Clear example of picture memorization leading to plagiarism. Recently we saw a few examples of AI generated cell pictures or western blots by Gemini, I am pretty sure we will see this happening with fake data …

“Theorists may be thought of as herders rather than farmers,they can roam from one field to the next seeking interesting problems and tending to their flock of ideas.” Nice quote from Boris Shraiman, and congratulations !!!

OMG, je vais pouvoir regarder le championnat du Monde de Cyclisme l'an prochain littéralement depuis mon bureau !!!!

"Learning the principles of T cell antigen discernment" a review focused on the theoretical and experimental principles of Adaptive Kinetic Proofreading, with recent application to cancer immunotherapy ! With @fxpbourassa.bsky.social , Sooraj Achar and Grégoire Altan-Bonnet. arxiv.org/abs/2511.18626

I liked everything as a kid, but thought I was much better at maths. Then realized before grad school that I did not want to spend my life proving theorems, switched to physics. Realized that ‘traditional’ physics was very well known at that point so embraced the wilderness of biological Physics.

Montreal, best city in North America.

What really bothers me in those weird times : people in Europe/US do not realize that we are living on borrowed time (on health, democracy, peace, climate …). For now things only degrade ‘slowly’ or people simply deny them, but it will be extremely difficult to go back once big cracks are obvious.

Montréal et Québec, les deux premières villes pour le vélo en Amérique du Nord, et dans le top 30 mondial !🚲 www.ledevoir.com/actualites/t...

Premiere experience REM pour un rendez vous centre ville. J’ai fini mon cours à 11:20 au Pavillon Claire Mc Nicoll. À 11:40 j’étais à la station McGill. On s’y fera sans doute mais là tout de suite c’est tout bonnement incroyable.

Copilot and ChatGPT are dead. I also tried to download a supplementary information from a journal for a paper I have to review, and even that is dead. This almost tastes like freedom 😃

The wonderful @audreymoores.bsky.social wrote an opinion piece about the dangers of this for chemistry, I guess it extends to other sciences … www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very happy to participate in the ‘Physics of Hopfield’ meeting in Princeton. With a fantastic introduction by Bill Bialek

how did i go so long not knowing we were literally teaching people to read wrong. i knew something wasn't right but jesus christ www.apmreports.org/episode/2019...

It still amazes me that, despite all the 'advances', most commercial websites are extremely clunky to the point of being unusable (BestBuy, why ???)

Ça fait presque 20 ans que je vis à Montréal je pense que c’est mon record de neige la plus précoce ! Bonhomme de neige de Novembre à suivre ?

Happy "Lights All Askew" Day to all who celebrate! (Headline in the New York Times from Nov. 10, 1919, brings Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity -- along with its alleged incomprehensibility -- to the public.) 🪐🔭🧠📰 #physics #science #histsci #lightsallaskew

Superbe vue depuis le belvédère ce matin, j’adore cette lumière d’automne !

Haha, this from the New Yorker is getting passed around the math dork community. I did a comic about this kind of thought a few years ago: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/commut...

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things: (1) Are the claims interesting/important? (2) Does the evidence support the claims? Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

When q.e.d was released I was a bit afraid it would be used for ‘peer’ review. That was only 3 weeks ago. Still not sure if q.e.d is a good or bad thing, but do we need to move so fast ?

Félicitations à @fxpbourassa.bsky.social pour l'obtention du prix de thèse de la division 'biological Physics' de l'American Physical Society ! Le doublé après le prix similaire de @biophyscanada.bsky.social ! @mcgill.ca www.aps.org/funding-reco...

Quite astounding that we are still pushing this kind of program, despite the Bouchard report and all the numerous stories of ‘stars’ coming from abroad who come to Canada, but keep their former lab, and then go back after 5 years because Canada is too cold or whatever.

What is even more disturbing : many ‘elite’ institutions are also failing to some extent (academia, law firms, etc…)

Open Letter to Protect Tri-Concil EDI Data, shared by @biophyscanada.bsky.social . I cannot sign right now because the form seems to suffer a bit (I assume from multiple connections !) but will definitely sign later !

