Very excited to be sharing our new paper, just out in Nature Cell Biology! The big question we investigate: How do migrating cells put their front 🔴 and back 🔵 in the right place?

There are almost no crustaceans in the deep ocean. Not because they would get crushed, but because they would DISSOLVE. The cold & high pressure cause changes to water that make it very corrosive to calcium carbonate shells. But there's one crustacean who solves this problem with ALUMINUM ARMOR.

Shi, Manzi, Grater, @nityak123.bsky.social, Ohler, de Jesus, & Dickinson show that in polarizing epithelial spheroids from mouse embryonic #StemCells, ZO-1 clusters are transported by cortical #actin flows to establish the apical junction. rupress.org/jcb/article/... #Myosin #Cytoskeleton #Polarity

This work nicely quantifies a major issue in our universities: "In higher education, administrative costs have risen much faster than instruction and research costs (4). MIT Faculty grew by only 9.2% between 1985 and 2023, while administrative staff grew by 189%." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Very pleased to see my 'What could a human right to participate in science be?' in Royal Society Open Science (open access) This paper certainly would not exist had it not been for the gentle persuasion and strong support of @michelamassimi.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

Great Euphrates drained to the west during the the end-Messinian Crisis: "drainage basins were an order of magnitude smaller than their present-day extents, the total palaeo-discharge exceeded that of the modern Tigris, Euphrates and Nile rivers combined" www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪⚒️ #Geology

PathwayEmbed: A Computational Tool to Quantify Intracellular Signaling Transduction States from Transcriptomic Data academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

This is incredibly crazy and when you click through you will see that this I am not joking at how crazy this sounds (expansion microscopy of individual building blocks of proteins such that structures can be recapitulated with a light microscope). This is absolutely *look at this crazy thing*

There is a rebuttal to AI crit that goes: “you are assuming there is some mysterious, unnameable essence that makes people human.” The argument is then that we must somehow show evidence; ideally, that evidence would be quantifiable

Quantifying large language model usage in scientific papers www.nature.com/articles/s41...

President of MIT not mincing words today in @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...

As a trans woman I had the I guess novel experience of being like a magical coding prodigy in the eyes of my peers and managers right up until I transitioned, then was "under-performing" and put on a PIP fairly soon afterwards. The shift was pretty jarring

sometimes I wonder if people in other fields have any clue what we go through as women in computational fields... (graph from: www.npr.org/sections/mon...)

New work-in-progress #ggplot2 extension package for chord diagrams hopefully coming soon! #RStats #DataViz

“As someone who studies culture, I would say that consciousness is at least partly for separating metaphor from reality.” There is so much to think about in that single sentence. (The entire op-ed is excellent.)

for NYT op-ed, i construct a theory of the “expertise gap” that keeps people like Dawkins falling for the idea that A.I. is conscious. the gap is in the machine: complex statistical/linear-algebraic kludge —> cultural output. a new kind of reading results www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/o...

Our new paper in Science Advances shows that TLR7, a viral RNA sensor, reshapes the maternal immune response to influenza in pregnancy, amplifying vascular inflammation and adverse maternal and foetal outcomes. @oxibgroup.bsky.social #pregnancy #influenza #TLR7 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Robust integration of single-cell datasets with imbalanced modality composition www.nature.com/articles/s4...

Early apelin receptor activation attenuates elastase-induced emphysema and preserves endothelial apelin receptor signaling in mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.12.724387v1

Single-cell proteomics illuminated new mechanisms of mammalian development. We found that spatially polarized protein distributions and intracellular protein gradients emerge during the earliest stages of mammalian embryogenesis and bias subsequent cell fate decisions. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Nesting Controls Phase Transitions in Higher-Order Contagion arxiv.org/abs/2604.23337

Predictability of complex networks www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out recently in Nature Mental Health. "Optimizing functional connectivity scanning conditions for predicting autistic traits" www.nature.com/articles/s44... 1/n

Take a look at some of our latest results, diving into task-fMRI data, autism, and predictive modelling: "What is the best brain state to predict autistic traits?" www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/2

Check out Evelyn's latest work. This is a beautiful story on how Arachidonic Acid regulates neutrophil swarm initiation. Come for the science, stay for the incredibly beautiful figures and movies 🤩

What am I looking at here opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...

