Andrew Kennard @askennard@qoto.org

One of my professors during PhD used to say “you can drive a truck through the holes in any given paper. so you look for what you *can* learn instead.” and being the smartass grad students we used to think driving that truck was fun. After so many years, I now appreciate her wisdom more than ever. All scholarly work has limitations but it’s refreshing when people critically evaluate what’s the actual value of the research. It's about humility, honesty, rigorous intellectual work.

It’s time for the Senate to create a select committee with full subpoena power to investigate the bribery scandal that is roiling the Supreme Court.

#Scotus #corruption

https://www.propublica.org/article/senators-ask-paul-singer-leonard-leo-accounting-gifts-supreme-court https://www.propublica.org/article/senators-ask-paul-singer-leonard-leo-accounting-gifts-supreme-court?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

PNAS commentary on the first year of their Consultative Peer Review Pilot

'The pilot is designed to encourage the submission of research that is sufficiently multidisciplinary and presents a challenge in finding reviewers, is counter to a prevailing view, or is too far ahead of its time to receive a fair review. Authors whose work qualifies for this review option can submit through the pilot to have their work thoroughly and efficiently reviewed by experts in the fields most relevant to their research.'
#PeerReview #sciencecommunication #scientificpublication

https://www.pnas.org/post/update/one-year-look-pnas-consultative-peer-review-pilot

'Story is now so valued that, in many realms, it has become compulsory—consider the recitations required of asylum seekers or rape victims, who are penalized or dismissed if the parameters of their stories do not readily conform to the genre.
And if a story betrays us? The solution, it seems, is to cast about for a better one.'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-bewitching-the-modern-mind-christian-salmon-the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall-book-review

When an app asks for permissions, the OS should not only let you answer yes or no. Every category should havev a "yes, but feed the app fake data" option.

Want my contacts for no reason? Have these generated fake ones! Wanna listen to my microphone? Here's random ambiance sounds! Location? I'm on a tiny 5x5m island!

Hell yeah! Put it all in your databases!

Actively sabotaging and punishing services wins over boycotts any day.

New lab paper! Bio-protocol from @NFerrandiz

3D Ultrastructural Visualization of Mitosis Fidelity in Human Cells Using Serial Block Face Scanning Electron Microscopy (SBF-SEM)

https://bio-protocol.org/e4708

#CellBiology #Imaging #VolumeEM

Did you now...? That multi-well plate lids stack and seal nicely so that they can be re-used to store (oily) microscope slides in between? You're welcome 😉 #don'twastewaste

Our paper is out in
Current Biology
🎉🎉
Congrats Sushila & co-authors!

Read more to find out how an oncogene impacts mitotic substrate attachment leading to out-of-plane cell divisions:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)00723-6

A friend called mindlessly scrolling “rubbing the glass” and if I have to hear it so do you

Do you have coding skills and some familiarity with Python programming? Join our online course on Deep Learning for Microscopy Image Analysis! #DL4MIA

Bring your own microscopy datasets for hands-on learning on image denoising and restoration, image segmentation, failure cases and limitations, with practical insights from experienced trainers.

Register by 4 August 👉 https://humantechnopole.it/en/trainings/ht-deep-learning-for-microscopy-image-analysis-2023/

#sciencemastodon #science #ai #python #humantechnopole #deeplearning #imageanalysis

With @florianjug

@WXFanatic @mappingsupport @ai6yr

Hey, let's be subject to the whims of a DIFFERENT erratic reactionary billionaire!

'Here, we show that yeast paralogous genes are more divergent in transcription than in translation. We explore two causal mechanisms for this predominance of transcriptional divergence: an evolutionary trade-off between the precision and economy of gene expression and a larger mutational target size for transcription.'

https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1010756

Transferred #mitochondria accumulate reactive oxygen species, promoting proliferation. #Cancer #ReactiveOxygenSpecies #CellCycle https://elifesciences.org/articles/85494?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

This makes me physically sick. It’s a toxic brew of the artificial scarcity of ‘elite’ institutions, the cheapening of research, and the runaway professionalization of being a kid.

https://www.propublica.org/article/college-high-school-research-peer-review-publications

I wrote this little program to visualise biological tracking data from #microscopy. We used it a lot for sense checking and verifying a lot of our data, but sadly it won't make it into our next paper. Anyway, today I tidied it up a bit and will make it available with all the rest of the code for others to use.

#reproducibility #CellBiology #ScienceMastodon

I respect screaming babies on airplanes because they're the only ones providing honest feedback about the overall air travel experience

Six year ago, I returned to NIH in Bethesda, where I started my career as a science writer, to be a patient in an ambitious study to understand the patho-biology of post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).

The study included 30+ researchers & many substudies, and was essentially a fishing expedition to understand what goes wrong to make us so sick (like bedbound-for-years sick). 1/

(photo by @Bether )

#MEcfs #ChronicIllness #medicine #nih

Democrats being sunk on judicial appointments (one of the few areas where the party can take tangible, meaningful action) because an aged member of the party can't physically make it to any of the votes but also refuses to simply treat her situation with grace and resign is such an apropos thing for where the country is right now. The arguments against Feinstein's resignation are so dumb as to verge on bad faith.

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/dianne-feinstein-resign-calls-arguments-17910730.php