A very thoughtful take on AI development: "Machines can be immensely useful tools, but there are many things that we can only do for ourselves, and we cannot afford to lose the motivation to do so."
There’s something sad about how many blogposts are simply copy-pasted ChatGPT output now.
It’s not writing, it’s content — not voices, but outputs. When the only button you press is for an LLM, blogposts don’t earn applause, they earn scrutiny.
Indeed. One of the flawed premises of AI in education is that’ll save time. In many if not most instances that’s not going to be true, if we actually verify the results.
The Next Innovation in Higher Education: Vibe-Teaching™ www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...
We provide the illusion of education.
Students provide the illusion of engagement.
Together, we uphold the illusion of academic integrity.
Two funded PhD positions investigating the evolution of sarcomeres @ibdm.bsky.social in @biancah0406.bsky.social and our lab, together with @cnidevo.bsky.social - Interested to explore how similar or different Jellyfish sarcomeres are to Drosophila or human ones?
www.ibdm.univ-amu.fr/ibdm_job/2-a...
“By the eighteenth century, some scientists had concluded that embryos must—somehow, somewhere—contain the full complexity of the future adult…..Growing up was simply a matter of scaling up.”
Registration is OPEN for the 2026 Santa Cruz Meeting on Developmental Biology!!! Please spread the word!
@mads100tist.bsky.social @socdevbio.bsky.social @bsdb.bsky.social @xenbase.bsky.social @isdb.bsky.social @devbiol.bsky.social @the-node.bsky.social
scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu
Open Problems in Machine Unlearning for AI Safety (Jan 2025) arxiv.org/abs/2501.04952
I think that, like with art, papers offer an opportunity for you to tell the story your own way. Could another person research the same question? Yes. However, each person has the opportunity to do it and communicate it in their own way, and we must protect that 🧪
Thank you kesavan. I first drafted the content in a markdown file. Then used Claude to create a html page. It took me some back and forth in moving things around. Cursor has browser integration so that’s helps in drag and drop. But the color design was easy for the ai. Then finally converted to pdf.
Thank you for your interest. I usually attach the image to the prompt to a model with vision capability. Moreover, if you also open the image on napari gui by pairing the cellpose-mcp with napari-mcp + plugin then the model can take screenshots and able to take the feedback on the job it’s doing.
In the age of AI hype regarding data analysis. It’s more important than ever to go the basics of visualization. Scientists are painter who use data as their colors and rigor as their brush.
Here is the poster
github.com/surajinacade...
Ok. I am not an AI expert or software developer but I created this mcp for fun. You can ask the agent to segment stuff using cellpose and integrate with napari. Please give it a try let me know what you think😬. #biophysics #experimentalbiology #lifescience
👨💻Repo: github.com/surajinacade...
Compassion
"Ten simple rules for teaching data science": arxiv.org/abs/2602.02874
A new preprint by @minecr.bsky.social and myself. We'd love any feedback!
📱Is the origin of animals comparable to the origin of the smartphones? Yes! See our new review in @embojournal.org where we show how important it was the new "Operating System" (animalOS)for animals to evolve! with @ricardsole.bsky.social, Nick and Elena @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social @csic.es @prbb.org
New paper out!
We show how mechanosensitive adherens junction proteins link actomyosin contractility to actin assembly using in vitro reconstitution.
Huge congrats to Aurélie Favarin, Rayan Said, & all authors!
In Science Advances: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#actin #myosin #mechanobiology
FOCUS: an AI-assisted reading workflow for information overload www.nature.com/articles/s41... (read free: rdcu.be/eVwtj
New video: more examples showing deep learning segmentation failure modes—and how to detect them with Napari. I show how Napari’s layer system compares images, ground truth, and results, and how Appose enables comparison across incompatible DL packages. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c369...
🎥 New video summary of a recent paper by @xsciteng.bsky.social et al. of the @jeffbush.bsky.social lab @ctbatucsf.bsky.social (rupress.org/jcb/article/...), revealing cellular mechanisms of tissue fusion in the developing face.
On scientific "style" for @undark.org:
"[Style] is a positive feature of science that facilitates different routes to solving problems.....We can embrace differences in our approaches while still promoting rigor and clarity."
undark.org/2025/12/04/o...
An illustration of a woman wearing an axolotl costume in front of an audience, with text: Embracing my silly side makes me a better scientist. I wish I’d done it sooner
"In the end, I have come to realize that being authentic at work is not a weakness, but rather a strength." #ScienceWorkingLife https://scim.ag/49B7hRv
I'm surprised I only came across it now, but this review on improving communication in data visualization is excellent.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Love it!!
Does AI-Assisted Coding Deliver? A Difference-in-Differences Study of Cursor's Impact on Software Projects arxiv.org/abs/2511.04427
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
New perspective by @maikbischoff.bsky.social & @mayorlab.bsky.social about how mesenchymal cells use contact-dependent rules to generate swarm-like behaviors, patterns & organ forms. rupress.org/jcb/article/...
#CellBio #CellMigration #Morphogenesis #Development #Science
I don't think the average person is going to learn much by accessing a paywalled scientific paper.
But the current system keeps out journalists, science communicators, policy researchers, and fact checkers from reading into a topic as well.
Bacteria are surrounded by water! New work @natphys.nature.com by @ricardalert.bsky.social @mpipks.bsky.social & collaborators @ Princeton University shows that water capillary forces organise bacterial colonies into gas, nematic streams, and droplet states.
nature.com/articles/s41567-025-02965-y
