Leaving Tokyo today, glad I could enjoy a few early cherry blossoms ! 🌸

4. As Jevin West and I have been saying for several years now, because a seemingly credible message no longer implies a human sender, LLMs will push us toward more emphasis on reputation and status — and as such serve as an anti-egalitarian force in all aspects of society, science included.

Happy to be back in Tokyo for the EPIC symposium ! sites.google.com/g.ecc.u-toky...

We might soon get a Borgesian cell as detailed as the real one :)

« Quelle que soit la cause que l'on défend, elle restera toujours déshonorée par le massacre aveugle d'une foule innocente où le tueur sait d'avance qu'il atteindra la femme et l’enfant. » Albert Camus

Condensates are powerful ways to break symmetry and cells do remarkable things with them. Here we show that in a multinucleate fungus, a condensate regulates translation of a cyclin and a formin in distinct locations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Printing out one of the Waddington Landscapes optimized in our recent paper !

Two decades of iPS cell research. By my friend and colleague @gladstoneinst.bsky.social Shinya Yamanaka, in @cp-cellstemcell.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-stem-ce...

I do not know if this is related to AI, but I have seen an explosion of review requests in the last few months, from journals I do not know, and only loosely connected to my field. I keep hitting ‘decline to review’. This is a bit scary.

The model of unpaid academic labor required good jobs with ample unstructured time.

Impressionnant discours de Macron. La France m’épate parfois, par exemple je trouve à la fois incroyable et malin qu’ils aient lancé si vite une espèce d’IA à la française avec MistralAI.

Researchers say the ancient breakup of tectonic plates creates churning waves in Earth’s mantle that tumble in slow motion under the continents for tens of millions of years, sculpting topography deep within continental interiors. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4s8GTEs #ScienceMagArchives

This moment when you realize that Asimov's Laws of Robotics were orders of magnitude more clever than anything happening in reality. You wonder what would have happened if AI had rather expanded under any other past presidency.

J’espère que il y a une place spéciale en enfer pour les gens qui mettent les crottes de leur chien dans la poubelle à compost de leurs voisins

France lit the Eiffel Tower in blue and yellow on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, signaling solidarity and support for the Ukrainian people. #France

“It would be foolish to suppose that black box AI can save us from the daunting task of understanding how genomes work. But who would want to forego that anyway, given the intellectual richness & beauty that, for all its messiness, modern molecular biology is revealing?” @philipcball.bsky.social 🙌🎯🧪

Channeling my inner @mcopelov.bsky.social : "other countries have domestic agenda" 🙂

The sad thing is that everyone has been trying to slowly move away from or complement oral and written exams, because they were generating a lot of anxiety (among other things). Now we have no other choice that to move fully back to it. What is the point of giving any graded homework ?

I was supposed to fly to Boston tomorrow…. Third year in a row that I have to cancel a talk in the US because of a snowstorm. At least this time I will not have to wait for hours in Trudeau !

Suprematism, by Nikolai Suetin, 1920-21, 📸 by @tiltoncreative

J'ai l'impression de regarder un match de foot de l'équipe de France : domination outrageuse mais incapable de marquer et on tire de l'arrière.

I know nothing about hockey, but I feel deep in my heart that Suzuki will save us.

When I’m two weeks behind on my grading.

Si Trump fait ça, qu’on me lâche à tout jamais avec le ArRêTeZ dE MêLeR sPoRt Et PoLiTiQuE. www.unionesarda.it/en/world/mil...

Just realized that I am teaching during the Canada-USA hockey final.

Happy to share our latest review article, “Learning the Principles of T Cell Antigen Discernment.” www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... with @fxpbourassa.bsky.social , Sooraj Achar and Grégoire Altan-Bonnet ! 1/4

“Or [France] was right, but got on everyone’s nerves.” 🤣🤣

Just tested it, it is crazy (and it is directly translated in French for me !)

Pourquoi la France est-elle si bonne en biathlon ? Lors des JO d'Albertville, je croyais que c'était à cause des bataillons de l'armée type Chasseurs Alpins qui permettaient de s'entraîner, etc... mais plus l'air d'être le cas maintenant.

Absolutely fascinating. Why is there a clear increase of mortality rates for males around 25 or so for the better part of the XIXth century ? HT @edouardmachery.bsky.social

From Pankaj’s Mehta group www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... “Our findings highlight the need for rigorous benchmarking and suggest that the biology of cell identity can be captured by simple linear representations of single cell gene expression data.” 🔥🔥🔥

Happy to share that I am now officially tenured (for the second time in my life) ! On a Friday 13th, lucky day !

This + the EPA news 2 days ago really depressed me. If the trends do not revert quickly, we might never realize the progress that could have been achieved on all fronts and the suffering that could have been prevented (especially on climate change)

This is really cool

So … can we say officially that it is alive ?

To be fair, repealing scientific fact is a return to a great Gilded Age tradition, see eg the famous Indiana Pi Bill establishing that Pi=3.2 🤣 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana...

Meeting alert! EMBO workshop about molecular and physical principles in evolution in Portugal, 2-5 June 2026. Deadline for registration is March 1st. Check out the website it should be a fun and informative workshop bridging evolutionary biology and physics of life meetings.embo.org/event/26-cel...

One advantage of being French : history can be very looong. Hesitating between Pierre Corneille, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Thomas Pesquet or Jean-Luc Melenchon ! fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%...

Far from me from criticizing France, but the 30 million euros investment is less than one year of funding of the similar Canadian Impact+ funding for Montreal only !

Same for figures in papers…

The Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance reminded me that Ricky Martin's 'La copa de la vida' was the official anthem of the FIFA World Cup 98 in France. Some inspiration for 2026 ? Un, Dos, Tres, Allez, allez, allez ! (...et Allez les Bleus !!!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZDj...

“legally” doing entirely too much work here

Congrats to the Altan-Bonnet group !

À choisir je pense qu’effectivement UE > US …. (Sachant en plus que les etats de l’UE restent quand meme très souverains ….) www.lemonde.fr/idees/articl...

On a side note, it is unacceptable that every time you open a PDF with Acrobat, it tells you that it is a long document that would deserve an AI summary. Especially for confidential documents (students assignment, grant applications…). Universities should explicitly *prevent* this.

Why don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures? Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607

It reads a bit like I am about to (finally) complete a degree!

I am obviously on the Mitchell side here, but I think it would be very useful, both for the general public and future trainees who consider a career in science, to discuss why AI by itself cannot cure cancer or solve physics. There are even epistemological issues here.

Friday at @mila-quebec.bsky.social Annual Conference Day: an original 'Discovery/Mystery' format, many great talks, I learnt a lot ! I tried to connect problems in AI to similar problems in immunology, I share my 'Adversarial Immunology' presentation below www.youtube.com/live/PpSpdPh...