on.nyc.gov/getvaccinated. You can filter for sites where there's no cost for the uninsured.

Biophysical modeling with variational autoencoders for bimodal, single-cell RNA sequencing data www.nature.com/articles/s41... (free: rdcu.be/dSsaH) 🧬🖥️

"You need AI skills to engineer a prompt" Is just "The random seed is another hyperparameter to tune" in a hat and trenchcoat

I just finished my 28th yr of teaching grad compbio. Following the inevitable trend, a 3rd of the course is now Deep Learning (DL). One activity we did was a deep dive into the AlphaGenome pre-print (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). Question is, how do we evaluate it as a science paper? 1/n

Intrigued by a long-standing conundrum in small RNA biology—how nuclear Argonaute proteins silence transposons when they *need* target transcription for their own recruitment—we studied the piRNA pathway. And found a hidden RNA-decay axis from Piwi to the RNA exosome.

I had a student explain that they were taught OLS (and knockoffs like ridge regression) were AI, in class, by her data science department 🤷‍♂️

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

She expects us to believe that a university communicated anything of substance to an unsuccessful job candidate.

Gift link, probably the funniest thing the Wall Street Journal has done this year.

"Changes to centers and institutes were initially projected to save $4.8 million." Bill Belichick's annual salary is $10 million.

everyone who uses an llm to code more than me is voluntarily deskilling themselves, everyone who uses it less than me might as well be hand-wiring together vacuum tubes

Excited to share that this work is now published in its final form! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

absolutely losing it at my 14yo's biology homework

Alright it's the 15th. 10 days to Christmas. Would someone in your life benefit from a calendar featuring animals??? We have 47 Love Notes From Nature calendars left. When they're gone, they're gone forever. Bonus? The proceeds fund our native plant project in Philly! Get one at SquidFacts.net!

Christian Benford did it again. The Bills cornerback intercepted Joe Burrow and returned it 63 yards for a go-ahead touchdown.

I missed this from a couple of weeks ago, but if you're an NIH-funded investigator, please read. Peer review will exist to make things look legitimate, but can, and will, be over-ruled. Funding decisions, ultimately, will be done by political appointees. grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

30 years ago today, Netscape announced a new programming language, one that emerged from a frantic, week-and-a-half-long sprint. It ended up sticking around far longer than anyone could've expected.

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

"We followed everything we were supposed to do" Legitimate green card applicants with US spouses are being arrested by armed, masked men at scheduled immigration interviews, taken away from their children, sent to prison www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

Some well-founded warnings about the use of LLMs in medicine:

I tried an even harder example on Gemini Pro image generation and this is quite scary/amazing. I asked for a microscopy image of around 20 HeLa cells, GFP tagged 20% nuclear, 10% membrane, +1 nuclear staining, + overlap. Image below and prompt in the following post.

Before you have kids, you intellectually understand they need to eat dinner every day. But you do not understand what this means. You can't. They need to eat dinner EVERY day

By knocking a hole in his house right before winter and then boasting about spraypainted Home Depot decor, Donald Trump is showing a savvy empathy for the DIY skills of the average American male.

Car Size xkcd.com/3167/

Love to bike to work through the middle of the vehicular manslaughter arms race

Black Mirror: in this episode I invented the Dead Person AI as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Dead Person AI from the classic Black Mirror episode, Don't Create The Dead Person AI

Our lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Democrats, coming off a historic national protest against fascism and a country-wide electoral sweep:

I am seeing a lot of posts about Rosalind Franklin that themselves ignore her publication record on DNA! In fact Franklin and Gosling's paper, including the famous Photograph #51, was published, along with Wilkins's paper, back-to-back with the Watson and Crick paper in Nature in 1953.

I havent read such a banger of an essay in a very long time. This is so well-written!

The Mayor of New York only makes $260k. I bet there are police that make more than that in NY with overtime. We need to pay elected leaders more money and stop pretending it's some sort of calling. They're managing hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and millions of people's lives.

ryan is right. people HATE hearing this. but it is just a matter of simple incentives. if you want a more representative legislature — and if you want a legislature more resistant to corruption — then you need to jack up the salaries. serving as mayor of NYC should net you a cool 500K *at least*