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Beth Cimini 🔬💻📊

@bethcimini.bsky.social

She/her. I turn pictures into numbers so others can turn them into medicine. Also I yell about politics a lot. See the fantastic things my team does at https://ciminilab.github.io/WeMakeStuff . Views my own, awesome science from my amazing team.

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Ask Erin / Dear Beth@askerindearbeth.bsky.social · 12h ago

Ep 41! Distance transforms are super handy ways to filter or measure objects in images- but what are they, and how can we make and understand them? Let @erinweisbart.bsky.social and @bethcimini.bsky.social guide you along the way!

Understanding Distance Transformations and using them in CellProfiler: AskErinDearBeth Episode 41

YouTube video by Ask Erin, Dear Beth

youtu.be

Ask Erin / Dear Beth@askerindearbeth.bsky.social · 6d ago

AE/DB turns 40 (episodes)! Lots of biology shows up as speckles (or, as we prefer to think of them, ~*~sparkles~*~), but what kinds of measures can we use to quantify that? Let @bethcimini.bsky.social and @erinweisbart.bsky.social show you a few! Had fun trying out PygWalker and Molab for this one!

Andrew Lawrence@ndrew.bsky.social · 20h ago

the two big ai stories to kick off the week are - meta ai giving your address to strangers on fb marketplace - stole a scientific breakthrough and presented it as its own work this is what we get instead of healthcare or third spaces or public transportation or pick literally anything else

Micah@rincewind.run · 2d ago

it’s bad, actually, that much of the industry is gatekept by people whose standard for hiring a woman is “are you a Cool Girl who is into weird men doing sex stuff at her all the time?”

Faine Greenwood@faineg.com · 2d ago

Women trying to succeed in Silicon Valley AI and effective altruist spaces are reporting feeling serious social pressure to attend sex parties - where people have reported being sexually assaulted, like below. Events like Aella’s “Slutcon,” which is happening again this weekend.

Ann Pierce @itsannpierce 20h I am disheartened by this as well. I already lost a bunch of followers for agreeing with @tautologer, but it's saddening to see local nerdy women being caricatured as Karen-like outsiders and getting pushed out of the scene. This is exactly why you hear so few concrete, names-attached stories of sexual harrassment and assault. I'm told there is a history of discrediting these because the "slut normalization" thing is top priority and these stories get inconveniently in the way of spreading this ideology. I got roped into attending last year's Saturday Slutcon party because so many local and out-of-town friends were there (to echo sentiments @tautologer expressed about "slut events becoming central to the larger scenes). Mostly I hung out with people I knew and that was great. But in the course of my 3-ish hours there, there were 2 times my "no" was not accepted by a man I didn't know, and I was physically pushing a huge guy off of me who was rubbing his penis on me, who continued to do it despite my physical force against him, and after I finally wriggled away from him, told him I wanted to dance alone etc., he came back and did it again. This was scary and bad, but it didn't even cross my mind to report this because one of the other people who didn't accept my "no" earlier in the night was the bartender (an officially sanctioned authority at the event), and I knew the event was organized exclusively by women into CNC (who are vocal about how rapey behavior turns them on), so I figured this sort of thing would just get me laughed at. And anyway, I heard there were a lot of other incidents like it. Later though, someone encouraged me to report this story to the organizers, and despite my embarrassment I did, so *they know* that this and other incidents happened. This is why they cut the Saturday night party this year and created a larger training program for the flirt girls - *because* of things like this last year. Yet the narrative bein…
Prasad Jallepalli, MD, PhD@prasad.bsky.social · 2d ago

related to this: Apple is introducing what amounts to an acquisition-coupled watermark, as a means of proving provenance and authenticity microscopy acquisition and processing software packages must do the same thing — create an explicit chain of watermarks to vouch for the image you see

Kay Schink@kschink.bsky.social · 3d ago

According to the quoted email from Nikon spokesperson, AI was used for "postprocessing". However, I wonder how this lines up with this recent post on LinkedIn, which finds AI watermarks from Google AI generators. I checked this myself, and Gemini reports a watermark.

