For no particular reason, I’m meditating on memories of the GW Bush years and the question of what’s more dangerous, lawful evil or chaotic evil.

Introduce yourself with what almost killed you: Hi, I’m a decision to keep climbing a 4500 meter peak in snowshoes even after a little light snow turned into rather a lot.

Finishing the year with a cool cloud! I don’t think I have seen this kind before. It must be a neat effect of the mountains.

🔬2025 has been an incredible chapter in Nikon Healthcare’s history. As we hit our 100-year mark, we’ve been blown away by the engagement and passion of the microscopy community. ✨ Thank you for making this year so special. 🔗Explore our special 100th anniversary page: https://bit.ly/44DKEsd

If anyone has a book you love, or heard about, or one you wrote, please recommend it. I’m always looking for books!

Walked past Mick Jagger on the street. Literally nothing notable happened. His pants looked painful to wear.

It boggles the mind that society has evolved into a place that lavishly rewards the kind of people The Police used to write songs about. Plus that one Weird Al song ‘Melanie’. youtu.be/oeKgLLaa4-E?...

New biomaterial just dropped!

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

I've been working on my own cocktail database / website - mixology.tools - to enable advanced data analytics. This is still a work in progress, but it's advanced to a point where I want to open it up to feedback. It's source & open data: see mixology.tools/about.html for links. Cheers!

I'm going to do a deep dive into the last 15 years of traffic data and publish a full analysis, because it reveals some very interesting trends, but here is my initial takeaway: Bluesky in 2025 was more effective at driving traffic to our marine science website than Twitter. Ever. Was

The car wash offered “graphene” sealant as a a $5 upgrade. Confused and somewhat frightened, I said yes. Best case scenario the marketing guys got a bit ahead of themselves. Worst case, both me and the car are about to make interesting case studies.

There is a foolproof way to get results you didn’t expect.

Rachel Carson: The Marine Biologist Who Changed How We See the Living World voxmeditantis.com/2025/12/19/r... #WomenInSTEM #STEM #MarineBiology #Ecology #Conservation

And then single blind it so the doctors running the study, assuming they are not already biased, know exactly how to give the funding source the results it asked for.

Someone finally read a book about Rome.

We have a ✨new website✨ - go and take a look to meet our team, find out how you can work with us, and see our upcoming training events! www.crick.ac.uk/research/pla...

>:^|

Getting SMART about FRAP enabled us to make many FRAP curves in one imaging session. Now we are doing things like 18 conditions n = 30 in a single overnight session. Study protein dynamics in high throughput. Curious on how? see our publication: febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Woop Woop, it's out!!! Congratulations everyone. A beautiful paper

From paleoart to fine art, comics to medical animation, bioart to space imagery, explore the rich SciArt ecosystem on Bluesky with the SciArt Starter Pack. 150 artists, plus the entire popular SciArt Feed 🐡 to pin to your skyline. And no gen AI or NFTs. 🥳

Gozer: CHOOSE the form of your [AI] destructor Venkman: Nobody choose anything! Ray: I couldn’t help it

I apologize to literally everyone for this. theonion.com/betty-frieda...

Hey folks in Dresden, I have a very good friend that is a microscopy expert there in a bit of a tight spot - anyone have any openings ? DM me!

That’s the point. LLM owners want exclusivity for institutional expertise, among other things, so they can charge everyone who wants to access it. Wikipedia is one of their most hated foes since it provides free knowledge to the masses. And everyone should be supporting Wikipedia for that reason.

Dog, woods.

“…malware that can use large language models to write custom code for each hacking attempt” That’s basically a digital version of Stephen King’s flu from The Stand.

