Nick Stroustrup

@nstroustrup.bsky.social

A British/American group leader at @crg.eu . We study the biology of aging using molecular genetics, engineering, systems biology, and probabilistic machine learning. Lab page: http://lifespanmachine.crg.eu

How do wealthy parents help their offspring? By giving them ribosomes! Optimal ribosome provisioning is key to fast development in unpredictable environments. The fastest path to ribosomal wealth in nematodes is a maternal inheritance. Happy we could play a small part in this fascinating work.

Benjamin Towbin@betowbin.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New paper alert: Our latest shows how maternal diet impacts ribosome levels and early growth intergenerationally in #Celegans Led by Sigma Pradhan and in collab with @nstroustrup.bsky.social journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... @plosbiology.org @izb-unibern.bsky.social @unibe.ch

It's very sad to learn of David Botstein's passing. I worked in David's lab as an undergraduate--one of the most formative periods of my academic life and probably the biggest reason I work in biology today. I vividly remember my first meeting with David. I was a 3rd year engineering student,

We found 24 neuron classes that are excited or inhibited by environmental H2O2, spread across the nose, mouth, and inner pharynx. Different neurons trigger at different H2O2 levels (from 1 µM early warning to >1 mM lethal), and many adapt, so responses encode dose + recent history. 7/

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"Results from experiments with N = 4 or less are shown to be highly misleading (...). For a cut-off of 2-fold expression differences, we find an N of 6-7 mice is required to consistently decrease the false positive rate to below 50%, and the detection sensitivity to above 50%"

Optimized murine sample sizes for RNA sequencing studies revealed from large scale comparative analysis - Nature Communications

Determining the appropriate sample size (N) for bulk RNA sequencing experiments is critical to ensure reliable results. Here the authors perform an unusually large N experiment (N = 30 per group), ana...

nature.com

Yet one more reason we cannot allow LLMs to serve as epistemic grounding is that we cannot triangulate among them the way you can among reasonable independent sources. They bullshit in the same way and end up agreeing with one other about things that are completely false.

Multi-lingual children can end up with very random gaps in their vocab. I've asked my 4 y/o daughter every day after school *for years* what she ate for lunch. She would never tell me and I always wondered why. Today just before bedtime, we were talking and she asked me: baba, what is "lunch"?

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 8mo ago

A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.690213v1

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are

Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

theatlantic.com