Mark Histed@markhisted.org · 2d ago

“Much of STEM has [a lot] in common with the humanities and social sciences.” This. I’d say scientific discovery has *everything* in common with scholarship in other fields. It’s why the Trump/Vought/ view that we can kill academia and still have science research is so totally wrong.

Mike Boylan-Kolchin@mbkplus.bsky.social · 2d ago

The messengers generally look down on most scientific inquiry unless it’s a very specific form of applied science. We can’t let these folks divide us; in the end, much of STEM has more in common with the humanities and social sciences than with, e.g., business.

Faine Greenwood@faineg.com · 4d ago

Why is the U.S. public so much more negative on AI than almost anyone else? Well, I think the fact that the U.S. AI industry is being lead by a bunch of very visible, crazy weirdos who talk about how AI will take everyone’s job and maybe kill us all the time is a pretty key factor.

Faine Greenwood@faineg.com · 4d ago

People around the world have interestingly divergent opinions on AI - but most agree that they expect it to cause more job loss than growth: www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/...

Mia Konjikusic, PhD@konjikusicmia.bsky.social · 4d ago

To add to all the lovely videos of non-AI processes multicilia beating: ctenophore multiciliated cells! They can reach up to 1mm long, causing a rainbow light refraction effect with the correct light positioning! Taken by myself at MBL in 2019 embryology. Realtime frame-rate!

Christophe 🔬 Leterrier@christlet.bsky.social · 4d ago

Here's a balanced account of where the microscopy community stands on AI use by this year's Small World in Motion winner. My main issue is that no one seems to have seen the original data despite requests (no mention of it being reviewed by the organizers) www.the-scientist.com/allegations-...

Allegations of AI Use in Nikon Competition Spark Controversy | The Scientist

Microscopists raise concerns about inappropriate AI usage in Nikon's microscopy contest-winning video. Nikon stands their ground, citing no policy breach.

the-scientist.com

Josh Moore@joshmoore.bsky.social · 4d ago

ICYMI: OME-Zarr 0.6 is out! 🎉 This is big, years in the making. @bogovicj.bsky.social & @jo-soltwedel.bsky.social perseverance brought transformations into this next major step on the road to OME-Zarr 1.0. 👏👏👏 Huge congratulations to the Johns — and to everyone who helped get us here! 🥳🙌

Johannes Soltwedel@jo-soltwedel.bsky.social · 6d ago

🚨New release: NGFF specification 0.6 🚨 Last week, we formally released the latest version of the NGFF specification: 0️⃣.6️⃣( ngff.openmicroscopy.org/specificatio...) Let's take a small tour through the things possible with #ome-zarr 0.6 now that this is out! 👇

MadScientist@mads100tist.bsky.social · 4d ago

This is it. This is what everyone is enabling by humoring genAI: you spend months writing something that took you years to get at, for an opaque algorithm that a few control to spit a number and cut you off right there and then. This is what we're up against 🧪

John Stott@jpsastro.bsky.social · 5d ago

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, your application was not successful. Review process As part of the initial triage of the 179 proposals submitted to this call, each was assessed using an AI-based review. Every proposal was read independently by several different AI models against the same seven criteria used to shape this call (including cyber security relevance, research quality and novelty, importance of the problem addressed, feasibility of the project plan, likely outputs and impact, value for money, and responsible research practice), with each model asked to give a score and a written justification with supporting quotations from the text. To guard against any one model's idiosyncrasies, we also ran a second, independent process in which different AI models debated the merits and weaknesses of each proposal before reaching a judgement, again against the same criteria. Scores from both processes were combined to produce an overall ranking. This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review. Projects selected for funding were drawn from those that progressed to the full human review stage. We recognise that AI-assisted assessment is a new and evolving part of the review process, and we are continuing to evaluate how well it aligns with the judgements of human reviewers on this call. We will soon produce a document detailing our method, so that others can build upon it and improve it. Feedback on your application Your application was not selected to progress beyond the AI triage stage. To provide transparency on the outcome of this assessment, we are sharing below the scores (out of 5) from each of the two AI review processes described above, together with the mean score across the two processes.
Kate Bevan@katebevan.com · 5d ago

