zooming in on some nictating dauers of an unknown (likely Auanema) species

New preprint! We unexpectedly discovered that some Caenorhabditis species delete parts of their somatic genome early in development, which fragments their chromosomes and eliminates key germline genes. Multiple lines of evidence suggest this bizarre process was present in the ancestors of C. elegans

Dauer larvae of an unidentified, Auanema-like nematode found with a dead beetle (they're nictating on its foreleg making a ghoulish phantom hand)

Janelia is hosting a course on DL for bioimage analysis www.janelia.org/you-janelia/...

Team led by Tomoya Kitajima designed protein-based artificial #kinetochores to act as decoys to reduce bipolar microtubule pulling forces on chromosomes in aged mouse #oocytes, preventing premature #ChromosomeSegregation during meiosis I & II. In @natcellbio.nature.com 👇 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I'd only dabbled with napari, but needed to use it for a paper we're writing. This is a quick post about getting started: from installation to a folder full of thousands of processed images, with gotchas along the way. quantixed.org/2025/11/04/a...

If you're not living in the US and you're doing science related things please wave, my feed is suffocating and I need news from the rest of the world

What a gem from @dudinlab.bsky.social @gautamdey.bsky.social @centriolelab.bsky.social in Cell! Expansion microscopy atlas of >200 eukaryotes comparing cytoskeletal architectures revealing structures not seen before. Stunning visualisation! Exactly the kind of transformative cell biology we need.

Zohran Mamdani looked at a clock and said he knew it was 6pm, and in fact it was 6pm, but he didn't _know_ that; he merely had a justified true belief that it was 6pm, since in fact the clock had stopped that morning at 6am.

It was such an honor for me to work with awesome colleagues Needhi Bhalla and JoAnn Trejo on this important piece 👇

I ran down to Kyoto from the hills yesterday and was rewarded with the sight of a Chestnut Tiger · Parantica sita · アサギマダラ floating through the KU campus

Life was not that different in 1666

The Skagit River is my new favorite river. It's a beautiful, diverse, glacial watershed. All 5 North American salmon species, steelhead, coastal cutthroat, bull trout, & dolly varden are all native & extant. It's an salmonid paradise that aptly means "place of sanctuary" in native Lushootseed. 🐟

Took a late afternoon hike through the woods down to Kyoto with the kids today — I couldn't manage to focus well but there was absolutely a persistent, full-color rainbow streaking through this (ジョロウグモ) spiderweb! About 3 in the afternoon with the sun already getting low.

Watching the game this way is no less suspenseful

"…seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and the hopes, the loves and the hatreds engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement…"

"the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa" (disclaimer: I am also a card-carrying member of Antifa.)

A selenium-binding protein contains the sequence "SELEN…" - OK, not that surprising, I guess. Are there any unlikely coincidences in a protein sequence akin to the prescient name of Su(var)3-9? A kinase that has "KINASE" as part of its sequence for example.

We’re Hiring! We're Hiring. Do you want to become a Language Warrior? The Tulalip Lushootseed Dept. has an open position. Apply at

I’m a USC alum and would be sickened if they agreed to this. alumni.controlshift.app/petitions/tr...

🚨 First pre-print from my team !! TL;DR: presence of polymorphism (sequence differences between the homologous chromosomes) can *increase* the local rate of recombination in Arabidopsis thaliana, turning cold regions of the genome hot (purple v. grey) !

LIVE – dxʷləšucid 101- Lushootseed 101 / pədʔuladxʷ – Fall 2025 On day 6, Tulalip Lushootseed Teacher Natosha Gobin will be conducting a live session at 12 Noon. To join the live stream, you can use the provided YouTube link:

One day, a stranger arrived at the island and said "One of you has blue eyes".

At a calligraphy exhibition in Kyoto 2 weeks ago, two extreme points in a continuum.

