And the @bsdb.bsky.social Waddington medal goes to... @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social. Could not be more highly deserved, I'm so delighted to hear this 👏

Are you attending @bsdb.bsky.social 2026: Molecules to Morphogenesis in Warwick this week? Visit our stand to complete our quick survey and be in with a chance of winning a special goodie bag.

Arp2/3-dependent actin assembly shapes endosomes and promotes intracellular trafficking in fission yeast The work from Alejandro Melero @ameleroc.bsky.social and Miguel Basante-Bedoya just out in Current Biology. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @biology-unige.bsky.social

We're still accepting submissions for our upcoming special issue - Imaging Cell Architecture and Dynamics - which is being coordinated by @franbottanelli.bsky.social and Giulia Zanetti, working alongside our Editor @guijacquemet.bsky.social Deadline: 1 April journals.biologists.com/jcs/pages/im...

Hello, world! We are starting a worker cooperative to build, maintain, teach, and support open source scientific imaging software. image.coop/blog/posts/2...

Registration is now open for our two-day **"Heidelberg Wild Thinking Workshop - The organism, its self and its environment: from philosophy to physics"**, https://www.cos.uni-heidelberg.de/en/wild-thinking-workshop-1 an interdisciplinary event on **19-20 […] [Original post on biologists.social]

Interested in one of the top jobs in European biology? @embo.org has opened a call for its next Director, to succeed Fiona Watt Really spectacular opportunity! Spread the word... www.embo.org/features/emb...

i’ve come to believe that we will never solve the literacy crisis by talking about reading as “watering the garden of your mind” or whatever. books are, and have always been, the favored medium of God’s purest freaks and degenerates. Reading isn’t a salad. If you’re doing it right, it’s a vice.

MRC curiosity-driven research reopens with new approach www.ukri.org/news/mrc-cur... MRC applicant-led funding opportunities reopen 7 Apr, experimental medicine opportunities opening 30 Apr Complete change in selection of project: no boards, shortlisted applicants -> in-person panel interview.

Join the #EMBL conference "Microtubules: from atoms to complex systems" 🗓️ June 17-20! Register for in-person at @embl.org Heidelberg or Virtual 👉 www.embl.org/about/info/c... #EESMicrotubules @events.embl.org

Zooplankton larvae shoot up in the water column when exposed to high pressure. Mediated by special pressure-sensory photoreceptors. From our paper on the mechanism of barotaxis. https://elifesciences.org/articles/94306 #cilia #plankton #neuroscience

If change doesn’t come from reviewers, publishers, or the courts, one remaining lever is for funders to set clearer standards for journals publishing publicly funded research.

Litigation could force structural change, but in this case the courts declined to intervene. That leaves regulation by research funders.

Demand side: publishers could adopt new models if they believe it improves their product or business. Across the industry, however, there is little economic pressure pushing publishers to change long-standing practices.

There are at least four possible drivers of change. Supply side: reviewers could refuse to provide free labor. In practice this is unlikely because peer review norms (reviewing for free) are deeply embedded in academic culture.

The case raises a broader question: how does change happen in scientific publishing? In the peer-review labor market, reviewers supply labor and journals demand it, yet the price of that labor has long been set at zero.

The argument was essentially that scholars provide valuable labor (peer review) for free while publishers generate billions in journal revenue.

The claim: publishers collectively enforce norms that keep peer review unpaid and restrict competition between journals, eg by prohibiting authors from submitting a manuscript to multiple journals at once.

A recent lawsuit against several major academic publishers raises an interesting question: how does change actually happen in scientific publishing? A group of researchers sued 6 publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer) alleging antitrust violations. 🧵

The Max Planck Society has a junior research group program for women named after Meitner. It's existence is evidence that things haven't changed enough. It wouldn't be necessary, if they had. But there are signs of progress. Look at this age/gender dist of directors:

This microscopic freshwater organism, Limnias malicerta, is a rotifer, recognized by its rotating wheel-like structures. It uses spinning cilia on its head to swim and capture tiny food like algae and bacteria. Original post

Absolutely terrible news. I knew Alan as he was a long-serving Director @biologists.bsky.social. Our research interests were very far apart but I loved chatting with him about running, gait analysis and GPS. He was a data nerd just like me. So sad. My thoughts are with his family.

Obama: "We are living in a time where it can be hard to hope. Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions. Another setback to the idea of the rule of law ... but this man - Rev. Jesse Jackson - inspires us to take a harder path ... bc if we don't step up, nobody else will"

Rapid RSV tests linked to less antibiotic prescribing in kids An Italian study finds an RSV-positive rapid antigen test in children aged nine to 36 months was associated with a 48% reduced risk of receiving an antibiotic. www.cidrap.umn.edu/r...