This is the mathematician equivalent of screaming and running around

I'm planning on a GIANT roxygen2 release in the near future (tons of bug fixes, improved R6 support, new S7 support, ...) so if you use for your packages, I'd really appreciate you trying it out and letting me know if you see any problems! github.com/r-lib/roxyge... #rstats

I agree with what @kawillis.bsky.social is saying here. I think it’s an interesting idea but would need to be engineered carefully. Lots of possible unintended consequences. I like the idea of simple “downvoting” / mechanism for public scrutiny - but financially incentivizing and adjudicating…. ?

Let's say we get past all of this. Now. What do you see as the implications, in the real world where papers have more than one funder, when one of those multiple funders says a paper is "bugged"? What should they be, and what can we predict is likely to happen?

This is a great idea. Gets the individual incentives ($) lined up with the collective incentives (good scientific knowledge) in a viable and sustainable way Funders, why not?

Unconventional experiments that later redefine what counts as 'pursuitworthy' are excluded by strict standards. Szymon Miłkoś suggests that we need “transformative” standards: judge risky research by how well it turns intuitions into shareable norms 📄👇 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #HPS #philsci

I do not understand how *every* mechanism I review grants for requires me to submit detailed feedback, yet everything I apply to is just like yeeting science into the void.

Grow Flat midbrain organoids (up to 800 μm-thick) onto 3D-printed resin vascular network-mimicking meshed tubes (200 μm interval, 200 μm diameter😎) for 3 months Almost zero hypoxia, necrotic core, or ER stress ⏫Dopaminergic progenitors/neurons #CellStemCell 2025 www.cell.com/cell-stem-ce...

Hey, craniofacial and development folks! Check out a new preprint from me and @crumplab.bsky.social about the developing jaw. Here, we show how major signaling pathways establish distinct compartments along the oral-aboral axis. I'm excited to share it with you all!

This essay by @epress.bsky.social does an excellent job illuminating the wrenching cracks among American Jews. It is a sensitively-woven description, not a political argument--and a reminder to those otherwise inclined that "the Jews" are not, and have been never been, a monolithic lobby group.

Hot off the press 🚨 Epidemic spreading between regions is often modelled on a network 🕸️ But how do we describe this process properly? Here, we show how to build a linear transport operator at the network scale, by coarse-graining local advection-reaction-diffusion within edges. shorturl.at/0tAN8

How it started, how it's going Left: Lunar Orbiter I, 1966 Right: Artemis II, 2026 flic.kr/p/8Grtp2 flic.kr/p/2s68RXM #Artemis 🧪🔭

"Our findings identify ECM composition and mechanics as a primary mechanism governing mammalian regeneration. By demonstrating that the ECM acts as a mechanochemical signalling hub, we show that “retuning” the physical environment from a stiff, collagenous state to a soft, HA-rich state can.."

The competitive #researchfunding system is at breaking point. In our new Perspective, Peter Kolarz from @rorinstitute.bsky.social argues for whole system transformation, as innovations to address ongoing problems will not suffice. 🧪 #AcademicSky plos.io/4mjCi0g

Extrinsic factors can create a local tissue environment that encourages restoration @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @canaztekin.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @storerlab.bsky.social @scicambridge.bsky.social @kevinchalut.bsky.social

We have a new story out at @natcomms.nature.com! This time our lab tackled the enigmatic "autoinflammation of unknown origin". These #autoinflammatory patients don't fit the criteria of classical syndromes. It wasn't even clear they were a single group, to be honest www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It's been a while... dusted off some old code to see what the current publication lag times are at cell bio journals. At the end of the post there's the poor paper with the longest delay in the dataset... Hold On Hope: publication lag times at cell biology journals quantixed.org/2026/04/09/h...

This is so, so well-articulated.

A Spin-Glass Metabolic Hamiltonian optimized by Quantum Annealing Reveals Thermodynamic Phases of Cancer Metabolism https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.05.715441v1

" it represents a larger jump in capabilities than most previous model releases." "Claude Mythos Preview is significantly more capable than Claude Opus 4.6, the most capable model discussed in our most recent Risk Report." www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a...

“The researcher found out about this success by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park.”

this is so painful to read, i love it github.com/stephenturne...

Review | Data biases in genomics www.cell.com/trends/genet...