Thrilled to share our latest work, led by @aryantaheri.bsky.social and Julia Peukes! Using cryo-EM and cryo-ET, we reveal how KIF21B’s distal tail engages multiple tubulin dimers along a protofilament, enabling persistent microtubule attachment and crosslinking. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We are excited to share two preprints reporting a mosquito-specific receptor for chikungunya virus and other alphaviruses! 🤩 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @harvardmicro.bsky.social @harvardvirology.bsky.social @hhmi-science.bsky.social

One month left to apply (deadline August 31st)! 👇 #Virology #AcademicJobs #FacultyJobs #FacultyPosition #TenureTrack #GroupLeader

Daniel Hurdiss@danielhurdiss.bsky.social · last mo.

We are looking for an Assistant or Associate Professor to join us at the @utrechtvirology.bsky.social. Interested in building an independent research programme in a collaborative #virology environment? Please take a look and share with anyone who might be a good fit! www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

Great to see this finally published! We describe channels at the poxvirus core wall involved in nucleic acid release. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In situ structure of the poxvirus portal complex - Nature

Cryo-electron tomography uncovers the structure of a conserved hexameric ‘portal complex’ that spans the core wall in vaccinia virus, and shows how it is associated with viral functions such as a...

nature.com

The function of government is the transfer of public wealth to AI billionaires

Congratulations to Chris Russo, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, for receiving the 2026 K.H. Kuo Award for Distinguished Scientist in Biological Electron Microscopy www.bsc.org.cn/KuoSymposium...

Billionaire logic is that it makes more sense to terraform Mars rather than to stop venusifying Earth, and that it is a better strategy to build underground bunkers than to make the whole planet a better place to live for everyone.

Polanyi calls knowledge that isn't written down in texts or drawings but that exist within people and groups of people as "implicit/tacit knowledge". The loss of this unwritten, often unspoken, knowledge is often considered to be one of the reasons why institutions lose the capacity of doing stuff.

Nina Metz@ninametz.bsky.social · 2w ago

Why Aren’t There More Imax 70mm Screens for ‘The Odyssey’? variety.com/2026/film/ne...

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

As an academic, I have decided to pre-empt AI taking my job, so I am going to take ITS job! I am going to start hallucinating, lying to my students, and drinking 700,000 litres of water

Great job 👏

There is a special place in hell reserved for the people that removed all customer service emails and replaced them with AI chatbots

My personal summer of code continues with another ChimeraX plugin - this time, MorphometricsX! Load quantified meshes from morphometrics (or pycurv) in ChimeraX with color-by-quantification and display alongside tomos and particles. Coming to the toolshed soon! #teamtomo github.com/baradlab/mor...

Very happy to celebrate the first paper from the Nilsson-Payant Lab @ki.se! We investigated inactivation methods for hantaviruses (including ANDV) and for how long they can remain infectious in the environment under different conditions! journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...

Hantavirus stability and inactivation

Author summary Hantaviruses are ubiquitous rodent viruses and contain some of the most lethal known zoonotic viruses, including Andes virus (ANDV) and Hantaan virus (HTNV), with no FDA- or EMA-approve...

journals.plos.org

Something like 99% of all new drugs have come about because NIH-funded academic researchers did 90% of the foundational work for basically scraps, allowing industry to swoop in and pick off the gems for profit off the back of the US taxpayers

Meanwhile, in the US. It just takes your breath away. *50 years* in prison for protesting. Don't imagine for one moment that we are immune to this. Already, the legislative framework is in place in the UK to enable such convictions - before we get a Trumplike PM. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Alarm over ‘extreme’ sentences for anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism

First amendment groups call 50-to-100-year prison terms chilling as legal experts say sentences unusually long

theguardian.com

Look at that dinosaur reading and reviewing claims himself rather than asking Claude how good it is, as we all know now proper independent review should be done /s

Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · last mo.

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

Robert Insall@robinsall.bsky.social · last mo.

This, emphatically, shouldn't have been done, and shouldn't be used. You'd think we'd have learned that someone else's contextless algorithmic division of science outputs into "the best" and "not the best" is a disaster. Doesn't matter whether AI or Elsevier does it. the-one-percent.qedscience.com

Motion to collectively call this the Slop Factor 🧪

Tim@timisstuck.bsky.social · last mo.

From Oded Rechavi’s post on X: “Whether you’re on the 1% list or just have a good score that you want to share, on our website you can download the report and share it, for example with your tenure, promotion, or hiring committee, or with your university PR department. “

May his successor remember that they will be governing backed by a center-left party with a large majority in parliament, not in a coalition with Reform.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 2mo ago

Keir Starmer expected to announce departure as prime minister on Monday

Pure evil. www.politico.com/news/2026/06...

Trump administration to phase out HIV funding for South Africa

The State Department said the country had failed to address the president’s concerns about treatment of its white citizens.

politico.com

In accordance with ancient tradition, our next Prime Minister is announced to the nation while standing between a furry and a man with a bin on his head.

What if we put it on the Blockchain?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2mo ago

Brooke Rollins says DHS wants to put "AI on drones" to detect screwworm

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

As Professor Homer Simpson said, "It's funny because it's true."

We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots

“For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underreprese...

mcsweeneys.net

I'm watching the National Academies of Science's "State of the Science" address, and it's like McNutt is inhabiting an alternate reality. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS TRYING TO BURN DOWN THE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC ENTERPRISE, and she's talking about red tape and industrial partnerships.

This is deeply unhinged bsky.app/profile/eos....

Honoured to receive the first Sir Dave Stuart Early Career Award today. Dave was my PhD external examiner, making this award, recognising his contributions to structural biology, especially meaningful to me. Thank you to Instruct-ERIC and Thermo Fisher Scientific for championing ECRs.