If Trump goes too far, the Supreme Court will simply stop him

Just got back from an excellent week-long family trip to Ishigaki island, and despite the passing of a typhoon nearby we thoroughly enjoyed the ocean. This year the suzumedai / スズメダイ (damselfish?) were very bitey, and I came back with a bit less skin on my legs than I started with!

Paper alert! 📢 How do cells strike the perfect balance during meiosis? ⚖️ A new study from the Matos lab in @natureportfolio.nature.com uncovers how Holliday junctions and the synaptonemal complex safeguard crossovers ➡️ tinyurl.com/2k4mmpzu @univie.ac.at @meduniwien.ac.at

New release of #BigTrace plugin is out. Together with @aafkegros.bsky.social from Simone Köhler group we added a fully automatic tracing mode. + more macro functions and bug fixes github.com/ekatrukha/Bi...

One of my most prized posessions is this book, a 五體字類 dictionary showing many examples of 5 styles of of each 漢字. Among its superlatives must rank its approach to text layout: basically, "fuck it, we'll print the best examples as big as possible". LaTeX will not touch this for centuries to come.

"We stand on the shoulders of giants" barely suffices to describe our debt to previous generations of scholars of all kinds. Have you ever used… paper? This background note just scratches the "surface" — and we moderns absolutely depend on this. www.persianmanuscriptmaterials.org/introduction...

Our preprint on Pol-η usage during genome replication has been uploaded. It addresses the biased use of Pol-η in the lagging strand and late-replicating regions, which may be correlated with cancer mutagenesis. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It's hawkmoth season! This hōjaku / ホウジャク is the more common of the two species that frequent the yard. They'll be around until October/November, as long as these cosmos flowers last

Notch signaling in germ line stem cells controls reproductive aging in Caenorhabditis elegans academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Is euchromatin really “open”? Our new study @bioRxiv suggests otherwise. Using super-resolution imaging @shiori-iida.bsky.social‬ @masaashimazoe.bsky.social reveals: Euchromatin forms condensed domains in live cells. Cohesin constrains them and prevents domain mixing. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

I am an avid reader of Žižek (his writings reliably twist my brain in a good way) but this… would have been my first exposure to a curated set of his jokes, if #3 (m.m.) had not been told in my hearing by my grandfather, a golfer and devout Catholic, around 40 years ago: bigthink.com/thinking/sla...

I like and still use RSS for all manner of interests. Lately I've been using the Vivaldi browser instead of the text-based `newsboat`, but I find the default refresh rates too fast for my 20th century tastes. I would like the first item to be "daily", and the last "once every twenty years".

A nice surprise was waiting for me when I got back from a whirlwind visit to the US west coast

Excited to share work with Zhidian Zhang, @milot.bsky.social, @martinsteinegger.bsky.social, and @sokrypton.org biorxiv.org/content/10.1... TLDR: We introduce MSA Pairformer, a 111M parameter protein language model that challenges the scaling paradigm in self-supervised protein language modeling🧵

we're hiring!

This month's kana assignment — a properly attested poem based on a pun. A sage once said "He who would pun would pick a pocket" but this one is pretty good — my doggerel attempt is, I fled to the bushes to escape the heat, but their "Summertime" flowers brought a hot defeat

I am unmoved by the specific critique that "the US is ceding 'scientific superiority' to China, Russia", &al. Why should that matter? Science is not (should not be) a competition among states. But, the dismantling of US science hinders the whole scientific effort worldwide, and that does matter.

Firing google scholar due to low citation count

Looking forward to some quiet time in the library* this afternoon *numpy

www.bbc.com/japanese/art... 日本も続いてほしい。

海の日に、京都の海（琴引浜）に行ってきました。

An astonishing result! Kudos to the whole team.

Leaving the lab in this state feels like a waste (but was busy doing more important things)

Do you realize that when you open up your laptop you are using a device that makes the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy look like a PalmPilot?

Why are we still doing Corporate Memphis in 2025CE