Andrew Kennard @askennard@qoto.org

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

please enough video tutorials give me a webpage with text and pictures

Amazing how many brilliant scientists will look at an LLM "passing" a standardized test and think, "wow, this computer is very smart" and not "standardized tests are very bad at measuring intelligence"

Getting a lot of new follower requests from folks with zero bios. Please fill out bios or do a short intro. It helps a lot. Thanks ✌

Beware of anti-myths!

Spinach *does* have a higher concentration of iron than a steak.

The problem is that it's not absorbed nearly as much when digested.

Nice read.

What next? Edge (23,34) is not really ambiguous in the Karate Club?

Crosspost from @DanLarremore@twitter.com:

New one on my list of favorite papers.

"Academic Urban Legends"

It explores the ironic follies of how we cite literature by tracing a myth: that we think spinach has a lot of iron only because of a decimal point error in the early 1900s. h/t @jugander@twitter.com

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306312714535679

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/DanLarremore/status/1631481816057257985

Tell me all the reasons why it would be a bad idea to use a #kickstarter model for #research #funding (especially to top-up existing projects)

(7/13) We then took this project to Woods Hole during the 2022 MBL Science Physiology Course, where Manny Richter, Nick Martin, and Chunzi Liu took amazing videos! Chunzi also started modeling CV filling, which made a great addition to our manuscript!

(1/13) We (Rikki Garner, Tati Beckford, Makaela Weeda, Chunzi Liu, @askennard, Marc Edwards, Lil Fritz-Laylin, and I) have a new preprint about osmoregulation!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.01.529730v1
Here’s the tootorial & backstory:

I'm happy to share our new preprint on osmoregulation!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.01.529730v1

tootorial coming soon

I hope you all enjoy it more than the amoebae did!

Like cell biology AND free pizza?
Join Dr. Marc Edwards, Dr. Arif Ashraf, and me for a panel on cell biology at the Amherst Women's Club (35 Triangle St., Amherst), tonight at 6!

Happy #MicroscopyMonday!
Here’s a collage I made a while back highlighting Naegleria’s actin (cyan) and microtubule (orange) cytoskeletons. Naegleria only use microtubules to build a mitotic spindle, and when they transiently transform into a flagellated cell type.

#MaskUp #GetVaxxed #GetBoosted

@composeroftheday
@buffysaintemarie

#ComposerOfTheDay February 20

Buffy Sainte-Marie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie - "My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying" (Remas... https://youtu.be/KwOyconXiGM via @YouTube

#BuffySainteMarie

How to be an academic in a world on fire?

As scientists concerned about the climate crisis, @clarekelly and I set out to rethink the role and goals of the university in tackling the 21st century's challenges. Inspired by Raworth's Doughnut Economics, we propose seven new ways to thinking - not only to help us think, but also to act.

Read the paper: Urai AE, Kelly C (2023) Rethinking academia in a time of climate crisis. eLife 12:e84991. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84991
Join us for a discussion at Growing Up in Science Global on 11 April: https://nyu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIoc-GsqT8uGNXniBIHPo9u4ibfDwxysLkI

... and let us know your thoughts!

Ted Chiang's piece on ChatGPT is extremely good, and full of interesting parallels and metaphors. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

A look at Earth’s biomass distributed between taxa.

Plants dominate accounting for >82% of biomass, followed by bacteria at 13%. The entire animal kingdom only makes up 0.4% & humans alone are just 0.01%. https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth #science #nature

Credit: Our World in Data using research by Bar-On et al. (2018). Biomass is measured in tonnes of carbon.