💚 Some personal news… 💚 (1/2)

evolution really went off with brassica oleracea

“Komagataella phaffii”

Few papers perfectly intersect my interests better than this paper on advanced baseball bat designs via genetic algorithms from the Centre for Advanced Wood Processing mdpi-res.com/d_attachment...

I think about this a lot

Props to the guy playing a clearly AI-generated TikTok on loop in a public bathroom, will file that in my “dystopian vignettes” folder

A new report I worked on for NAS on AI and biosecurity is out today - we looked at risks posed by SOTA AI and opportunities to use AI to improve biosecurity. It builds on a report we wrote back in 2018, which feels like a million years ago in AIxBio! nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/28868

Today, everything's computer, but tomorrow, everything's crabputer arxiv.org/abs/1204.1749

I'll be with the Ginkgo team at Nvidia GTC next week! Sign up here to for a demo: automation.ginkgo.bio/nvidia-gtc-2...

Since twitter is down I'll mention that I'd spend more time here if engagement was higher (with real people not the bot slop X has). Feels like tuning the algo to boost replies a bit more would be useful - my feed is mostly people shouting facts into the void

Support for the Ribosome Panspermia Hypothesis grows unabated

It's been just over a year, and either no new papers have been published with AI-generated rat balls, or the newer models are just that good at generating anatomically correct rat balls

It’s been a tough few weeks. My 10yo daughter was diagnosed with a very rare, aggressive cancer called interdigitating dendritic cell sarcoma (IDCS). I’m reaching out to identify clinicians/patients who have encountered pediatric IDCS or other (non-LCH) dendritic or histiocytic sarcomas cases.

We're excited to announce our 2025 Ferment Series, an evolution of our flagship annual conference dedicated to advancing our mission of making biology easier to engineer! We can't wait to see you in Boston Read more: www.ginkgo.bio/resources/bl... Sign up for updates: www.ginkgo.bio/ferment-2025...

It must be hard for designers to keep up with rapid tech changes for long-lasting stuff like airplane seats, but I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall for the meeting where they locked in the seatback Ethernet jack

Me in 2005: it would be fun to connect with my fellow students on the facebook Me in 2025: the new meta is getting your message out via tradwife accounts on xiaohongshu before either government sees it

My feed here is way more academic than on twitter, so as an industry scientist I feel like this all the time

Just an update that no one new has been added. Thinking about trimming it down, tbh

Here it is... it is exclusive, it is arbitrary, and membership will be determined solely by me. You should be upset if you are included, and also upset if you are not included go.bsky.app/JZc9HXe

I'm afraid I'm losing the urge to post - Twitter gives me brain worms and Bsky is a little too...earnest? Is there a starter pack for science goblins?

Thank you, Jimmy Carter. This chart is on a log scale. This year there have been just 7 cases of guinea worm. ourworldindata.org/grapher/numb...

Slack would be lethal if deployed in this environment

If I'm staring at you it's because I'm waiting for you to notice that my eyelashes are higher volume thanks to my B STRUCTURAL VOLUMIZING + LENGTHENING MASCARA featuring Bolt Threads' recombinant B-silk™️, a product of Haus Labs by Lady Gaga www.hauslabs.com/products/b-s...

Making academic pay more competitive with industry will make academia more diverse, but until then industry (especially startups if you have equity) are the key to upward mobility in science. Science doesn't need to make you rich but it shouldn't be designed to keep you poor either

My favorite academic trope on here is when y’all skeet about the burdens of academia and it’s all extremely normal work stuff like answering an email

❤️ "tinfoil shield" as a term. If it was up to me, every workshop on science policy would have a buzzer that would go off when a scientist says "we should educate the public more" on an issue that is value-driven. Then you have to sit in a penalty box and read about why the deficit model doesn't work

If the world weren’t so weird about GMOs we could have a new fruit dropping every week

Been this way since asilomar back in '75

Ok I love precision fermentation but what if we just made all the milk the country needs with a single megacow

Happy Ribosome Monday www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dh...

We need to speed up design-build-test cycles in bioengineering

Took butter out of the fridge so that it’s room temp when I need it later

Boston folks should check out our monthly Engineering Biology Club event - next one is coming up on Thursday 12/5 at 5:30PM. Come for the free food, and sign up for a lighting talk if you want to jam with us! Hosted by the one and only @synbio1.bsky.social www.ginkgobioworks.com/learn/engine...

Welcome to Ribosome Monday, something that's definitely real and not something I made up for Bluesky - please reply with your most fringe ribosome thoughts - mine is that aliens would likely categorize life on Earth as ribosomal life; all other biology is just a vehicle for ribosome proliferation

Trying out starter packs with a @techbio.bsky.social starter pack - join the TBT slack if you'd like to be added! go.bsky.app/PqdYxpr

What a time to be alive www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One must consider that if DNA data storage takes off we will someday store sequencing data as DNA

Wholeheartedly agree with this, and would add - in your position, are you adding new people to the first rung of the ladder that you're on? One of the things I'm proudest of at Ginkgo is seeing non-PhDs come in and earn PhD level roles at Ginkgo and elsewhere

RFP: Request for Problems Announcing Ferment’s $20M studio fund for bio-empowered companies www.ferment.co/media/rfp-re...

Which ✨AI✨ tool do I have to subscribe to in order to successfully paste a table into a document without messing up the formatting

I made a demo notebook and recorded a video tutorial for how to use the AA-0 protein sequence model from Ginkgo AI In the PETase Mask Fill Challenge, we compare the performance of 3 different models for modifying a plastic-degrading enzyme foundrytheory.substack.com/p/the-petase...

not to give a 2nd day of follow-back discourse but a lot of people follow starter packs before they add a profile picture/bio/post anything. I’m sure I would be thrilled to follow many of you, and I usually follow after good interactions with related people! hopeful to see this platform take off :)

Ben Affleck comes close to saying what I’ve been thinking, so I’ll pretend we agree - ethically trained AI will be a great creative tool for artists, but the equivalent of word art for the rest of us - janky, unprofessional, but good enough to get a point across

I am ***absurdly*** excited to announce the launch of a new funding opportunity through Experiment dot com!!! You have one month to pitch something wonderful in the realm of plant biology/biotech research and education. $10,000 max grant. PLEASE RE-POST + SHARE!!! 1/3 experiment.com/programs/pla...

Thinking about submitting a preprint to biorxiv just to call dibs on a new term I came up with

You may not like it, but this is what peak biomanufacturing performance looks like youtu.be/YnnbuoeQFSI?...

If we’re selling naming rights it’s time to start the conversation about sponsor patches on lab coats too

Can't wait for people to skeet me with their syn bio problems because I already know the way to fix them

The funny thing is this applies to grant funded research too - I was able to be a grant funded PI in my mid 20s because I was in industry