The final Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in papers 30 years ago today.

Great advice received as a postdoc: Do the easiest thing. I was 3 years into my postdoc and juggling projects w/nothing concrete = career crisis I went to my advisor Paul Sternberg for help. He asked what was going on & what mutant had the strongest phenotype. "Clone the easiest one." It worked.

"Do the control you’re scared of. Often, you know the go/no-go experiment you should do, but you put it off because you’re scared of the result. You know what I’m talking about."

Ok here it is - out of 44 FDA approvals this year, 31 are small molecules (70%), 26 of those are oral drugs (84%), 22 of them are chiral (71%). This is the largest number and percentage of chiral FDA approved molecules in a single year. Fitusiran is not a small molecule, bonus.

The most striking feature is that the sensitivity of this approach allows to track autophagic vesicle transport in vivo for the first time! We found that distal dendritic segments showed elevated speed of autophagic vesicles, while proximal dendrites were more stable.

Whoa! Game changer!!! Great work, and excellent bluetorial 🧵

Mr. Cuban, I'm a professor at Yale School of Public Health. Here's a paper published by one of my colleagues in the top medical journal evaluating the Medicare for All Act, which would not only get us there, but would save $450B per year. Happy to discuss! www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

everyone on here is 38 years old and loves star trek deep space 9

xmas movie posters but with muppets: thread

OSTP has issued a request for information, please share with them your ideas for how to improve government functions related to science funding and policy www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Must say, while interviews with established PIs with deep cuts to their funding are important, the principal and longest term effects are on the trainees. An entire generation wiped of confidence.

One of the most pleasant surprises of the past 20 years was the transformation of Wikipedia into arguably the most reliable general information source freely accessible to the public. It’s not perfect — I’ve certainly seen errors — but it’s kind of shockingly good. One might consider a donation.

Worth noting that the student admits that she just threw the thing together in 30 minutes without reading the paper she was supposed to be responding to.

Reminder that the head of the NIH is an economist who has never conducted NIH-funded research, spent years doing paid speaking engagements for far-right extremist groups, & is best known for a study where he committed serious ethical violations & ended up wrong by greater than an order of magnitude.

AI-generated/heavily influenced grad school applications were abundant this round. They felt "off" - not genuine. In my opinion, if you are applying for a position that requires extensive critical thinking and writing, using AI for your application does NOT help your case with reviewers.

My lab in the NIH Intramural Program (Bethesda, MD) will be recruiting postdoctoral fellows over the next year with flexible start dates. We work on nanoscale cellular imaging of the plasma membrane and related organelles. Please reach out if you’re interested. www.training.nih.gov/jobs/pdp-053...

My dog isn't allowed to jump on the sofa and in exchange I'm not allowed to go in his laboratory

I love academia, half your coworkers left yesterday evening and won't be back until Jan 6, the other half will frantically try to contact you at 8am on New Year's Day

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

I love to be told that feminism has failed women by women whose careers and ability to flourish in public life, let alone have a credit card, only exist because of feminism

STUNNING: Nearly a year since President Donald Trump took office, his education department’s Office for Civil Rights has not entered into a single new resolution agreement involving racial harassment of students, we found.  @jsmithrichards.bsky.social @megomatz.bsky.social @jodiscohen.bsky.social

Amazing work 🤯 Great thread 🧵

⚡️Mitochondria make ATP, the energy that powers life. But in neurons, with axons up to a meter long, how do these tiny power plants stay functional in the right places? We went looking. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

SCOOP: American Academy of Pediatrics loses HHS funding after criticizing RFK Jr. Research included reducing sudden infant deaths and identifying autism early. Me and @Paigecunningham.Bsky.Social www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

I'm told that HHS has just terminated all funding agreements with the American Academy of Pediatrics. Here's a letter HHS sent canceling one of the grants, relating to work on birth defects. Canceled because the project "emphasizes equity, diversity, and inclusion as key foundational components"

New in ACS SynBio: led by Dennis Bolshakov, we used the awesome power of yeast to define how expression levels, noise, and sequence program the dynamics of synthetic protein waves, allowing us to genetically encode new cellular timescales stable over generations! pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH. And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you. A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

Amazing work by @krishnanyamuna.bsky.social and team. Great thread with pics. 🤯 a paper that will change how you think about cells - there are long-lived chemical microdomains within organelles!

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscopic slide. 🫧🐻🧪

Don’t forget this time of year to reach out to the competent, helpful, and kind people in your professional and personal life. Tell them how they made a difference for you this year, and how much you appreciate them. This simple act will raise their spirits, and yours too. Gratitude feels good!

Congratulations @jcstark.bsky.social and the team, antibody-lectin chimeras (AbLecs), a new modality for cancer immune therapy, now published @natbiotech.nature.com. These bispecifics can block glyco-immune checkpoint receptor ligands directly at the immune synapse/activate immune effector functions

“Basic neuroscience hasn’t produced new drugs.” 💊 Not true - zuranolone (PPD), suzetrigine (pain), gepants (migraine), and more... were born out of a long arc of studies in the lab. I wrote a Perspective on why this matters. @thetransmitter.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/drug-develop...

This is your yearly reminder -- submitting your paper just before the holidays is not a good idea. You're competing with a flood of other papers and even if it's sent for review, no one will agree. PS Feline editorial assistant contemplating the burden of submissions.

New paper out! We developed localizable chemigenetic fluorescent sensors for key metal ions (K⁺, Na⁺, Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, Zn²⁺, etc.). Our K⁺ indicators work beautifully in live cells and neurons. Samples available on request. Huge thanks to @deensun3.bsky.social and Kai @mpi-mr.bsky.social. Link 👇

Excited to share that this work is now published in its final form! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The #NIH IRP Summer (paid!) Internship Program for 2026 has opened its application portal. This opportunity is open to US Citizens who are college students (including rising first-years), postbaccalaureate, and graduate students, including medical and dental. The deadline is 2026/02/18!

Would you like to know how to make a zine? Here's easy step-by-step instructions on how to make your own without the use of a computer by @thorazos.bsky.social

When your PI presents your work

Which is more likely, Eric? That Harvard suddenly became more moderate just when you arrived to teach a seminar, as you seem to claim, or that it was never the radical right-bashing bastion you believed it was because you were woefully misinformed?

The RFK, jr effect.

you’ve definitely heard of elf on the shelf but are you ready for

A reminder to use the right P2A sequence to produce separate proteins - the images are from a GPCR-P2A-mCherry construct using a P2A variant without (upper row) and with (lower row) a preceding GSG linker.

You can do this right now: Think of a person who wrote a paper you love, whose work influenced or helped you, or has made your professional life better. Search up their email address. Shoot them a quick email of thanks. It means so, so much. This is a rough time of year, share some joy.

I think some folks might be happy to see this. NIGMS MIRA R35 for EI/NI has been published. PAR-26-121 files.simpler.grants.gov/opportunitie...

NSF - Forced reorg - POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements) - Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …) I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing. “Details matter” 🙃

I wish people today realized that 1 of 2 children used to die before we had vaccination. In fact, a high % of families didn't name kids until they made it past 1. That's why they are always saying, 'the baby' in old novels.

“The Daily Nebraskan found in the leaked spreadsheet that every program eliminated appeared to be profitable…every program that the chancellor proposed eliminating generated more money from tuition dollars than the department costs to run”

Do you like local music? Do you want to raise money to support cancer research? Are you curious to see a classically trained cellist onstage with a rock and roll band? If any of that appeals, come to the Crystal Ballroom in Davis Square, Somerville a week from tonight. 1/?