I’ve thought a lot about this problem. Yes, AI garbage will soon be near impossible to distinguish from real microscope images. You could probably still use a decon-like PSF model to flag raw image data that doesn’t follow known optical physics. $10 says they’re talking about it at JCB. 1/4

I’ve thought a lot about this problem. Yes, AI garbage will soon be near impossible to distinguish from real microscope images. You could probably still use a decon-like PSF model to flag raw image data that doesn’t follow known optical physics. $10 says they’re talking about it at JCB. 1/4

For people old enough to remember, a big inflection point for the NY Times happened when Sulzberger chose to go full USA hoo-rah after 9/11, at the expense of integrity & standards. The Judith Miller saga just capped off a long, sad slide. Willing coordination w neocon agitprop got pretty bad.

We are looking for a PhD student to work on an exciting plastid endosymbiosis in microbial eukaryotes. This position involves sampling, exciting microscopy such as CARDFISH, ExM and FIBSEM, single-cell transcriptomics and more. #protistsonsky 1/2

My book 'The Tree of Life' is published in the USA and Canada today. Available as book, on kindle and as audio. I would be really grateful for reposts. www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So... www.amazon.ca/Tree-Life-So...

Okay, it is still open enrollment and i am still trying to convince you to go and sign up for health insurance. I know it is expensive and scary. But you can do it. The thread embedded here is a tutorial on how to understand and make that decision. I will now write a quickie version.

Our 12yo determined that her current favorite animal, the jerboa, go on our pumpkin this year. But talk about a cool Golgi pumpkin! Following convention, it looks like cis- is down.

Not looking to disrupt anyone’s day, but a whole new endomembrane system just dropped. What does that stuff do? No one knows yet!

Does anyone know if Democritus actually wrote a book about chameleons? This might be kind of niche.

Required reading for cell biologists to get a sense of basic statistical principles! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My new ImageJ / Fiji toolkit is out 🔥! The goal is to make image handling & visualization easy, with an intuitive interface! Install it on Fiji with the "Image Viewer" update site #microscopy #ImageJ #FluorescenceFriday #microscopyMonday imagej.net/plugins/imag...

Registration closes Friday at noon! Are you in South-Western Ontario and interested in fluorescence microscopy? If so, we are offering a 2-day course on designing, implementing and analysing microscopy experiments. Visit our website for more information: micrographiauwo.ca/cc2025/ #microscopy

As a supervising attorney, I am here to tell young lawyers that AI is absolutely a threat to your career. I do not mean that it will replace you. I mean that if you use it, you increase the risk that another attorney will replace you when you are fired. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

There’s an irony in how the mouse trap was pretty much Pareto optimized with the spring board design in 1898. I’ve tried the alternatives, setting aside awful things like glue strips. If you build a better one the world will beat a path to your door out of sheer surprise.

I saw this weird atmospheric phenomenon in Pittsburgh the other day. Rainbows usually happen opposite the sun, making a ring about 40 degrees around where your shadow. But here the sun’s just out of frame to the left, and you see this persistent rainbow bit just next to it. Any ideas?

'The device helped 81 per cent of trial participants suffering from advanced age-related macular degeneration (AMD) to achieve clinically meaningful improvements in their vision, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Monday.' www.ft.com/content/c2e8...

If I ever stop getting that unique thrill over a science story that starts this way, feel free to bury me.

In short: What began as a confusing cleavage artifact became a strategy for programmable import of synthetic building blocks and efficient GCE. It’s a whole new layer of control over ncAA encoding. Curiosity turned a failed experiment into a new principle! Very proud of the whole team’s work 🙌 9/9

We hire! The CytoMorpho Lab is looking for an engineer with a background in cell and molecular biology to join our team in Paris. This is a 18-month contract position, but we're open to exploring long-term opportunities. More details here: cytomorpholab.com/index.php/jo...

The avalanche was on

15 years in the making, we confirmed that mitochondria - the powerhouse of the cell - have an unusual localization in patients who experience psychosis (including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders). You’ll never guess what kind of patient cells we used to make this discovery… 🧵

For how much birria stew my family has eaten in the last few days, I still have a shocking amount of birria stew. 12yo takes it in tacos. I try to argue that cuts down on the total birria she can remove in a sitting, but resistance is strong.

As Roman leaders knew well, the best way to ensure the loyalty of forces you command is to not pay them.