Lol. This is academic publishing taken to its logical end. https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/05/publisher-demands-500-from-impersonated-author-to-retract-paper/

Under a new policy released Thursday, the Trump Administration will test conversion therapy on trans people in prisons. It explicitly states that it aims to help trans people “recover,” all the while forcibly detransitioning them both medically and socially. transitics.substack.com/p/the-trump-...

From @nikomccarty.bsky.social on writing:

My quote of the day Harrison Ford SAG-AFTRA awards, March 1, 2026

First peer-reviewed paper from Raredon Lab!! 🔥🔥👇🏼👇🏼 Kudos to @seedelstein.bsky.social for a job well done and super interesting findings!!!

We built a lung organoid system where the only variable we changed was the initial cellular composition. Same matrix. Same media. Same environmental conditions. Different starting communities.

Transitional epithelial states emerge across systems - hillock-like cells, Sox9+ progenitors, and secretory-alveolar intermediates. Hillock cells are notably dynamic. Their polarization and immune-regulatory signaling shift with composition. They are one node in a broader regenerative circuit.

One of the most surprising findings: We can grow complex lung organoids directly from unsorted bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid - even when epithelial cells are only a small minority at seeding. From this immune-rich input, both proximal and distal epithelial lineages expand.

As an undergrad, I started playing with what many of us call “miniature lungs in a dish.” The work evolved and is now out as a manuscript in @cp-iscience.bsky.social The question: How does starting cellular milieu shape regeneration? www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Love it when an Onion article has been relevant my entire adult life

The anti-war president is continuing his campaign of peace I see www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02...

Perpetrators choose to offend. They choose to abuse. Victims don't choose. Victims are just that—victims. And yet, we punish them instead of perpetrators. We give perpetrators a pathway back. And then we wonder why we live in a rape and abuse culture.

Another way in which Trump closely resembles Putin and other dictators is that when he is scared, he is dangerous. With public support in freefall, and with heat from the Epstein Files increasing despite his attempts to obstruct their release, Trump has started a needless war with Iran.

Delighted this paper is out! Soft solids fracture in complex ways. Can we control it using structure and activity? Yes, using defects that localize energy injection for targeted failure! Amazing work combining exp, theory & ML by Sheng Chen and collab with Murrell lab (Yale).

Topological control of spontaneous failure in active nematic solids go.nature.com/4cfzC0Y

Sometimes, the only way to build back up is to let everything fall apart. This is certainly true at the cellular level. www.quantamagazine.org/break-it-to-...

“Understanding autism from a variety of perspectives, whether it’s neurological, immunological, or even ‘placentological’—I think those are all important pieces of the puzzle,” says @cheadlelab.bsky.social of @cshlnews.bsky.social. By @vcallier.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/pos...

We’re grateful to @thetransmitter.bsky.social for highlighting the amazing work in @cheadlelab.bsky.social's laboratory! Read all about their recent preprint on maternal-fetal immune conflict in a mouse model of ASD. 👇

The agents entered the campus at around 6:30 this morning, just before a neuroscience researcher posted that “Dhs illegally arrested me. Please help.“ www.thecity.nyc/2026/02/26/e...

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause. I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does. 🧵/ sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

Without considering the sources of claims, efforts at epistemic vigilance become play-acting. With LLMs, we don't know the sources. Excellent thread from @mjcrockett.bsky.social

Is a T-cell Any More Real Than a T-test? “If I have shown that both are abstractions, both are useful, and both deserve a kind of epistemic respect, then I have accomplished what I set out to do.” Preprint: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28358/ #PhilSci #PhilSky

After the arrests of powerful men across the world, you might be asking why the US has so much trouble holding its leaders accountable for lawbreaking. Since Nixon, all three branches of government have worked hard to ensure they can break the law with impunity www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

As Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei suddenly discover that institutions of human power still exist, and can pose problems to one's utopian fantasies, forgive me but: I called this. I clocked Amodei's political ignorance in late 2024 on heels of his ludicrously naive manifesto. I bear my receipts:

Motion to stop referring to it as Next Generation Sequencing. That's like saying The Matrix is a recent movie

Figure 1 in this paper is both informative and hillarious. The collider on self-perceived causal inference skill is too real

I have written a piece articulating what I believe is a reasonably new position on AI, or at least one extremely underrepresented in the discourse, and I hope people will read it. The full piece is behind the New Scientist paywall, but I will share some snippets www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

Very interesting read from @margaridamcm.bsky.social ! 👏

No! It's the other way around. Engineering principles *generate* complex systems: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper out! In this project, we focused on the question how tissue mechanics is spatially controlled during development. We show that the GPCR ligand Fog acts as a “mechanogen” during Drosophila gastrulation, driving a self-organized wave of tissue invagination: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"We appear to be in the midst of a 'peer-review meltdown' in which the peer-review system is becoming woefully overtaxed by the volume of manuscript submissions." As the authors highlight, the lack of incentives to conduct peer review is...a problem. undark.org/2024/07/04/o...

The sickeningly prolific @philipcball.bsky.social with another excellent piece on the complexity of development and genetics. An interesting use case is in pedagogy, in K12 & college. Many science teachers simply can't imagine any way of introducing genetics as effective as Punnett squares.

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

Very interesting attempt to trace back the early evolution of a “system of conventional signs” (proto-writing system) 🧪✍️ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

maybe i have a bleak worldview or whatever but this makes me feel a bit more optimistic because the loop has closed and so maybe now humanity can regroup to see what's on the other side (post-homework etc). maybe some people in the next generation will want to actually learn things, maybe not

Happy to share our latest paper. Our findings uncover a unique chromatin architecture and spatial chromosome arrangement in gonadal germ cells and document that alongside global DNA demethylation, the germline epigenetic reprogramming involves reorganisation of the 3D genome.

Fontana thinking his 6000+ experiments may not have been enough to feel confident in his conclusions in the 18th century while we expect our singular experiments and their standalone replications to do wonders some 250 years later... (excerpt from the intro of Jutta Schickore's About Experiment)

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

the purpose of a system is what it does — Stafford Beer (2002)

Happy to share scHiCAR, an ultra-high throughout (millions of cells), low cost (5 cents/cell including NGS), and trimodal platform for integrated single-cell level analysis of mRNA, open chromatin, and 5-kb resolution looping with ground-truth data the same individual cell.

the only place this should happen is academic conferences

A primary source on this topic is here:

Even the bill is odd, capable of bending near the middle to create a sort of slurping 'peristaltic pump' where the middle bit remains closed but the tip of the bill parts to allow the tongue to dart in and out. For decades, scientists thought this bending was an optical illusion from refraction.

How do #sponges coordinate their bodies despite lacking neurons and true muscles? We show that sponges use monoamines to control water flow in their canals — reminiscent of how adrenaline regulates blood vessels. My PhD story, now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Evolution

"Only life knows Life". My @bigthink.com piece on Hans Jonas the most important philosopher you've never heard of. Jonas saw why life is different and why reductionist models of it will fail. A physics of life must go further. bigthink.com/13-8/nature-...

For those interested!

Excited to share our new review in @dev-journal.bsky.social on tissue phase transitions during development! @karengrace12.bsky.social @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social 🔗 doi.org/10.1242/dev....

I used Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 (and a bit of Codex GPT-5.3) to port edgeR to Python. See edgePython github.com/pachterlab/e... This allowed me to develop a single-cell DE method that extends NEBULA with edgeR Empirical Bayes. All in one week. Details in doi.org/10.64898/202...

In case folks are looking for a convenient way to containerize their claude code instances, here's a way to use Docker on your mac machine to isolate YOLO-ing claude instances. github.com/paulgp/claud...