Time to try something new.

Welcome to the Bluesky account for Stand Up for Science 2025! Keep an eye on this space for updates, event information, and ways to get involved. We can't wait to see everyone #standupforscience2025 on March 7th, both in DC and locations nationwide! #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

Professors please pull up a chair. I’ve been talking to my classes about what has been going on. I explained indirect costs to them. I talked to them about what a probationary employee is in the government. At the end of class they asked if we could talk about it more. (1/)

We’re #hiring a Director for Studio D3, our center for data-driven discovery at the @alleninstitute.bsky.social. 🧪 www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/41...

Mental health treatments should be guided by science, not misinformation. With 13% of American adults relying on SSRIs to manage depression and anxiety, the new HHS Secretary’s unscientific claims about these medications are cause for outrage 🧪 www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

RFK Jr. is already taking aim at antidepressants

The new HHS secretary has made baseless claims that the drugs are addictive and cause violent behavior.

motherjones.com

Oh. My. God. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Seeing a lot of hype about AI models trained for “under $50.” Let’s be real—these models are distilled from much larger models trained with massive resources. Distillation is useful, but calling it “cheap training” seems misleading. What am I missing? www.theverge.com/news/607341/...

Researchers trained an OpenAI rival in half an hour for less than $50

Doing a DeepSeek.

theverge.com

Aptly put: Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, compared the halting of outbreak updates to “finding out that your local fire department has been told not to sound any fire alarms”. www.ft.com/content/6067...

US scientists must resist Trump’s efforts to tear down research

It is misguided for academics to pre-emptively self-censor, tempting though that may seem

ft.com

When the Trump administration took a key climate justice tool offline, a coalition of data scientist heroes restored it within 48 hours. 🧪 www.ehn.org/scientists-r...

Scientists restore climate justice data tool after Trump administration took it offline

When the Trump administration deleted a key climate justice tool, a group of data scientists raced to bring it back online — restoring access in under 48 hours.Anika Jane Beamer reports for Inside Cli...

ehn.org

What AI should exist — but doesn’t yet — to transform biology? The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group has launched the Ask Anything, Change Everything campaign to gather bold ideas on how AI can revolutionize our understanding of fundamental biology. alleninstitute.org/ask-anything...

Ask Anything Change Everything

Submissions are open for ideas of how artificial intelligence (AI) could unlock discoveries that advance our knowledge of fundamental biology.

alleninstitute.org

Aviary from FutureHouse provides a new framework for training language agents on real-world scientific challenges, including protein stability, DNA engineering, and literature-based question answering. 🧪 arxiv.org/pdf/2412.21154

Merry Christmas (to those who celebrate) Photo credit: Grok

Inside me are two wolves: one wants to make cinnamon rolls from scratch and the other doesn't want to go to the grocery store Okay they're not wolves more like sloths

The Allen Institute and the University of Washington have released a new AI search tool to answer scientific queries of OpenAccess content Preprint released in @arxiv-cs-cl.bsky.social OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-augmented LMs arxiv.org/abs/2411.14199

OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-augmented LMs

Scientific progress depends on researchers' ability to synthesize the growing body of literature. Can large language models (LMs) assist scientists in this task? We introduce OpenScholar, a specialize...

arxiv.org

Meet ACE - a new tool for comparing annotations across Allen Institute transcriptomic taxonomies! Join us for a webinar on how to use it in your #neuroscience research, incl. studies using our Alzheimer's datasets. 📆 Dec. 18, 9:30am PT 💻 Webinar 🎟️ alleninstitute.org/events/cell_... #neuroskyence

Cell Type Taxonomies A-Z: Webinar Series

Webinar series covering everything and anything cell types starting in January 2024. Hosted by the Allen Institute.

alleninstitute.org

alleninstitute.org/careers/inte... Internships and Postbac opportunities open at the Allen Institute, applications close January 7th 2025. Great opportunity for anyone interested in life sciences research or science-support careers. Spread the word!

Internship & Postbaccalaureate Programs

Students and early-career professionals in lab research, biology, neuroscience, immunology, and others should apply for our internships and fellowships.

alleninstitute.org

Cool Yule read: this article highlights how behavioral diversity in artificial intelligence “teams” can significantly enhance problem-solving & adaptability, something that could change how we approach challenges in (AI) research. 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2412.16244

Neural diversity is key to collective artificial learning

Many of the world's most pressing issues, such as climate change and global peace, require complex collective problem-solving skills. Recent studies indicate that diversity in individuals' behaviors i...

arxiv.org

Whoa: 9 sea snake species have regained the genetic requirements for advanced color vision, showing that complex traits lost to evolution can be regained. phys.org/news/2024-12...

