Andrew Kennard @askennard@qoto.org

Hey, it's my tooterversary!

Thanks to all the great people I've met in the last year! I've loved learning about your hobbies, and foibles, and hearing some perspectives that make this less of an echo chamber.

I support my instance to keep this community going and I encourage you to do so too.

My conversation with Zeb Miletsky about his book Before Busing about the Black freedom struggle in Boston:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2220518/13500324-the-black-freedom-struggle-in-boston

We have a new paper out!

We looked at vesicle transport in cells. The textbooks say it's all motor-driven, but this idea is based on how large organelles are transported. Instead we find small vesicles move mainly by diffusion! We came up with a way to restrict the diffusion of one vesicle type (we made them furry!) & that reduces cargo delivery.

Congrats to my co-author Méghane Sittewelle who did all the imaging magic!

https://doi.org/10.26508/lsa.202302406

#CellBiology #MembraneTrafficking #Microscopy

Crosstown Traffic: new paper on vesicle transport

https://quantixed.org/2023/10/25/crosstown-traffic-new-paper-on-vesicle-transport/

#publishing #science #microscopy #outreach #papers #TrackMateR

Alright, so, I am finally here and totally late to the party but I'm here!

18/ #31nightsofhalloween #MicrosCreepy
Here's an amoeba imaged by scanning electron microscreepy!

In the endless discussion of #Mastodon over #Bluesky (which, btw, really, we all should move on if not away from it and it would be about time), I am amazed bout the quantity of people posting (on Mastodon) that scholars post more on Bluesky than here, bc (insert whatever feature of Twitter).
Maybe it's bc I'm tired and sleepy today, but considering the endless stream of complaining here, wouldn't it be better for the #AcademicFedi to stop comparing and start posting about their work?

Very cool preprint from the Fritz-Laylin lab - "Genetic transformation of the frog-killing chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.17.561934v1

17/ #31NightsofHalloween #MicrosCreepy
Here's a closer look at the cell division fail from yesterday. The contractile vacuole network gets distributed through the cell during division- here you can see tubules converting to bladders that pump unusually synchronously

16/ #31nightsofhalloween #MicrosCreepy
These are the cells that created yesterday's maximum intensity projection! Featuring one failed cell division, and one successful cell division. Lots of contractile vacuole activity.

15/ #31NightsOfHalloween #MicrosCreepy
A max intensity projection of crawling and dividing cells

“Graduate student mentorship as a target for diversifying biology.”

Girish Kale and Reinier Prosee cover a recent preprint from researchers #UCBerkeley. Particularly excited to note the positive impact of informal mentorship & being part of interdisciplinary groups that the students report as part of this study. #preLightsPeerSupport

#preLight 👉 https://prelights.biologists.com/highlights/mentoring-practices-predictive-of-doctoral-student-outcomes-in-a-biological-sciences-cohort-v2/

#challenges #diversity #mentoring #practices #STEM

12/ #31nightsofhalloween #microscreepy
I got to play with a very cool microscope today!
purple: actin
orange: mitotic spindle

New blog post just dropped!

"Assembly theory is cool... but doesn't quite do what its inventors say it does."

http://www.johannesjaeger.eu/blog/assembly-theory-is-cool

reviewing this recent Nature paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9

news & views here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03061-y

#evolution #complexityscience #innovation #possibilityspace

8/#31NightsOfHalloween #MicrosCreepy
A twirling flagellate

I wanted to consolidate a few thoughts on google, misinformation, large language models, enshittification, and the fate of the web as we know it.

It started when Carl Zimmer shared this remarkable example of Google being fooled by machine-generated bullshit online.

It's #MicrosCreepy season!
Here's an experiment that went horribly wrong

7/ #31nightsofhalloween #microscreepy

Gummy worms!

... or the tracks of cells before (green) vs after (orange) being squashed to a 5 micron ceiling. They tend to crawl faster when squished. Circles are the pillars holding up the ceiling.

Bungee Beetle Escape!

My son has been learning to code so that he can write his own game, and here, after many many weekends of effort, it is! It's fun!

I had to get him to add 'easy mode' (AKA mum mode) to give me a chance of getting beyond level one. Level three remains, for me, a place only heard tell of in legend.

If you give it a go then feedback is welcome - it is a work in progress.

https://mixian.noodlefactory.co.uk/~tom/bungee-beetle/