The SerialEM Python interface has been a huge driver of innovation at the hardware-software boundary in cryo-EM: suddenly the scientist with some programming chops can readily implement their ideas 🥰 This looks like a fantastic meeting!

I used to work at Bell Labs. And my new picture book, SPARK, is about Bell Labs scientist Jim West: bit.ly/SPARKbk

"Life is so beautiful as long as I am creating it! So painful when it is a given that must be endured. Live, act, be wholeheartedly!" 19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s resolutions for a life worth living www.themarginalian.org/2025/02/17/s...

A bit like spiralling publication costs we need to start having a proper discussion around lab equipment servicing costs. These are often completely disproportionate to the cost of instrument and the service that is provided and seem to serve as a cash cow for vendors.

First time getting woke up by an earthquake - uh oh www.berkeleyscanner.com/2025/09/22/u...

also: Mojo beats Nvidia at matrix multiplication, the backbone of deep learning, on their current gen Blackwell chips 🤯 www.modular.com/blog/matrix-...

Apple silicon GPU support in Mojo was built out by an intern (!) this summer and has been coming up rapidly over the past few weeks This is a way for anyone with a recent Mac to get into GPU programming and call it from Python - a recipe for some fun applications! forum.modular.com/t/apple-sili...

Paid some BS late fee for our apartment building last year. I had no idea but someone sued them stating the fees were “unconscionable and excessive”. Just got a surprise check in the mail, thanks litigious USA I guess?! 🫡

What is confidence? nonzerosum.games/confidence.h... A visual guide to understanding confidence differently in a way that can increase it. #PersonalDevelopment #SelfHelp #Others #Trust #Cooperation #Narcissism #SelfDoubt

"You're irrelevant on Bluesky!" m8 I was irrelevant on Twitter where I had 110k followers and frequently got over a million views on my videos. It was still just shitposting on a social media site. Deciding that posting is activism has rotted a lot of brains on all sides.

A thoughtful critique of the pharmaceutical industry from the author of Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health Once again: financialization != salvation www.versobooks.com/products/303... youtu.be/0kmfbks8Jn4?...

PSA: 9 billion USD in research funds stolen by publishers over a 5 year period for open access fees - this takes away from your ability to pay your people what they are worth. Preprints forever.

46 articles and book chapters for me. The thing is, if Meta had licensed my work they wouldn’t have paid me - they would have paid Springer, Wiley et al. I am not saying it is right that they stole the work, it is just another layer of exploitation of creators.

The myth of the lone genius in science actively undermines the conditions that foster real progress - these people exist but they have limits and true innovation requires scaling beyond the individual

cell divisionists & FtsZ fans take note 👇

Really enjoying this book about the history of Bell Labs - a place that knew true innovation requires more than just one person or group

I’ve been using napari ~daily for years and the feature set has been basically static in recent history - has been super nice to see real momentum lately, some of these fun features required huge amounts of work in the back! Kudos to the team, glad to see the project in a good spot

Check out these thoughts about reviewing preprints. I agree, a change in the culture and practices would be very welcome.

Thanks Alister! That Feynman catchphrase is certainly words to live by for #TeamTomo. I actually used to intro my talks with it. But the trick is in the full quote-- these "easy" observations rely on making our microscopes (and tools for analysis) more powerful. Thanks for your help with #MemBrain 🤗

The classic Feynman quote from Plenty of Room at the Bottom comes to mind: “It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing!” web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/...

My PhD paper is in press @cellpress.bsky.social and now online: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...! Contents: weird #NPCs in yeast and flies, #CLEM, in situ #cryoET and more! Made possible by the amazing @becklab.bsky.social team at @mpibp.bsky.social and collaborators! #TeamTomo

It’s quite rare these days that what I’m working on is completely mindless - currently annotating training data and watching woodworking YouTube, feels very zen 🧘‍♂️

the @napari.org crew came to town! 🥰

For something different, tried this approach on something on the other end of the spectrum - in situ ribosomes from low SNR 2DTM data. Used the U2OS-grid 9 dataset from EMPIAR-12459 (699 movies; doi.org/10.1016/j.mo...). Blob pick & 2D after denoising gave 12k particles. 2-class HR-HAIR --> 3.3 Å

“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions” The way we do things matters more than we think www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/29/i... @mariapopova.bsky.social

How to criticize with kindness – the late, great philosopher Daniel Dennett on the 4 steps to arguing intelligently www.themarginalian.org/2014/03/28/d...