Sea snakes regain advanced color vision, recovering a complex trait once lost to evolutionary time

Nine species of sea snakes have now been identified as having regained the genetic requirements for advanced color vision, demonstrating that once a complex trait has been lost to evolutionary time, i...

phys.org

I’m so stealing this idea. Such a cool way to ensure #deib is built into a team’s mindset. Thanks for sharing, @sarahstern.bsky.social

Sarah Stern@sarahstern.bsky.social · 2y ago

At (most) lab meetings we have a “moment for diversity” where that week’s presenter either tells us about their culture or presents some topic related to diversity and inclusion. This week I chose to spend a few minutes talking about Rita Levi-Montalcini. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Le...

The Washington Post nails it: AI is transforming healthcare, from diagnostics to personalized treatments. 2025 will be the year of AI in life sciences—thoughtful integration is critical. 🧪 Read more: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Opinion | This year, be thankful for AI in medicine

The technology is making health care more accurate and less expensive.

washingtonpost.com

🧪Abhishaike Mahajan examines Recursion’s shift from cell painting to brightfield microscopy. The piece highlights how #ml has unlocked brightfield imaging as a label-free alternative, addressing challenges of cell painting. A must-read: www.owlposting.com/p/why-recurs...

Why Recursion Pharmaceuticals abandoned cell painting for brightfield imaging

5.7k words, 26 minutes reading time

owlposting.com

I used to spend about half my time thinking about ways we can better understand how to use AI in #biology — but increasingly, I’m worried about how about how we scale platforms to cope with data volumes 🧪🧵

Predicting the results of experiments is challenging, especially in fields like neuroscience. This recent study shows that fine-tuned LLMs, like BrainGPT, can predict neuroscience results more accurately than human experts on benchmarks. 🧪 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02046-9.pdf

@jshendure.bsky.social and team continually blow me away

allen institute@alleninstitute.org · 2y ago

What if we could read the diary of a cell? Researchers from around the world, including #SeaSynBio's @jshendure.bsky.social, share with @nytimes.com' @carlzimmer.bsky.social their vision for how an emerging suite of technologies could change how we study life. 🔗 www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/s...

Moravec’s Paradox is such a fascinating concept: today’s AI can tackle complex tasks like reasoning or drug discovery—things that push human limits. But it still struggles with what humans find simple, like picking up a coffee cup. Biology & AI remind us how differently intelligence can evolve. 🧪

This is a great fellowship for any postdoc who wants to work with #neuro data in a nurturing environment at @alleninstitute.bsky.social. Deadline is approaching!

Andy Hickl@andyhickl.bsky.social · 2y ago

My team at @alleninstitute.bsky.social is fortunate to be sponsored by the Shanahan Foundation to offer fellowships in data-driven #neuroscience. Apply by December 16! #postdocs #mlsky https://alleninstitute.org/careers/internships-and-postbac/shanahan-foundation-fellowship/

This is the best take on the potential of predictive biology I’ve come across 🧪 open.substack.com/pub/creode/p...

Predictive biology

An emergent epistemology

open.substack.com

Tom suggests replacing the logic of prereg -> confirmation with the logic of train/validation/test splits. The place this approach is really, really needed is in historical data — where we can never get another equivalent sample! Our ordinary understanding of replication is broken there.

Tom Carpenter, PhD@tcarpenter.bsky.social · 2y ago

Example: you split the data into 2 sets. You run several analyses in one part. You grok it many ways. You do subdivide that into folds to find analyses that minimize error in folds when slopes are estimated from others. When you have an analysis you like, you independently confirm in the other set

I ran nearly 8,900 of my tweets through ChatGPT to analyze patterns in my digital footprint. It revealed insights into my political affiliation, career history, and personal life. Here’s what I learned. 🧵🤖

I like this article, despite its clickbaity title — largely because there’s stuff for us to do as regular scientists 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

AI could pose pandemic-scale biosecurity risks. Here’s how to make it safer

AI-enabled research might cause immense harm if it is used to design pathogens with worrying new properties. To prevent this, we need better collaboration between governments, AI developers and expert...

nature.com