I have never seen a double standing ovation at a scientific meeting before but it was a beautiful moment to see the warm reception of Ralph Baric and of his recent work on merbecoviruses, particularly at a time when he is being sorely persecuted despite his record of service to the country.

Maggie Cheung. I would probably learn a couple new languages as a fringe benefit

Nanoraptor@nanoraptor.danamania.com · 2w ago

You suddenly get a narrator describing your life and there’s no way to turn it off - everyone can hear it. While shopping, at work, at home, with friends - the voice narrating your every move goes on. Who do you hope is the voice of this narrator?

"Scientific systems rarely collapse through a single dramatic event. They decline incrementally: one technician dismissed, one laboratory left unrepaired, one instrument taken out of service, one young scientist deciding to build a career elsewhere." physicsworld.com/a/letter-fro... ⚛️🧪

Letter from Argentina: 'an empty desk and an idle electron microscope signal the erosion of the country's science' – Physics World

Faramarz S Gard laments the decline of Argentine science

physicsworld.com

Galloway is such an idiot blowhard. I'm sure he'll find some way to make UC worse

Brendan Cantwell@cantb.bsky.social · 2w ago

I quit www.politico.com/news/2026/07...

this is pretty funny but also reminds me of the time my 7th grade math teacher did not know what factorials were and told me "you can't just make up your own operation even if you decide that the exclamation point is a symbol for it"

Seth Trueger@mdaware.org · 2w ago

oh come on

Today is the 250th anniversary of Boston’s mass inoculation against smallpox on July 3, 1776. The city was effectively closed to commerce from July through September 1776. The mass immunization effort was cheered as evidence of true independence. Here's how I described it in my book:

The only logical conclusion is that ancient hominids reproduced via parthenogenesis

MU-Peter Shimon 🀄@mu-peter.bsky.social · last mo.

A unique and intriguing finding... Out of 20 individuals screened, analysis of the teeth from Homo naledi skeletons in the South African cave system found they were all female. Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers🏺🧪 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

My "Human T-lymphotrophic Virus" hat is dying, so I need a new virus hat. Anyone got a lead? Old conference swag, some indie maker, etc?

As a biologist, (ergo a layman w/r/t national intelligence), I've found it surprising how, with each declassification, we see how little was added by SIGINT. I assumed we'd been monitoring gene synth and oligo sequences in China since, like, 2006. But when you're outside everything looks easy!

*Preprint Alert*: How do we measure resolution when biomolecules won't sit still? 🔬 Estimating it for a static cryo-EM reconstruction is standard. But what about a conformational ensemble? arxiv.org/abs/2606.14449 with the amazing henryhmattingly.bsky.social and @lukeevanshandle.bsky.social #cryoEM

After nine years at the head of the Rutgers CryoEM & Nanoimaging Facility, I am stepping down to focus on scholarship in the area of virology. I will be joining the Dept of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Rutgers as an associate professor in the fall.

Banning American scholars from writing articles or collaborating with counterparts in other countries is such a terminally idiotic form of shooting ourselves in the foot in terms of national competitiveness that it makes no sense to make this a term of receiving R&D grant support.

I-75 Scientist@flscitriguy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

NIH Definition of Foreign components. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Just saw the news that HHS has hounded coronavirus expert Ralph Baric into retirement. Baric is an accidental hero who was doing blue-sky research on animal coronaviruses before SARS thrust him into the role of protecting us from pandemics. Without his work, SARS-CoV-2 would have been far worse.

One thing that drives me nuts in peer review is when there are concerns about a manuscript's fundamental significance or fit for journal and it gets pushed on to a 2nd or 3rd round of review before rejection. This is not something you can fix in an additional round of review!

This is interesting...our experience is we get devitrification under similar thermal annealing cycles (although we used buffered protein solutions instead of whole cells, so one possible difference is the intrinsic cryoprotectant ability of cells)

Martin Hällberg@bmhallberg.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Surface ice ruining your cryo-ET lamellae? We showed you can sublimate it away — inside the SEM, no extra hardware, no devitrification. 🧊→✨ New preprint from @KarolinskaInst 3D-EM 🧵👇

I suspect most cryo-EM experts leave unsaid that we all think filter paper blot-based plunge freezing will be obsolete in 10 years but we have no idea what technique will obsolete it.

the posting is live jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/270...

klbr@klbr.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It's time for me to hire someone so we can determine the origin of life in the universe together. Is that of interest to anybody

It's time for me to hire someone so we can determine the origin of life in the universe together. Is that of interest to anybody

We had a cure for hemophilia A, until today. This feels so strange to say, or to contemplate: that we can un-cure a disease because of collective disinterest.

dicing up some grubs for old-fashioned diagnostic virology

At what resolution in cryo-EM do you see clear holes in aromatics? I see in some X-ray crystallography literature people are saying 1.6Å, but in cryo they seem quite visible at lower resolutions than this.

life achievement: replaced my chainsaw chain for the first time

She couldn't resist the opportunity to explicitly say she's punishing Harvard for hiring former elected or appointed Democrats. This level of explicitly partisan score-settling is wrong and un-American.

Eric Columbus@ericcolumbus.bsky.social · last yr.

🚨🚨 Deranged letter from Education Secretary Linda McMahon to Harvard’s president, cutting off federal funding for any new grants. Worth reading in full. It is NUTS.

I know I haven't been active on here much lately but...I am hiring a core facility postdoc to own the Krios, do a lot of cryoET jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/249...

I was thinking to myself "what were the best years so far for USA? maybe 1998 and 2014?" This leads to my new hypothesis (nonserious) that the best years are going to be an inflection point in the median income (PPP-adjusted) with positive first derivative.

Trafficking studies that rely on following virus microinjected into the cytoplasm aren't valid if the virus in native cells would be inside a membranous organelle.

Since I got a third cryo-transmission electron microscope, I have more 'scope time than I know what to do with. If you have a project that requires a large amount of data collection, get in contact because we can probably work something out.

Don't be a useful idiot puppet for the regime drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/02/25/d...

Don’t be a useful idiot puppet for the regime

I say this to myself regularly in the past weeks, mostly when it comes to sitting on my hands about my regular NIH-related and academic science career-related hobby horse issues as they arise. We h…

drugmonkey.wordpress.com

Wondering if your study section cancelled? I update this sheet daily. As of today, 56/124 study sections that should have met since Jan 2, 2025 have "not met as scheduled." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

2025 Study section tracking

docs.google.com

Does anybody else find it weird that it's common for receptor homologs to bind different viral species of the same family but in a completely different pose? I would've thought a priori that if receptor use is conserved, the pose will also be conserved,