2nd- or 3rd-year PhD student? Applications for @hhmi-science.bsky.social's #GilliamFellows Program open 9/1! Robust dissertation support, an incredible community of scientists, tailored professional development (for you *and* your faculty thesis advisor), & so much more. Bookmark bit.ly/4qQArRh!

👇👇👇

"the application-led research bucket, which maps to responsive mode applications, as you used to know them..... So curiousity driven research is protected in scale and in scope"? Because LMB isn't traditionally thought of as funding for "responsive mode applications" (nor is it QR).

Interesting thing about the UKRI funding diagram: the research councils are invisible with their programmes now (maybe?) inputs to funding bucket outcomes. Disciplines not the organising principle, but pieces of delivery channels. That’s the enormous structural shift. Universities better catch up

*Recruiting new group leaders* The @lmcb-ucl.bsky.social at University College London are looking for outstanding candidates to sponsor for career development fellowships. Fellows would then be assessed for tenured positions at the end of the fellowship term.

This poses an intriguing question: how is cytoplasm robustly and accurately organized in absence of physical barriers, and how is cytoplasmic partitioning achieved within the constrained time window of rapid embryonic divisions? (2/9)

One more week to finalize your applications for the 2026 MBL zebrafish course at Woods Hole! Application deadline extended to March 9. Please repost and forward to anyone interested in learning 'everything zebrafish'! www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

Change can be positive and may lead to better outcomes. This is just a plea for more information or to be clearly told when more information will be available. Simple things like cashflow in HEIs. If MRC £ a key income stream then knowing the exact length of the pause is critical to planning.

We are #Hiring! Our lab is looking for a LabTech/Lab Manager! Take a look to our research here! physics-of-life.tu-dresden.de/team/pol-gro... Drop a line if you are interested to know more details! #labtech #labtechnician #biology #labtechnicians #labmanager #labwork #Xenopus #zebrafish #devbiol

Just published: chemotactic sperm cells become phototactic 💡- by loading photo-activatable second messengers. This allows to "reverse-engineer" chemotactic signaling dynamics and expose cells to signals they would never see in the wild. Honoured to be part of this collaboration with the Kaupp lab.

I am so grateful to the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences for this honor. Can’t wait to be back to the lab and celebrate with lab members on this special recognition of their hard work.

Millions of moms struggle with depression during their pregnancy. America deserves a Surgeon General who can state plainly that SSRIs are SAFE for the majority of pregnant women. We don't need more junk science charlatans. I'm voting NO on Casey Means' confirmation.

In which we show that Tatton-Brown-Rahman syndrome due to a pathogenic variant of DNA methyl transferase DNMT3A can be associated with Familial Pneumothorax 🫁🧬 #RareDisease #Pneumothorax @cuh.nhs.uk @royalpapworth.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mine in this week’s @newyorker.com

Congratulations @kellythd-nguyen.bsky.social - amazing!!

Fantastic launch to our exciting @wellcometrust.bsky.social #UNICIL project in Exeter with a symposium entirely dedicated to our favourite things #MotileCilia with our teams & new friends! Great things ahead under @micromotility.bsky.social ‘s helm.. @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy /1

Our department at Genentech is hiring. We're looking for a freshly-minted PhD (0-3 years) protein biochemist / structural biologist to join as a Sr Scientist. A rare opportunity to join our group leader job family at a more junior level than we usually hire.

Excited to share our new preprint exploring how Paramecium achieves diverse flow functions, i.e. feeding and swimming, simultaneously. This work was spearheaded by our ExM expert, PhD student Daphne Laan @daphnelaan.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

En ce moment à Nice, rassemblement de fascistes. J'ai passé la journée à prévenir mes ami.e.s racisé.e.s et LGBTQIA+ de ne pas sortir. Une amie a été menacée par 6 hommes. On se rend compte de la dinguerie ? ?? ?

Interviewer: "When you look at today's numbers, what do they tell us about the effectiveness of Donald Trump's tariffs." Me, very serious economist: "Hahahahahahahahahahaha.... hahahahahahahaha.... hahahahahahahahahaha... oh, wow." Sometimes all you can do is laugh at the absurdity of it all.

An agentic system for rare disease diagnosis with traceable reasoning www.nature.com/articles/s41... DeepRare: github.com/MAGIC-AI4Med...

Super happy to share that our last paper published in @jcb.org is out !

Normalize laughing derisively in men's faces when they deserve it.

@camboutin.bsky.social, Kodjabachian et al. @ibdm.bsky.social describe an inducible multiciliated cell line well suited for advanced #microscopy and #proteomic approaches. The study provides a detailed proteomic profiling of MCC during their differentiation. rupress.org/jcb/article/... #Cilia

There's been a bit of a change of tone in how UKRI leadership is talking about the funding reforms underway Ian Chapman acknowledged this week that “uncertainty about funding is an unhelpful overlay when already faced with great challenges” and said UKRI would engage “more concertedly” ...