A comic from the New Yorker. On a skyscraper construction, steel beams are connecting in ways which defy logic. An angry-looking man (presumably a foreman or some such) is leaning over the edge and shouting "Escher! Get your ass up here"

Listening to In Our Time on #BBCRadio4 discussing Escher, and I'm reminded of this classic from the New Yorker

They should have called it Straight of Schrödinger: it is both open and closed depending on whom you talk to and when.

Kozak sequences regulate gene expression in Trypanosoma brucei Abstract. The Kozak consensus sequence around the AUG start codon of mRNAs allows efficient cytosolic translation initiation in eukaryotes. It has not yet

🆕T. brucei Kozak sequences are unusual, hard to detect, but important for translation regulation - Check out the work conceived💡, carried out🔬and written up ✍️ by Philip Stettler, with only a minor contributions from me and the Polacek group - CONGRATULATIONS🎉👏 academic.oup.com/nar/article-...

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

This is of course hard on the junior and untenured, but not as hard as some seem to think. Is it better for your metees to burn through 5 postdocs so that one lucky one gets a CNS paper, or is it better for all 5 to get respectable, but less glam publications?

Deciding not to submit to CNS is, in part, deciding to be happier doing good science and having a "sucessful" career, as measured by traditional measures. Will chasing glam journals hurt my chances of making full Prof? Who knows? Do I care that much about making full Prof? Not really.

(1/7) How does T. brucei achieve a 140-fold stoichiometric excess of VSG mRNA over upstream ESAGs from a single polycistronic unit?
Our latest research in @natmicrobiol.nature.com reveals a mechanism of spatially regulated RNA decay to fine-tune expression of virulence genes

'Predators that just run in and grab, stab and kill': The deep cave bacteria resistant to modern medicine In the brutal world of deep caves, bacteria live in a miniature world of terror. The weapons they have evolved can defeat antibiotics – but now they are inspiring powerful new drugs.

Nice article about cave microbes and the work of people like Hazel Barton from BBC News

www.bbc.com/future/artic...

OMG, the passenger riding along!

Congratulations Sebastian!

Hergé

UZH: Postdoc The newly founded Cryptosporidium lab at the Institute of Parasitology focuses on the genetic and transcriptomic basis of parasite virulence and persistence in Cryptosporidium and is committed to incl...

🚨 Postdoc position 🚨
I’m moving back to Switzerland this summer to launch my lab at the University of Zurich and am recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow (start: late 2026).
Details & application:
jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie....

Please share! 😊

How many mechanistically different protein insertases are there? Maybe fewer than you think! Check out our tale of pATOM36, MIM, MTCH1/2 and YidC in the preprint by Stephan Berger of the Schneider and the Ballmoos Labs. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Inducing novel endosymbioses by implanting bacteria in fungi - Nature A study presents an approach to establish and track a new endosymbiotic partnership by implanting bacteria in a non-host fungus and shows that stable inheritance of the implanted bacteria is possible ...

Vorholt Lab re-created endosymbiosis in the lab: injected bacteria into a fungus and evolved a heritable partnership.

Evolution, fast-forwarded.

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

RETRACTED: Integrative phylogenomics positions sponges at the root of the animal tree Determining whether sponges or ctenophores root the animal tree has important implications for understanding early animal evolution. Here, we examined support for these competing hypotheses by constru...

This is a beautiful case of how real science happens & serious scientists work. Kudos to both set of authors: “This has been a humbling experience, but one that speaks to the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavor.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The discovery of DNA started with this overlooked scientist In 1869, Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher isolated a mysterious substance from cell nuclei—an overlooked finding that would later reshape biology and our understanding of life itself.

With new book 'The Dawn Fisherman' out soon, delighted to have explained with co-author Ralf Dahm to @meganwollerton.bsky.social at National Geographic how pus, old bandages (& later, salmon gonads!) led to discovery of DNA in freezing cold castle kitchen! www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...

Safeguarding the powerhouse: antibody-based characterisation of trypanosome mitochondrial quality control proteins at Lancaster University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Safeguarding the powerhouse: antibody-based characterisation of trypanosome mitochondrial quality control proteins at Lancaster University, listed on FindAPhD.com

🧬Fully Funded PhD
Mitochondria|Protein Homeostasis|Antibody Technologies
🤝In collaboration with @menzieslab.bsky.social and Nick Robinson
@blslancasteruni.bsky.social
🎓UK students only
⏰6th March 2026
📩Enquiries: c.dewar1@lancaster.ac.uk
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
#phdopportunity #mitochondria

I find this kind of ironic, this is what happens if AI generated content is not checked.

This could be big! - Got it in January

Tracking the details of an experiment in successively cited Methods sections

Tropical spiders craft giant doppelgängers as decoys The extraordinary anti-predator strategy of two tiny, orb-weaving spider species has been uncovered by scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Florida.

Nature can be wickedly cunning.

💊 Resistance against antibiotics is a severe threat - also in 🇨🇭

The Forum Phagentherapie discusses with experts and the public about solutions.

👉 Register for our phage forum on Jan 31 in Basel: lnkd.in/e-im3e-g
‼️ Voices from society and patients are vital to develop viable approaches.

Image of Uranus taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, showing a whitish north polar region, vivid blue-greenish atmosphere and a few whitish elongated storms visible around the pole. The planet is surrounded by clearly defined ring system set against the black background of space. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/192271236@N03/54879990600/ Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/AndreaLuck CC BY

The winner of ✨ #planetaryScience image of 2025 ✨ is

✨Uranus as seen by JWST✨
Taken on: October 6, 2025
Credit: NASA/ @esa.int /CSA/ @stsci.edu / @andrealuck.bsky.social

Full resolution: www.flickr.com/photos/19227...

🧪⚛️

David got company!

Wünsche euch ganz herzlich alles Gute

Well, this is an utter disaster for science.

This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next.
🧪

This is actually the trippiest thing I've ever seen that was not deliberately created by M C Fucking Escher. It straight up took me over a minute to make sense of and now I can't go back.

This is the white-and-gold dress on a gram a week of trenbolone.

Here is an artistic rendering of Simona’s work

A trypanosome-specific complex mediates late-stage processing of cytosolic LSU rRNA Abstract. Unlike most eukaryotes, Trypanosoma brucei processes its cytosolic large subunit (LSU) RNA into six fragments. The factors responsible for these

In the early 1980ies the labs of Cordingley, Boothroyd and Borst
discovered that the LSU rRNA of T. brucei is processed into 6 fragment. Now more than 30 years later Simona Amodeo at al. found the factors that mediate these trypanosomatid-specific processing events. academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!

preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵

Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/9