Andrew Kennard @askennard@qoto.org

The first few messages that humanity received from the Galactics were surprisingly articulate and erudite. However, over time the weird inconsistencies added up enough that humanity gradually realized that they were talking to a Galactic chatbot.

Thus began the Great Crusade against the Galactics.

#MicroSciFi

In a new paper, published today in Current Biology, we analyse the genome of renowned composer Ludwig van Beethoven using a polygenic index related to musicality, as a way to illustrate the limits of genetic predictions at the individual level. Beethoven, one of the most celebrated musicians in history, scored unremarkably, ranking between the 9th & 11th percentile based on modern samples. We explain why this is no surprise & how it can provide a valuable teaching moment on the complex relationships between DNA & behaviour.
An interdisciplinary collaboration across two Max Planck Institutes (Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen & Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt), University of Amsterdam, Karolinska Institute, Vanderbilt University and others.
#MastodonScience #science #music #genetics #genomics
@mpi_nl @maxplanckgesellschaft

https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0960982224000253

The good news is, if you thought Twitter's descent into Musk-filled madness might be detrimental to your efforts to get other scientists to cite your work, fear not. In this regard, Twitter was not actually that useful.

Monster Movie: making movie files from microscopy data

https://quantixed.org/2024/03/19/monster-movie-making-movie-files-from-microscopy-data/

#computing #science #ffmpeg #FIJI #ImageJ #microscopy

Our minimal MAP (i.e., microtubule associated protein) - the starPEG-KA7 peptide (see https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E19-05-0247) is going places, er..., biomolecules🧬 !

New work by the Göpfrich (Heidelberg) and Kierfeld (Dortmund) labs shows that starPEG-KA7 deployed on DNA filaments facilitates the formation of DNA rings that are able to contract upon heat or molecular crowding cues:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46339-z

#actinmyosin #synbio #artificialcell

Another typical science mastodonian thread tha reach a solution for #lablife #troubleshoot from @dhananjaythakur
🦣🦣🦣
https://mastodon.social/@dhananjaythakur/112095146560498091

@tsturm @sohkamyung I think if a giant clam posted, it would be something like:
Clam Log, shell growth line 12,601
Insolation optimal, photosynthetic output at maximum. Basking at maximum shell gape. Growing a new line for the day.
SOMETHING TOUCHED ME, CLOSE UP CLOSE UPPPP
False alarm.
Proceed with scheduled photosynthesis

In Memoriam

Bill Weis (1959–2023): Pioneering structural biologist and biochemist who revolutionized our understanding of cell adhesion and Wnt signaling

Obituary by Mark Peifer and Alexander R. Dunn published in @JCellBiol

https://t.co/WwIm1qhtme

Whenever I think someone is way too excited about fractals I zoom out a bit and find someone else even more excited...

Helping someone debug someone, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

Hello naparistas! We are proud/relieved to announce the release of napari 0.4.19! 🥳 Back in August @czaki was like, "I think we should make a quick bug-fix release post 0.4.18”… 6 months later… 😅 #FOSS #OpenSource

We fixed major, long-standing bugs with color handling in Labels layers, and improved performance — especially for (u)int8/16 data. It's also easier to create custom colormaps — see 1st pic which uses a variant of Glasbey. 😍

Check out the full release notes! https://napari.org/stable/release/release_0_4_19.html

Moralizing QRPs without acknowledging or providing alternatives for our punishing reward / job / work system does not align with my personal values or the values of the academic system I want to be building.

Happy #MicroscopyMonday!

The New Yorker & single cell seq

I traveled to Paris to give my philosophy crash course for scientists (http://johannesjaeger.eu/philosophy.html) to a wonderful group of PhD students at LPI Paris, as I do every year.

Contact me if you want to bring this course to your own institute!

It's not only fun, but also useful allowing you to become a better researcher through philosophy. The course has an interactive, discussion-based format that is based on an online series of lecture which are freely available: https://youtu.be/EH3-9myS8qU?si=gGxiF0sj5S_eij2S.

Holy shit I love this research paper

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1

#anthropology #anthro #academia #academicresearch #longevity

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of MBE, the SMBE journals will be publishing Perspectives and Virtual Issues each month highlighting our historic and contemporary contributions to a specific topic in molecular evolution. Read more in our first Perspective, written by the EiCs of both journals. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msad264 #science #evolution #biology #genome #evolgen_paper

I guess we do #introduction posts over here? I work on the #neuroscience (am I doing those hashtags right!?) of learning and memory, specifically how we learn while we navigate space and context. To do this, I take in vivo recordings (currently calcium imaging but ephys has my heart) of freely moving rats! After that, I use computational and mathematical approaches to analyze their neural activity! I am currently a BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 postdoc at Northwestern working with John Disterhoft and Sara Solla. I was trained at MIT with Matt Wilson, where I got my PhD in biology, and my BS is from Carnegie Mellon. Welcome!

Early-bird deadline is Friday 19 January for Journal of Cell Science 2024 Journal Meeting 'Diversity and Evolution in Cell Biology' organised by Gautam Dey, Lillian Fritz-Laylin, Snezhka Oliferenko, Meg Titus & Michael Way. Apply to attend at https://www.biologists.com/meetings/jcsevocellbio24/
#cellbiology #evolutionarybiology #comparativebiology #Phylogenetics #imaging #microscopy #geneticengineering
@gautamdey @WallaceUCSF
@mcsymbiont @DudinLab @thattai @BungoAkiyoshi