The lab’s first pre-print! We investigated how growth-inducing Erk activity waves are regulated in regenerating zebrafish scales. We discovered that Erk waves are followed by waves of expression of their own inhibitors, as predicted by excitable waves theory. tinyurl.com/26r2cmpj

🙊

Excited to be at ICTS for the school on Geometry, Mechanics and the Physics of Growth, co-organized with Ganga Prasath (IITM) and @joelmarthelot.bsky.social (Aix-Marseille)! Fantastic start with a lecture on continuum elasticity by @abigailplummer.bsky.social (BU)

Had the pleasure of working with @mohannad-dardiry.bsky.social to rethink what it means to develop for life. Many thanks to @dev-journal.bsky.social! @embl.org #LifelongDevSI

Excited to share our new paper out in @isme-microbes.bsky.social. We asked if environmental microbial communities can be adaptively modulated by host species that transiently acquire their symbionts from the environment #SymbioSky #MicrobiomeSky doi.org/10.1093/isme...

📣 New preprint! Stoked to share a fantastic collaboration with @campaslab.bsky.social! We discover a unique mammalian mechanism for body axis elongation using mouse and human gastruloids, and confirm central findings in mouse embryos. Check out the 🧵 👇 @mpi-cbg.de @poldresden.bsky.social

Preprint 🚨! B cells form localized patterns in the immune synapse when mature, allowing improved affinity discrimination. How? We suggest a new mechanism using dynamic active forces and feedback! Read more @ arxiv.org/abs/2510.18771. Great colab with Shenshen Wang, Tom Chou and Tony Wong (UCLA).

“Cellular Olympics” our catalog of freeky ultra fast cellular superhero’s is freely available “Ann Rev of microbiology” www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... This is a compilation of world’s fastest single cell organisms - enjoy this buffet of rare delightful protists with mind bending speeds. 🧪

🚨🚨🚨 And THREE stood up! Penn has joined MIT & Brown in rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact. When we join together and fight back, WE WIN! No amount of federal bribery is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent. LET’S GO! #DefendHigherEd @aaup-penn.bsky.social

MCDB Assistant Professor Faculty Search. Please Repost! Applications Due Oct 15th (TOMORROW!) We welcome applications from all areas of physiology and neuroscience - spanning molecular, cellular, systems, and organismal levels. More information can be found HERE: lsa.umich.edu/mcdb/news-ev...

Lol the Nobels can't even acknowledge women's contribution to discovery. But sure let's acknowledge The Machines.

Life knows how to keep going - even if it’s freezing -15 degrees C 🥶 outside. AGU just covered our discovery of ultra resistant ice diatoms gliding into a world record! 🧪🔬Enjoy the story here: eos.org/articles/ice...

1/11 In @science.org: A new perspective on how our intestines renew. Cells are not “pushed out” by crowding or die from apoptosis. Instead, cells play a mechanical tug-of-war, where weaker cells extrude, reframing gut renewal as force-regulated. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Dresden researchers @paveltomancak.bsky.social @bruvellu.bsky.social, Carl Modes, @cuencam15.bsky.social ‬ & colleagues published in @nature.com that a tissue fold in fruit fly embryos buffers mechanical stresses & may have evolved in response to mechanical forces. www.mpi-cbg.de/news-outreac...

Lab’s latest: (mouse) mums grow their guts during pregnancy and lactation: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝 www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Out today in Phys. Rev. Fluids, our 'Arrested development and traveling waves of active suspensions in nematic liquid crystals'. The bend instability in active suspensions pairs off against bending resistance in LCs to tell quite a story! 1/20 people.math.wisc.edu/~spagnolie/P...

I’m thrilled to share my first review about microbial ecology + mosquito-borne disease control! Bacteria block pathogen development in the mosquito gut, but which bacteria will produce long-lasting results in the field? Let’s think about colonization and persistence in the mosquito gut! (1/4)

Publishing scientific papers is an obstacle course. There are many aspects to this but lengthy review times are one. That's why I am very excited about the new initiative @biologyopen.bsky.social, @biologists.bsky.social open access journal: Fast & Fair 1/n 🧪 journals.biologists.com/bio/pages/fa...

This was a fun exercise... reflecting on my accidental path into science, the questions that drive our lab @crick.ac.uk , and thoughts on building a more inclusive scientific community. Grateful for the opportunity @focalplane.bsky.social and Subhajit .

