🧵🚨: Remember the recent #genAI cheating scandal at Brown? Everyone talks about the average score drop from take-home midterm to proctored final: 95.7 → 48.8. That number alone can't settle anything. But the released data can, and almost nobody has looked at it. So we did! Read on. #AcademicSky

What exam scores can and cannot prove about unauthorized AI assistance: Evidence from a highly public classroom episode

In spring 2026, an economics professor at Brown University gave a take-home midterm and, after unusually high scores, made the final exam proctored. Among the 59 students who completed the course, ave...

arxiv.org

If you are interested in nervous system evolution you may want to read our review with Kei Jokura on nerve nets: "Revisiting nerve nets: functional organization and evolutionary implication" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/s44318-026-00879-w […] [Original post on biologists.social]

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

Holiday in the climate emergency. No that’s not AI or edited, just a snapshot I just took with my phone on Lacanau beach in France. What future will this boy grow up in? It is in our hands, but time is running out.

Microscopy Nodes 3.1 is out for Blender 5.2! 🎉 This has cool new features for conditional masking, working with even larger data (regional upscaling), and data manipulation! Watch the new youtube tutorials that explain the features: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

📣 Abstract submission and early registration are now OPEN for the 7th European Cilia Conference—an official EMBO workshop! 📅 8–12 March 2027 📍 Stresa, Italy Submit and register: meetings.embo.org/event/27-cilia www.eurocilia.eu #EMBOCilia #Cilia2027

From early electron microscopy of insulin granules to 3D islet reconstructions, this review follows the evolution of islet ultrastructure imaging and looks ahead to link structure with function in diabetes. link.springer.com/article/10.1... 🔓 @plid-info.bsky.social @hhmijanelia.bsky.social

It's an exciting day for #Fiji users! Now read and write @zarr.dev v3 and #OMEZarr v0.5. Don't want a million tiny files in your #zarr? Shard that sucker! Read the details here forum.image.sc/t/fiji-can-r...

Fiji can read and write Zarr3 & OME-Zarr v0.5 (new N5 release!)

Updating your Fiji-Latest installation will give you the newest versions of the N5 library, enabling OME-Zarr v0.5 / Zarr v3 support with sharding! What's new? Reading zarr 3 datasets (sharded and u...

forum.image.sc

Ironically, as @mart1oeil.eu showed, there are telltale signs that the piece was edited with ChatGPT: many links include "?utm_source=chatgpt.com" If even Science editorial team cannot afford good human editing, that's worrying

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · 3w ago

Editor in Chief of Science: AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive.

This is one of the most beautiful cross sections of cilia I've ever seen in our data, found by @csigulinsky.bsky.social. It is perfectly perpendicular to the plane of imaging which brings up an important point ~ connectomics. You gotta have enough resolution to see the important things. 2nm/px FTW!

Happy to share our review on islet ultrastructure @diabetologiajnl.bsky.social: link.springer.com/article/10.1... We cover classical EM, multimodal, and3D imaging and give an outlook on exciting future experiments on islet structure in diabetes. @plid-info.bsky.social @hhmijanelia.bsky.social

Islet ultrastructure: past achievements and future directions - Diabetologia

Islets of Langerhans constitute the endocrine component of the pancreas and comprise the main cell types responsible for the regulation of glucose homeostasis. Beta cells produce and secrete insulin, ...

link.springer.com

How ready is your image dataset for analysis? Join our 2-part online workshop on image dataset quality control, data exploration and PixelPatrol. 📅 Sept 10 + 17, 2026 Open to @helmholtz.de & HIDA partners Registration opens Aug 13, 12 PM. More 👉 bit.ly/Image-Qualit... #datascience #training

🚨We are #hiring! Excited to welcome a talented #postdoc to join the lab. and be part of an interdisciplinary research program #Type1DiabetesGrandChallenge -- harnessing #pancreas #development for #stem cell therapy of #diabetes. 🧫🧪🔬 Join us! Apply before 23 July. ⤵️ my.corehr.com/pls/coreport...

Super excited to launch this search for a new endowed professor at the @biozentrum.unibas.ch! Join us to build a research cluster in Climate Biophysics! 🌍🌊🌾🔬🧪 This is a unique opportunity to create a community in Basel🇨🇭working together on this timely topic! ⏳🌡️ Questions? Please reach out! 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

Biozentrum, University of Basel@biozentrum.unibas.ch · last mo.