*extremely tired voice*AI agents don't "go rogue". They are not sentient; they don't have agency. They work within guardrails set by humans. If the humans are so shit at building secure sandboxes for the agents to work within, that's on the humans. Stop using this framing.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 5d ago

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue this year at least four additional times, trying to break into government and university sites, according to researchers and government officials.

Damian Dalle Nogare@damiandn.bsky.social · 5d ago

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have been yelling at anyone who will listen about these kinds of pseudo fluorescence i2i methods for years now. For sure some valid use cases, but infinitely many more ways it can (and will) be abused.

Christophe 🔬 Leterrier@christlet.bsky.social · 6d ago

From the new info my bet is fluo labeling inference pushed to 11. Hallucinating nonsensical DAPI nuclei, mitochondria stain, membrane labeling from a kind of phase contrast image: wrong localization, wrong scale, wrong movement. Keeping this movie as SWiM winner is a disgrace to the competition

Mark Peifer (He, him)@peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 6d ago

Is anyone working for Nikon on here?? You really need to get them to understand the impact this is having on their brand. We loved the image contests--they are great PR for science and microscopy--but this is seriously damaging that reputation.

MadScientist@mads100tist.bsky.social · 6d ago

"embrace slop to create things that do not exist from a sample that was probably donated by some kid with the premise of studying their disease" Conflating AI and genAI on purpose is loser behavior and Nikon Small World will always have that label to me 🧪

Alex Ip 葉清霖@alexip718.com · last wk.

Important to consider that Trump has also shut down green card interviews worldwide except Hungary and Poland (where Christian nationalists are losing power), and refugee admissions worldwide except for white South Africans (who are upset they no longer have Apartheid) It's a Great Replacement:

AFP News Agency@en.afp.com · last wk.

US has deported more than 25,000 people under secretive agreements with 35 countries to take migrants with no ties to those nations, according to an investigation published Monday u.afp.com/Sj9Z

Airport staff and officials attend to a plane carrying migrants deported from the US at the Roberts International Airport in Harbel, some 56 km outside of Liberia's capital of Monrovia, on August 20, 2026
Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 6d ago

Journalists at CNN, MS NOW and Politico failed to maintain “standards of professionalism,” according to lawyers working for President Trump, who recently told a female reporter, “Quiet, piggy.”

The Trump administration accused media outlets CNN, MS NOW and Politico of publishing sensitive or classified information and failing to maintain "standards of professionalism" in a court filing Tuesday, days after President Donald Trump said the news organizations would be banned from White House grounds.
Dr. Stephanie@punkrockscience.bsky.social · 6d ago

The fact that every major news outlet includes vocal tics and hesitations when it’s a woman saying “like” and not when it’s a man saying “um” is itself wicked telling.

Nick Field@nickfield.bsky.social · 7d ago

“This country has never elected a female president. Why are we pretending that this is not a factor?” Ocasio-Cortez said with a laugh. “That doesn’t make it impossible, but to act as though it’s not a factor in anything ever is really a form of, like, denialism” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/u...

Jenny Cohn@jennycohn.bsky.social · last wk.

Peter Thiel has the wheel: “US Deputy Secty of Defense Stephen Feinberg has drafted a memo directing Defense Department subordinates to purchase up to $243.9 M in services from…[Thiel’s] Palantir…without a competitive bidding process…The memo’s subject line is called ‘Funding Palantir’.” 8/11/26…1/

Give Palantir up to $244M through 2028, says internal Defense Department memo

Draft memo taps AI data analysis biz for help with military production efficiency

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