Have you ever thought about inflating tissues? Or maybe quickly deflating those inflated tissues? New #EpithelialMechanics pre-print: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🧵 with pressure control, multiscale buckling, controlled wrinkling

Our two sister papers on combinatorial metamaterials published today in @physrevresearch.bsky.social, a result of a fantastic SKCM2 collaboration with Chaviva Sirote-Katz at Tel Aviv and Tamás Kálmán at Tokyo shokef.tau.ac.il

Scientific collaborations come in many flavors & are fun because they expose you to new areas of science. That was definitely the case for this paper, out today. We were definitely in the passenger seat but it was fun to go along for the ride 1/n rdcu.be/euiZB.

good take on the current state of the State attack on scientific infrastructure by @joshuasweitz.bsky.social joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/on-sticks-...

You hadn’t heard of kleptoplasty before? It is a pretty amazing phenomenon indeed. I was lucky to learn about it when this paper came to @elife.bsky.social a few years ago: elifesciences.org/articles/60176

Great write-up on our paper by @joshlukedavis.com @nhm-london.bsky.social www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

This week on the Nature Podcast 🔊 Flight simulator for moths reveals they navigate by starlight https://go.nature.com/461KE6E

Woah! Such an important study published in Nature today! Quick thread with some of their key figures! 🧵

My latest for American Scientist Magazine helps give scientists the tools to fight back against politicized charges that our research is silly or pointless- tools that will work whether you’re asked “why are we funding this” from your asshole uncle at Thanksgiving or an asshole US Senator. 🧪🌎

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

Great work from Mochulska & Francois developing a generative framework for systematically building Dynamical Landscapes of cell fate decision making using modular dynamical components Important step to interpretable and predictive models of cellular differentiation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

After being stuck in Hong Kong after ISSCR meeting unable to fly back home, I managed to get on a plane to London to stay with family, only to learn in the air that our institute was hit. My team is all safe. My lab sustained serious blast damage but we shall overcome! #PeaceNow tnx for messages :)

Weizmann Institute rn

Scientists observe the nematode’s behaviour in the wild for the first time https://go.nature.com/4dXCMFc

4. Most importantly though, Jay, despite his espoused commitment to science and the scientific process, is destroying the NIH and is NOT equipped for this job. As seen in the Bethesda Declaration...which you should go read, sign, and share: www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

SEVERAL KEY THEMES FROM THE HEARING: 1. Jay is REALLY pushing off accountability on the budget saying that it is "a negotiation between congress and the administration" I think he is distancing himself from Trump to remain "neutral" & avoid fallout when it (inevitably) comes.

Our latest "Dynamic Landscape Analysis of Cell Fate Decisions: Predictive Models of Neural Development From Single-Cell Data" A rigorous mathematical foundation for Waddington's landscape to study cell fate decision making Applied to ventral neural tube development www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A closed feedback between tissue phase transitions and morphogen gradients drives patterning dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.06.658228v1

War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength

🧪⚛️ Squids are awesome! Here's a very interesting example of how studying living systems reveals new phenomena and regimes of physics. In this case packing and order. Work from the group of @simonepigolotti.bsky.social at the @oistedu.bsky.social phys.org/news/2025-06...

The failure of the National Academy of Sciences USA to make a clear and unequivocal statement about the disastrous Trump administration science policies — it lets all of us down and dooms them to eventual irrelevance.

Our paper on hyperdisordered packing is out! Chromatophore arrangement on squid skin reveals an exotic form of disordered packing, caused by the interplay of cell insertion and surface growth journals.aps.org/prx/abstract...

New paper out in @pnas.org We followed cells migrating along signalling gradients in 3D, and found they collectively behave as a living droplet - a self-propelling fluid that grows. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

For multimessenger astronomy, you really need 3 detectors online to localise sources. With KAGRA all having a long way to catch up, and LIGO India only just starting construction, we'll have many years before we could make it back to current abilities even if everything goes perfectly

No no no! These university leaders don’t get it. If you negotiate one on one you don’t buy peace; you just expose the whole sector and yourselves to more shakedowns. See law firms. The only response is to unite in collective action and fight the Admin’s illegality. www.cnn.com/2025/05/31/p...

Spatiotemporal development of expanding bacterial colonies driven by emergent mechanical constraints and nutrient gradients @natcomms.nature.com from Terence Hwa lab www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Proposed cut to NSF Biology budget is 70%. 70%. Seventy. Call your senators & reps nonstop. Give them numbers on NSF impact for state/district. tableau.external.nsf.gov/views/NSFbyN... explain this will decimate the economy if their districts, especially if it has a major research univ. 🧪

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

Here Mike Lynch mounts a fierce challenge to two recent attempts to understand the evolution of complexity in biology and beyond. I wouldn't like to place bets on the winner in this bout, but it does seem Lynch presents some tough questions. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...