New Assistant (tenure-track) or Associate Professor position in Climate #Biophysics! Join our international research community to explore fundamental molecular mechanisms underlying climate-relevant biological processes. Apply by 7 Sept 2026! www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/de/open-posi...

Gain #training on correlative #LightElectronMicroscopy techniques in the eponymous EMBO Practical Course "Correlative light electron microscopy" in Utrecht, Netherlands, 13–18 September 2026. Deadline: 3 July 2026 meetings.embo.org/event/26-clem #EMBOCorrelativeLight #EMBOevents 🧪

Look at that dinosaur reading and reviewing claims himself rather than asking Claude how good it is, as we all know now proper independent review should be done /s

Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · last mo.

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

This AI stuff.... Anyone else feel like they're one of the remaining unbitten characters in a zombie movie?

I know it seems like a heretical idea, but one way to figure out if a preprint is really interesting (to you) is... to read the preprint. Then, in the spirit of sharing, send a note to authors: a simple kudos or a more detailed question. I do this a dozen times a year. It's awesome. Try it.

New preprint! In collaboration with the Steinmetz Lab at PSI we report cryo-EM structures of microtubules at up to 1.9 Å (!) resolution & in different nucleotide state mimics, suggesting a mechanism for lattice-induced GTP hydrolysis and why it leads to catastrophe: tinyurl.com/7cjrf863

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Cryo-ET gives unparalleled views of cellular structures, but targeted sample preparation by cryo-FIB milling has been a constraint. No longer! A new workflow yields close to 100% targeting success for centrioles & other small structures. Read the preprint ⤵️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

And the award for the worst AI-slop images of beta cells goes to: www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm...

Frontiers | Stress-driven remodeling of antigen presentation and chemokine signaling in pancreatic β-cells: implications for type 1 diabetes

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) has historically been framed as a disease initiated and maintained by dysregulated immunity that targets insulin producing β-cells. How...

frontiersin.org

With a motivating push from @christlet.bsky.social I made a new Fiji plugin, CurveMorph. The idea was to create a tool for kymograph generation along the dynamic (bending/shaking) filament shapes (microtubules, cilia, neurites, etc). The logo was made using the plugin. github.com/UU-cellbiolo...

I made a small VR app for looking at our beta cell reconstructions in 3D. I can also control it from my PC, which makes it nice for outreach events. Pretty happy with how it turned out.

Better vitrification = better cryo-ET. We've opened an RFA for two-year grants to advance vitrification techniques for biological samples—welcoming applications from researchers in heat transfer, cryogenics, and materials science. Apply here: bit.ly/4uip6eJ

Important new work from Chia-Hsiang Chang, @nachury.bsky.social and colleagues identifying the composition of neuronal cilia in an unbiased way. Lots of surprises herein: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In situ proteomics unveils specialized domains for extrasynaptic signaling on neuronal cilia

In situ proteomics and expansion microscopy reveal nanoscale organization of postsynaptic proteins on neuronal cilia.

science.org

Happy to see my image of a beta cell cilium included.

EuroCilia2027@eurocilia.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Big congratulations to our winners: Smilla-Maria Koy (1st), Chandrama Ghosh (2nd), and Anthony Rabaté (3rd)! Check out their breath-taking micrographs and the rest of the Top 15 entries in the stunning poster attached. The future of cilia research looks beautiful. 📸 #Cilia2027

My friends and colleagues were thrown out of the ADA meeting by the ADA for handing out copies of an editorial published in the ADA's own journal. We're talking 2 past ADA presidents and distinguished awardees including the 2025 Banting Award recipient. ADA needs to reverse course and apologize.

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2mo ago

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link

Police pushed out a couple of the attendees at a diabetes scientific meeting. The crime: Passing out printouts of a recent publication calling out the administration for destroying our research infrastructure. The right to free speech was infringed upon. Censorship is real. We have to stand up.

I guess here we are with censorship? Diabetes experts removed from conference

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2mo ago

"911, what's your emergency?" "Hello, Police? Yeah, our highest award recipient is at our meeting handing out copies of an article that we published. And uh....we....well....shit, nevermind." (gift link)