Beyond the assignment is my middle name

For a story: if you buy stuff for a lab, how are you handling shopping and procurement these days?

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Well, here's an angle on regulatory approaches to real world evidence I never considered. petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2026/07/15/w...

New in nanopore protein sequencing: a pore engineered to grab a peptide by the C terminus, then repeatedly read each amino acid starting at the N-term before cleaving to reveal the next one. Gives you a single-aa readout on sequence. 1/ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sequential reading of a stepwise-shortened peptide immobilized on nanopore - Nature

A nanopore-based ‘chop and measure’ method sequences peptides at single-amino-acid resolution by using enzymatic digestion to progressively shorten the N terminus one residue at a time,...

nature.com

Molecular aging is a really interesting field - it's not just cell systems, but long-lived proteins themselves that accumulate damage over time. This start-up is trying to remove advanced glycation end products from proteins like collagen in the extracell matrix. cen.acs.org/biological-c...

Enzyme engineers tackle protein damage from aging

By undoing lysine glycation, Revel Pharmaceuticals hopes to address tissue stiffness, inflammation

cen.acs.org

Chemistry is key to the success of current and future space missions: cen.acs.org/physical-che... #chemsky 🧪

I can't possibly do the story justice in a Twitter thread, so please read it on @cenmag.bsky.social: cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic... 13/13

Access to potential long COVID drugs dwindles as trials falter

Two sets of studies for COVID-driven conditions show the struggles of drug development

cen.acs.org

In the picture on her GoFundMe page, Mia Delli Gatti looks bright and cheerful. She sticks out her tongue and curls her left hand into a “rock on” symbol. The sun shines through the short, dark curls that halo her face. 1/

3) Best insight I've had from an AI expert: "Anyone who confidently asserts they know where this is all headed is wrong. No-one knows what the world will look like in a couple of years" 3/n

I'm just a biotech reporter, and don't have vast sums of money to throw at startups, but: if your website is so clearly AI-extruded without a human edit that it can't refer to your lead drug candidate by the same name consistently, then I would rather you just slap "in stealth" on the page.

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

OK I was wrong. I miss the days when trying to stay AI literate didn’t make me feel crazy on the daily

Biochemistry bat signal: The C&EN structures team has been asked to draw poly(I:C) from scratch. Surely this exists somewhere? Can you help?

The key to ending an Ebola outbreak is not some magic bullet, it's diagnosing people with Ebola and isolating them and identifying their contacts and quarantining them. That way patients can be treated safely, new cases identified early and transmission can be prevented.

One day last week saw a few big moves in the decades-long quest for an HIV vaccine: -The official end, announced last year, of NIH's flagship HIV vaccine program -Two papers showing that a complex B-cell-training regimen can coax out antibodies that can block infection. cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic...

HIV vaccine candidates reach milestone in primates

Multistep vaccination strategy coaches B cells to raise broadly neutralizing antibodies

cen.acs.org

On that note: www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1244...

Navin Pokala 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱@navinpokala.bsky.social · last mo.

Given that the sole beneficiary of the destruction of American scientific leadership is the Chinese Communist Party, it is reasonable to ask how much Chinese money is flowing to Russell Vought, the chief architect of America’s surrender to Xi Jinping www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u...

C&EN's @bethanyhalford.bsky.social was on this story a week ago for chemistry: (Of the top 31 US chemistry PhD producing schools) "20 schools reported that their incoming classes for 2026 would be smaller than for 2024—an average 37% fewer students than they took in 2024." #chemsky #chemchat

Prasad Jallepalli, MD, PhD@prasad.bsky.social · last mo.

www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u... an ominous trend: graduate admissions are down 15 percent from last year, on top of an 11 percent decrease from the previous year we are destroying our seed corn

Nighttime temperatures should drop below 28.8 degrees Celsius

Sometimes this account offers real insight of a media-criticism nature. Other times it’s just a window into someone learning the style guide in real time.

Editing the Blue-Gray Lady@nytdiff.bsky.social · last mo.

Change in Headline

Tough field to keep up with, but @brittanytrang.com and @matthewherper.bsky.social I'm curious about how you concluded this was the first scientist-specific AI tool/platform/interface from a leading co? (Does GPT-Rosalind fail to qualify for some reason?) www.statnews.com/2026/06/30/a...

Anthropic releases Claude Science, a product aimed at researchers, the pharma industry

Anthropic released Claude Science, an application that optimizes its large language model for scientists and, especially, those doing research at pharma companies.

statnews.com

🧵

c0nc0rdance@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · last mo.

Consider the Great Philosophical Questions™: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the nature of the human mind? Do the ends justify the means? Is cereal a type of soup? Not many have a definite, knowable answer. That's what makes Molyneux’s Problem so interesting: we solved it.

This week in "What's that gene, and why are they trying to drug it?" - this one has it all: - an active process for partial cell death in neurodegeneration (mercifully, nobody tried to coin a new name for it - axonopoptosis?) - a scaffold-looking protein that, whoops, turns out to be an enzyme 1/

"A striking feature of our results is how uniform they are across different types of scientists and labs. The patterns hold for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers separately. They hold for scientists in elite and non-elite labs. ...

Another very cool story: labor appears to start because of a drop in NAD+ in the placenta, which alters prostaglandin signaling. @bethanyhalford.bsky.social follows from metabolomics > redox enzymology > therapeutic hypothesis cen.acs.org/biological-c...

Coenzyme works as a molecular brake for labor

Depletion of placental nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide provokes the onset of labor in pregnant mice

cen.acs.org

Microscopy nerd alert: two scopes in California can now do phase contrast cryoEM - potentially fixing the tech's very low signal/noise ratio. The phase filter they used is a laser. Which is also the brightest thing in the solar system (outside of the inside of the sun). cen.acs.org/analytical-c...

15 years, flawless mirrors, and the brightest laser in the world: How physicists brought phase contrast to cryo-EM

Phase contrast enables structures of smaller proteins, could drive in-cell proteomics

cen.acs.org

Olfactory neurons are fascinating. They pick one single GPCR to express, out of 100+ options. They regenerate throughout life. And this startup thinks we can use them to monitor neurodegenerative diseases longitudinally in living people. cen.acs.org/business/sta...

Crownlands emerges from stealth with a transcriptomic atlas from nasal swabs

Start-up studies olfactory neurons as a proxy for the brain

cen.acs.org

Sobering reading, especially as the mother of a 10 month old. One choice that I applaud: describing essential oils and similar as “folk medicine.”

Amy Maxmen, PhD@amymaxmen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I went to Utah to see what life is like in America's new reality, where vaccine-preventable diseases are common again. Utah's measles outbreak has lasted 10 months. Pediatricians teared up in interviews. Mothers were stressed. 🧵My latest @wired.com @kffhealthnews.org www.wired.com/story/anguis...