Out of context quote from a really great article - “Marcelo Magnasco, a physicist and dolphin researcher at the Rockefeller University in New York, told me. “We will need to understand what it is to be a dolphin.”“ 😂 www.newyorker.com/science/elem...

"Who knows were science will flourish most highly a hundred years from now? Perhaps in Japan; perhaps in China. We know nothing about these things.” Niels Bohr in 1933 after hearing it suggested that US science would reign supreme in a few years.

In the early days of quantum chemistry, before we had computers to calculate the shapes of electron orbitals, one man invented a mechanical machine that simulated their shapes. My latest column for @chemistryworld.com www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-...

Every part of the ocean is now affected by the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution atlas.mercator-ocean.fr/s/FiFt7KqXPk...

Spouse saw a guy climb onto the tracks at the light rail station this evening. As spouse was on hold with 911, with seconds to spare before a train pulled in, taking great risk, a security guy pulled the man to safety. Hero. Courage and empathy surround us. We only need to have the eyes to see it.

Avoid C++ entirely, if you can. There are so many better options now. I think of it as a purely legacy language now.

We are happy to release LocScale2.0: a tool for context-aware, confidence-weighted cryoEM map optimisation. Taking two half maps as input, LcoScale-2.0 produces feature-enhanced maps along with a robust confidence score that guides objective map interpretation. cryotud.github.io/locscale/

HPV is the most common STI. Revisiting the infection pathways, we discover that, contrary to the accepted model of trafficking, HPV stays intact and infectious in host cell lysosomes 🤯. Among other discoveries, we show that the intact virus is a cargo of COPI-coated pits!

Fiscal dominance - “with mounting public debt, the danger is that price stability no longer remains the primary objective – it becomes subordinate to budgetary sustainability” www.omfif.org/2025/09/fed-...

Science had issues on its best day, as the funding situation gets worse and worse we slowly slip back towards a world where the only people who can afford to think are the independently wealthy. Sucks. Inheritocracy by Eliza Filby is worth a read www.goodreads.com/book/show/21...

lol - the C++ iceberg victorpoughon.github.io/cppiceberg/

“we’re nowhere near the point that AI can do your job, but we’re past the point where an AI salesman can convince your boss it can.” jenson.org/hype/

🚀 Check out our new preprint on extending the scope of single-particle cryo-EM with 2D template matching! Improved cryo-EM reconstruction of sub-50 kDa complexes using 2D template matching is now available on bioRxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@grigoriefflab.bsky.social continues to push limits 👀

Improved cryo-EM reconstruction of sub-50 kDa complexes using 2D template matching https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.11.675606v1

This claim is getting legs so I checked. Indeed, Google Trends in the US is currently very close to the February 2009 peak for "help with mortgage." 😔 trends.google.com/trends/explo...

I met a guy in the Berkeley hills who was employee number 43 at Genentech. Said graduating with a PhD in molecular biology at the birth of the biotech industry felt like being a rockstar. Look at how commoditized that skillset has become and where the job market is now. Look at tech/AI. Think 🤔

One of the weirdest arguments out there is that education should be constantly reinvented to chase the immediate, presumed needs of a (monolithic) "job market." theconversation.com/to-close-its...

CryoET is a particularly brutal area for combining a spectacular public success with hidden heroic failure!

“In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know.”

been on a bit of a tear with reading this year, favourite book so far is without a doubt The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut - a deeply human look at the life and work of John Von Neumann www.goodreads.com/book/show/75...

That's quite true ⬇️ now, but I am hoping the science community here will manage to reverse the order 🤓 I find LinkedIn borderline intolerable, as a continuous list of self congratulatory posts 99% of starting with "I am delighted to announce" or add your synonym for delighted.. 🙄 1/n

That message is summarised in the paragraph below. It explains a lot...