5 Calls Spend 5 minutes. Make 5 calls. Make your voice heard.

I just called my reps with @5calls.org, you should too: 5calls.org

Absolutely incredible Nutella ad.

Last week I shared results showing large variability between Imaris/Arivis/Aivia vs Python/ImageJ/CellProfiler. Much was due to small code issues (x/y swaps, microns vs pixels). After fixing, results are much closer—no big log-scale gaps. Some variability remains, but large errors weren’t real.

Well this is maddening

arg, uses spectral *unmixing* to separate

Highly recommend the Rarecyte Orion. 18plex. 1 shot, no cycling- uses spectral separation to separate. Data quality is amazing.

Love is in the air at Edinburgh zoo. Pebbling marks the start of the breeding season for Gentoo penguins.

Kids at Edinburgh Children's Hospital Charity painted pebbles for the penguins to choose from and present to their mates.

Cool, useful, project.

www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

Good morning from the harbor seal factory!

We got several working harbor seal families ready to challenge the establishment!

Here you can see a mother teaching their baby about the union.

Get em started young!

#UnionsForAll #SealSky 🦭 🦑

If you prefer written instructions, the step-by-step guide is here: saramcardle.github.io/FS2K/README....

Huge, *huge* thanks to @psobolewskiphd.bsky.social for putting together the Gitbook. 🙏

Videos are now available from the 2025 QuPath Training Course, from @iamichaelnelson.bsky.social, @zmikulski.bsky.social, and myself.

Watch for multiplex tutorials! For image analysis inspiration! Or just watch to hear me speak like an overcaffeinated squirrel!

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I really like that you coordinated his outfit to match the game. 😄

Revolutionary

Obligatory XKCD reference: xkcd.com/675/

Quantitative Imaging: From Acquisition to Analysis Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses -- a private, non-profit institution with research programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, bioinformatics.

🔬 🖥️ Applications are open for the CSHL course Quantitative Imaging: From Acquisition to Analysis (April 6–21, 2026)!

An intensive, hands-on course covering advanced fluorescence microscopy and quantitative image analysis using open-source tools.

🗓️ Apply online by Jan 30, 2026

Quantitative Fluorescence Microscopy 2026

Quantitative Fluorescence Microscopy 2026: Registration Open!

An international course in #fluorescence #microscopy and imaging for advanced grad students, postdoc trainees, imaging core managers and researchers who are incorporating the technology into their laboratories.

🧪 🐟🎸 🍎 👩‍🔬 🌎 🖥️ 🧬

Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications The dataset contains images of children’s faces downloaded from websites about autism, which sparked concerns at Springer Nature about consent and reliability.

Holy CRAP.

Retired engineer takes random pics of *kids*, without consent or attribution, bins them into “autistic” or “not autistic”, and uploads that “data” for free on Kaggle.

Well over a HUNDRED papers are published, 38 in Springer Nature, 25 in IEEE, using it.

And no reviewers objected? WTF.🧪

XXL NEWS! Greg and Alex are coming to America in January 2026 to spread the word of the Taskmaster.

Shows in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and New York! Sign up to the mailing list for pre-sale access.

taskmaster.tv/taskmaster-l...

Science works

Infographic with AI slop published in Nature Scientific Reports

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

Comic. Panels up to the 10-year point are grayed out. New panels since the Ten Years comic, which chronicles the first ten years of PERSON 1's journey with cancer: (1) [two people in bed] PERSON 1 (woman): One more chapter? PERSON 2 (man): Don’t we both have to get up early? PERSON 1: Nnnnnggggh PERSON 2: Sure, good point. (2) [many people wearing masks, walking while looking at graphs on their phones] (3) [birds landing on people] PERSON 2 in beanie and scarf: Hah! They like *my* seeds best. PERSON 1 in scarf holding phone with a bird sitting on it: Wait, how do I take a picture of this one? (4) [two people rowing boats with tree landscape] (5) [Person 1 carries overflowing stack of things to Person 2 in bed] PERSON 1: I brought you honey lemon tea, more pillows, a cinnamon roll, Tylenol, another blanket, a– PERSON 2: It was just Appendicitis, I’m really– PERSON 1: *It is my turn to take care of you and I am going to do it right!* (6) [Two people in car] (7) [still in car) PERSON 1: Oh my god. PERSON 2: Oh my god. (8) [car driving] PERSON 1: Pull over! PERSON 2: I am! (9) [both people get out of car] (10) [Large colored panel of aurora borealis over water with both people looking on] (11) [Person 1 sits against tree while Person 2 lies on the ground] PERSON 1: Fifteen years. No sign of the cancer. (12) I *am* having some weird symptoms. Joint pain. Fatigue. I think I’m losing my close-up vision. PERSON 2: Yeah. Me too. (13) PERSON 2: I think we’re getting old. (14) PERSON 1: I guess that’s okay. PERSON 2: It’s all I wanted.

Fifteen Years

xkcd.com/3172/

Python notebook from a two year old paper:
Oh, no, I cannot run, there is a slight mismatch of a logging library.

ImageJ plugin from 2001 running on Quantum Java 51 in 2078:
Your 100 petabyte temporal hologram was successfully thresholded.

A fluorescent embryo on black text, with the words Halfway to I2K: Virtual Tutorials on Image Analysis November 17-19, 2025 Virtual Conference for beginners to developers i2kconference.org Image Credit - "Sweet Embryo",Travis D. Carney, BINA Image Contest 2024

Just 4 days until the start of I2K and its 33 totally free image analysis tutorials and events! Please share with your "home networks", especially early career researchers - the videos will be amazing and high-impact no matter how many people attend live, BUT (1/x)

California – this Election Day, vote yes on Prop 50.

California’s Prop 50 says that if Republicans are going to abuse the system to try and hang onto power, we’re going to counteract that abuse and create a level playing field in the midterm elections.

Make a plan to vote yes on Prop 50.

7 🙂

Cutting Edge

There's an XKCD about that!
xkcd.com/606/

A 5 year old girl in a green dress at a protest with approximately 20 other people visible. There were hundreds there in total.

Took my daughter to one of the San Diego No Kings rallies, because even she knows that you have to stand up and say No to bullies.

Obama receiving his Noble Peace Prize

Wouldn’t it be cool if this photo of Obama receiving his Noble Peace Prize went viral today? 🔄

I want to thank all of the co-authors, though I can't find any of them are on bluesky. In particular, I want to thank Priyanka Saminathan for all her work getting this to the finish line!

Reactive microglia looking particularly angry. Iba1 showing cell shape in magenta, large amounts of CD68 in green, nuclei in blue. The cells are outlined in brown and the nuclei are outlined in cyan. There are lines connecting the nuclear centroids from Delaunay triangulation.

All of the segmentation and morphometric analysis was done with the open-source platform QuPath. The scripts I wrote are on Github and the raw images are on the BioImage Archive, because open-source is the way to go!

But seriously, look at these cells! They are so angry.

Microscopy image of a pink microglia with blue nuclei and focal points of green. Magenta = Iba1; Green = CD68; Blue = Hoechst.

We used widefield slidescanning + deconvolution + Z projection to image microglia in the hippocampus. 2 years in with ~11000 cell analyzed and I'm still not over how pretty microglia can be.

We found signs that glia in female AD mice begin to react to *something* before there are even plaques.