The #ERC just announced new rules!
erc.europa.eu/news-events/...
If you got a B score before, you’re blocked for 2 years (instead of 1). A C score means 3-year exclusion.
This applies to the 2027 call for now, but I’d expect this to stick. Important for anyone planning to apply this round!
Having mocked and insulted a billion Muslims on Tuesday, Trump attacked core beliefs of a billion Catholics today. And don’t forget his suggestion that any Jew who didn’t vote for him was an idiot. All in the days between the end of Ramadan, Passover, Easter and Orthodox Easter.
Since our preprint on the ETC-ATP synthase supercomplex has attracted attention, I would like to introduce the platform we used, Langtaosha. It was launched by SMART together with several other institutions with support from Open Life Science Alliance, aiming for long-term open infrastructure 1/4
🥱
I hate having to do the "look, they're normal just like us" post, but sometimes you have to do that when American propaganda tries to convince everyone Iranians are "animals".
I'm reviewing Sapiens, one page at a time!
It's a little bit fact-checking and a little-bit soul-searching combined into a lot of feelings...
ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/03/sapi...
Holy shit. This is like if a foreign country bombed MIT. Sharif University is the top science and engineering institution in Iran, and one of the top in the world. Absolutely unconscionable www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblo...
ROCKET 🚀 inference-time optimization of AlphaFold to fit structural data is published! rdcu.be/fa9YH
Since our preprint, we’ve pushed it to regimes where other methods break: low resolution, weak signal, real experimental edge cases. Here’s what we learned: 1/15
This! AlphaFold is PDB + UniProt + Deep learning. No data sharing, no curation, no data standards, no AlphaFold.
Isfahan is a city with over 2,500 years of continuous history. The US and Israel are bombing one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the region. Over 2 million people live there.
I’ve only heard from my family once since the war began and this is their city, Isfahan, tonight. #Iran
The @vbcscitraining.bsky.social is looking a PhD Program Manager! Needless to say this is an incredible important position. So please apply if you want to help us find, recruit and train the next generation of scientists!
RT appreciated!
A monochrome portrait of Fazly Ataullakhanov - a man in his fifties sitting in a seminar room
In memoriam
Fazly Ataullakhanov was a biophysicist with a rich heritage, and a strong scientific legacy. An ethnic Tadjik, born in Samarkand (Soviet Uzbekistan), educated in Moscow, made his best scientific contributions in English, collaborating with international researchers in the USA. /1
Congratulations Vladimir and team! A lot more in the paper, just posting some of Figure 2 here since growing and shrinking microtubules on the grid before freezing and cryoET is amazing
A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/
Lees Huxley.
Our paper is now out in Nature:
“Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres.
1/14
If you’ve not stopped using Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, etc…), now is a really good time to stop.
This is viscerally horrifying.
Let's try this #AcademicSky
1 fav, 1 funny, strange, or unexpected scientific anecdote about a paper, a scientist, a fact, hoping that some will be new to you.
favourite paper of 2026 🤩 congrats to all!
🧪🧬New preprint We present cryo-EM structures of reconstituted CTCF–nucleosome complexes, showing CTCF dimerization drives nucleosome oligomerization into defined higher-order assemblies. Disrupting CTCF–CTCF interfaces in mESCs reduces looping and impairs differentiation. tinyurl.com/CTCF-nucleos...
amazing!
European Scientists who said NO to Epstein-funding are the heroines of this hour🦸♀️
They show: It was your choice to SAY NO to Epstein's $ as scientist- you just had to have ethics & a spine
Kudos to Physicist IVETTE FUENTES who said NO
She was working at @quantumunivie.bsky.social @univie.ac.at
PhD position in my lab!
We speak to Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis about the United States under Donald Trump and its attempts to reshape the post-World War II international consensus.
www.democracynow.org/2026/1/22/ya...
Globally, no single day in 2025 was cooler than its 1991-2020 average.
climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima...
Wunderbar! Das schätze ich als niederländischer Wiener sehr. Noch viel mehr davon bitte!
Ziel sollte sein, dass auch Schüler und Senioren sicher, vielleicht sogar plaudernd, von A nach B radeln. Radwege verbessern ist relativ billig (vgl. Öffi und PKW Infrastruktur) und bringt langfristig alle was!
"Israel Is Banning the 'Last Foreign Witnesses' to Its Genocide in Gaza"
In a likely deadly move, the Israeli government told 37 foreign aid groups, including Doctors Without Borders, they could no longer operate in Palestine. Where is the outrage, asks Diana Buttu for Zeteo?
Abolish and prosecute ICE. They did a murder in broad daylight today. Imagine what they're doing in the closed facilities we're somehow not even allowed to see.
What in the Gestapo is going on in Grand Rapids?
Watch this activist get arrested *mid-interview* for speaking out against U.S. action in Venezuela.
