What he said.

Commiserations to Sir David Attenborough on his 100th birthday, as he is now too old to be allowed to play with LEGO.

GxxxG motifs of the T. brucei mito OM insertase pATOM36 are essential. Similar motifs also occur in its functional analogues: yeast MIM and human MTCH1/2. - Great collaboration between cvb-lab.bsky.social and @schneian.bsky.social. Congratulations to Stephan and Siri. www.jbc.org/article/S002...

Really reading the literature has always given scientists in training a huge advantage. But these days, it seems like a superpower. So many people skim/AI summarize papers, but then you miss out on so much! It's like reading a description of a Van Gogh painting vs. staring at it for 2h.

🎨🔬 Interested in the interface between Art & Science?🎨🔬 Check out my assay "Drawing conclusions" about how doodling and drawing catalyzed my scientific creativity link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Absolutely fantastic!

A COLOSSAL 62 ft long (20 m) hyper-predatory octopus in the Late Cretaceous that could comfortably eat a Mosasaur. I have never wanted a time machine MORE.

Imagine curing diseases by rewriting the code of life!🧬Discover how CRISPR/Cas9, guided by RNA, acts as molecular scissors to precisely edit genomes, for which the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rz-... @snsf.ch @unibe.ch @ethz.ch @nobelprize.org

Listening to In Our Time on #BBCRadio4 discussing Escher, and I'm reminded of this classic from the New Yorker

They should have called it Straight of Schrödinger: it is both open and closed depending on whom you talk to and when.

🆕T. brucei Kozak sequences are unusual, hard to detect, but important for translation regulation - Check out the work conceived💡, carried out🔬and written up ✍️ by Philip Stettler, with only a minor contributions from me and the Polacek group - CONGRATULATIONS🎉👏 academic.oup.com/nar/article-...

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

This is of course hard on the junior and untenured, but not as hard as some seem to think. Is it better for your metees to burn through 5 postdocs so that one lucky one gets a CNS paper, or is it better for all 5 to get respectable, but less glam publications?

Deciding not to submit to CNS is, in part, deciding to be happier doing good science and having a "sucessful" career, as measured by traditional measures. Will chasing glam journals hurt my chances of making full Prof? Who knows? Do I care that much about making full Prof? Not really.

(1/7) How does T. brucei achieve a 140-fold stoichiometric excess of VSG mRNA over upstream ESAGs from a single polycistronic unit? Our latest research in @natmicrobiol.nature.com reveals a mechanism of spatially regulated RNA decay to fine-tune expression of virulence genes

Nice article about cave microbes and the work of people like Hazel Barton from BBC News www.bbc.com/future/artic...

OMG, the passenger riding along!

Congratulations Sebastian!

Hergé

🚨 Postdoc position 🚨 I’m moving back to Switzerland this summer to launch my lab at the University of Zurich and am recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow (start: late 2026). Details & application: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie.... Please share! 😊

How many mechanistically different protein insertases are there? Maybe fewer than you think! Check out our tale of pATOM36, MIM, MTCH1/2 and YidC in the preprint by Stephan Berger of the Schneider and the Ballmoos Labs. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Vorholt Lab re-created endosymbiosis in the lab: injected bacteria into a fungus and evolved a heritable partnership. Evolution, fast-forwarded. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

This is a beautiful case of how real science happens & serious scientists work. Kudos to both set of authors: “This has been a humbling experience, but one that speaks to the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavor.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

With new book 'The Dawn Fisherman' out soon, delighted to have explained with co-author Ralf Dahm to @meganwollerton.bsky.social at National Geographic how pus, old bandages (& later, salmon gonads!) led to discovery of DNA in freezing cold castle kitchen! www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...

🧬Fully Funded PhD Mitochondria|Protein Homeostasis|Antibody Technologies 🤝In collaboration with @menzieslab.bsky.social and Nick Robinson @blslancasteruni.bsky.social 🎓UK students only ⏰6th March 2026 📩Enquiries: [email protected] www.findaphd.com/phds/project... #phdopportunity #mitochondria

I find this kind of ironic, this is what happens if AI generated content is not checked.

This could be big! - Got it in January

Tracking the details of an experiment in successively cited Methods sections

Nature can be wickedly cunning.

💊 Resistance against antibiotics is a severe threat - also in 🇨🇭 The Forum Phagentherapie discusses with experts and the public about solutions. 👉 Register for our phage forum on Jan 31 in Basel: lnkd.in/e-im3e-g ‼️ Voices from society and patients are vital to develop viable approaches.

The winner of ✨ #planetaryScience image of 2025 ✨ is ✨Uranus as seen by JWST✨ Taken on: October 6, 2025 Credit: NASA/ @esa.int /CSA/ @stsci.edu / @andrealuck.bsky.social Full resolution: www.flickr.com/photos/19227... 🧪⚛️

David got company!

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

This is actually the trippiest thing I've ever seen that was not deliberately created by M C Fucking Escher. It straight up took me over a minute to make sense of and now I can't go back. This is the white-and-gold dress on a gram a week of trenbolone.

In the early 1980ies the labs of Cordingley, Boothroyd and Borst discovered that the LSU rRNA of T. brucei is processed into 6 fragment. Now more than 30 years later Simona Amodeo at al. found the factors that mediate these trypanosomatid-specific processing events. academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

I wanted to take the bus but it was stationary

How does a caterpillar completely dissolve inside its chrysalis, before reconstructing itself in the shape of a butterfly? “Metamorphosis is wild,” marvels historian Oren Harman in his beautiful new book, which I reviewed for this week's @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

📢Postdoc position available!🧪🧫🧬 Our group is seeking a motivated researcher to investigate the molecular mechanisms driving host–endosymbiont interactions. Full details & application: karriere.hhu.de//index.php?a.... Please help us get the word out!

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

Schrödinger: Excuse me, miss, can I borrow that box for a science experiment? Pandora: Sure, be my guest.

- Picture by Raymond Gosling and Rosalind Franklin, King's College - DNA by Rudolf Signer, University of Bern

Holy smokes!!!!

Here we are! To celebrate our arrival, here is a #trypanosome expanded ~13 times & stained for tubulin, individual cortical #microtubules can be recognised, what was only achievable by EM before. Images: Christine Girard-Blanc & Thierry Blisnick. Many thanks to @centriolelab.bsky.social for training

Paper by the Schneider lab( @schneian.bsky.social ) & collaborators w/co-first authors Corinne von Känel & Salome Aeschlimann "TbTim20 facilitates protein import at a low membrane potential in trypanosomes lacking the mitochondrial genome" @febsj.bsky.social nccr-rna-and-disease.ch/news/article...

Multiple so called "quality control checks" by the journal almost killed us. - But now it is out! A novel mito. protein import factor is only essential in T. brucei without kDNA. – Check it out. Congrats, to the first authors Corinne and Salome and to all our coauthors. doi.org/10.1111/febs...

The flagellar pocket collar (FPC) is a cytoskeletal structure essential for nutrient uptake & immune evasion in #Trypanosome. @mbonhivers.bsky.social &co use U-ExM to provide novel insights into FPC biogenesis, and reveal 2 unknown cytoskeletal structures @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4n3bWi6

Video: a Japanese scientist was attacked by flies while giving the acceptance speech for his Ig Nobel Prize-winning research paper that proved painting Zebra-like stripes on cows led to a decrease in biting fly attacks.

...and now something for RNA enthusiasts @nccr-rna-disease.bsky.social The function of the vault complex has finally been solved: it is a lampshade.

Another case of convergent evolution?