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

On another level, I think mainstream movies playing on conspiracy tropes like ‘Fly me to the moon’ are kind d of irresponsible

True at McGill and at my former uni, where it led to major reorg that increased centralization (and the number of high level administrators). It's a major reason why my faculty and others have unionized at McGill. Info about the uni's finances is difficult to impossible to access. Nous is involved.

We are thrilled to announce the inaugural Metabolism in Development & Physiology virtual seminar, a new series connecting researchers across all stages & disciplines in metabolism! 🗓 13 Nov 2025, 16:00 CET 🎙 Alexander Aulehla (EMBL Heidelberg), & 🎙 Christopher Bell (Uni of Oxford) See you there!

Halloween Science movie.

If the NIH and HHS were under any other prior President (Dem or GOP), we’d see a rapid shift of funding to leverage this. But the politicization (and gutting) of these agencies means it won’t happen—and so many people will die unnecessarily as a result.

"Ensemble Montréal originally proposed deregulating Airbnb — despite the fact that short-term rentals are a leading cause of the housing affordability crisis. It's all more evidence that the people who often have the best chance to lead Montreal seem to have no idea what the city's problems are.”

mRNA vaccines seem to work synergistically w/ cancer immunotherapy. In patients, the vaccine acts like a siren that triggers the release of immune signaling proteins, instructing the immune system to attack tumors. We need to funding for mRNA based therapeutics. 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

Just posting because everyone needs to see a walking moai. 😝

brb, calling Regent's Park to let them know that Roddy Ho's vehicle has been located

C’est pire que de la timidité : mise en avant des ´penseurs’ d’extrême droite, publication de ‘fuites’ venant clairement du camp Trump (par ex sur Harvard)… ça s’est dégradé 2-3 mois avant l’élection. Je me suis désabonné après la colonne de Douthat disant que le Canada devait devenir le 51e état.

Compared to other publishers, The Company of Biologists is small fry with fewer than 70 staff supporting 5 journals from a single office. But, for over 100 years now, it’s punched above its weight in innovation, prestige and community support.

Latest work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social We find the fly development gene bicoid is much older than previously thought (~20 million yrs older!) 🪰🧬 To pinpoint its origins we tackled the Diptera phylogeny, providing some resolution (many open questions remain). 🔗 tinyurl.com/2vyuevpy

This is mindblowing on so many levels.... Statues to honour 'the West' ? We are truly reliving some parody version of the 1930s. All the big fascist buildings built at that time are horrible and look so fake www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the artificial general intelligence dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought. . cacm.acm.org/opinion/comp...

Please allow me to introduce... our new preprint 🎉 Together with Michael Zhao, Anna Erzberger and Alexander Aulehla, we investigate pattern formation due to aggregation in confined systems. You can find it at arxiv.org/abs/2509.08533 @michaelzhao.bsky.social @erzbergerlab.bsky.social

i seem to have watched enough french-language instagram videos that québecois influencers are suggested to me on the site (this one is about french-from-france folks being snooty about QC-specific words and accents)

Maud Menten was born in Canada in 1879 and completed her UG and MD education at University of Toronto. As a research assistant with Leonor Michaelis in 1912, they wrote the classic paper describing the “Michaelis-Menten” model of enzyme kinetics.. #WomenInScience

I just tried it on some of my *published* papers. 1. It is quite impressive 2. some suggestions are a bit too much ( I wish I could have done all that you suggested to address "minor" gaps, but it would take a very long time) 3. kind of afraid now that all papers will be reviewed by AI.

Montréal à l’honneur dans le Time et L’Economist

We are hiring ! If you want to become professor of Bioinformatics in the best city of North America, check the announcement below ! Also you do need to speak French (as long as you commit to learning it :) ) www.umontreal.ca/public/www/d...

Biology is much more complicated than most non-biologists can imagine. And AI is not going to change this anytime soon. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

Very sad news, John Gurdon has died. A developmental biologist's developmental biologist, Nobel prize winner His work is the foundation of much of today's dev & stem cell bio. An inspiration to many, including me. Always asking questions & wanting the answers www.magd.cam.ac.uk/news/profess...

It would be beneficial for French politicians to learn from other established parliamentary democracies. In Canada, there is a long-standing culture of minority governments, but a significant difference is that elections are called as soon as a vote of no confidence is lost.