Anne Carpenter

Summers' first statement addressing the newly unveiled Epstein correspondence comes on the heels of Sen. Elizabeth Warren calling on Harvard to sever ties with Summers and putting new pressure on the elite university to hold Summers accountable for his close friendship with Epstein. Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor and now the Democratic senior senator from Massachusetts, had said in response to a CNN inquiry that she believes Summers — Harvard's former president and one of its most prominent faculty members — "cannot be trusted" with students given his past relationship with Epstein. "For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment," Warren told CNN. "If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein's sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation's politicians, policymakers, and institutions - or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else."

"If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein's sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot… teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else." - @warren.senate.gov
www.cnn.com/2025/11/17/p...

I did it again. @globias.bsky.social #GloBIAS2025

Here's hoping I get a chance again next year.

A senior academic using mentoring as leverage to obtain sex is a contemptible abuser of power.

This is what I try to always tell people: food banks can do way more with your money than you can, due to bulk buying deals. And they can do way, way more with your money than with the canned goods you didn’t want to eat

Biologist David Sabatini loses again in legal fight against Whitehead Institute Judge dismisses final claim against scientist’s former employer and curtails lawsuit directed at woman who accused him of sexual harassment

Biologist David Sabatini loses again in legal fight against Whitehead Institute | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Required reading for cell biologists to get a sense of basic statistical principles!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s Halloween so time to make the cells scream!

There's a year-old problem with looping movies in Powerpoint on Mac. Movie plays once, jitters and then shows blocky artefacts. Same pptx works fine on Windows. Problem seems to be Mac-side (QT?) but 15.7.1 and 26.0.1 both show this behaviour.

A solution, in case it helps anyone:
1/2

💡Just presented our new paper at the @iccv.bsky.social BioImage Computing workshop: cubic: CUDA-accelerated 3D Bioimage Computing. We introduce a simple way to add GPU acceleration to scikit-image–based bioimage processing pipelines by swapping import statements. 🧵
1/6 #iccv2025

The editors of ACS Omega cheerfully accepted the authors' excuses and replacement image for this weird shit.
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
H/t Leonid @forbetterscience.bsky.social

Astrocytic PIEZO activation by heartbeat sound promotes extracellular matrix and maturation in human brain organoids Heartbeat sound is one of the first rhythmic stimuli encountered by the developing human brain, yet its biological role has remained unexplored. Here we show that heartbeat sound promotes structural a...

"Here we show that heartbeat sound promotes structural and functional maturation of human cortical organoids with a physiological astrocyte-to-neuron ratio." 🤯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Chocolate chips are enormously helpful in this regard.

The State of AI in Drug Discovery 2025, Wed, Oct 29th, 2025 @ 11:00 AM Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. publishers Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning partnered with big data generation at unprecedented scale is transforming the worlds of biotechnology and pharma, particularly in the arena of drug discovery. From generative AI to unlock novel drug candidates to virtual cells that gleam insights across multimodal biology, we are witnessing the cusp of an exponential curve of AI innovation that is poised to enhance and perhaps overhaul the design and validation of novel therapeutics. In 2024, GEN debuted our virtual summit, The State of AI in Drug Discovery, which drew a record audience. This year’s summit provides a platform for an outstanding group of researchers, evangelists and entrepreneurs to showcase the latest advances, applications and challenges regarding the deployment of AI across therapeutic development. The program features many of the most exciting companies and organizations powering the AI revolution, including NVIDIA, Xaira Therapeutics, Recursion, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Arc Institute, Generate: Biomedicines, and more! Please join us on October 29th for a dynamic program featuring: A featured presentation with Bo Wang, PhD (Xaira Therapeutics) on the promise of multimodal AI for health care The democratization of small molecule drug discovery with the developers of Boltz-2, Gabriele Corso, PhD (MIT), Regina Barzilay, PhD (MIT), and Najat Khan, PhD (Recursion) Evolving industry trends across the AI therapeutic landscape with Derek Lowe, PhD (Novartis and author of "In the Pipeline"), Molly Gibson, PhD, (Flagship Pioneering), and Stacie Calad-Thomson, PhD (NVIDIA) Building the virtual cell with Theofanis Karaletsos (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative), Emma Lundberg, PhD (Stanford), Hani Goodarzi, PhD (Arc Institute), and Ron Alfa, MD, PhD (Noetik) What’s next for AI in protein design with Surge Biswas, PhD (Nabla Bio), Tharindi Hapuarachchi, PhD (Generate: Biomedicines), and Oliver Vince, PhD (Basecamp Research) Breakout sessions from our event sponsors, Revvity Signals, Benchling, and Telesis Bio. Registration for The State of AI in Drug Discovery is entirely free. Sponsored by

Free webinar, looks good (wish it wasn't scheduled during Day 3 of SBI2 conference in Boston!)
webinars.liebertpub.com/e/The-State-...

President Trump reduces trade surplus in profitable export industry that provides middle-class jobs all across America.

Dear Secretary McMahon, Ms. Mailman, and Mr. Haley, I appreciated the opportunity to speak with you yesterday. I welcome further engagement around how we can (a) enhance the long-standing partnership between the federal government and this country's leading research universities and (b) ensure that higher education stays focused on academic excellence. As I shared on the call, I do not believe that the involvement of the government through a compact--whether it is a Republican- or Democratic-led White House- is the right way to focus America's leading colleges and universities on their teaching and research mission. Our universities have a responsibility to set our own academic and institutional policies, guided by our mission and values, our commitment to free expression, and our obligations under the law. Staying true to this responsibility is what will help American higher education build bipartisan public trust and continue to uphold its place as the envy of the world. We remain open to other ways to work with the federal government to enhance higher education. Best, Sian Leah Beilock President

Dartmouth is OUT! Thank goodness... a friend at U of A and I have been playing "Who will be the last of the 9 standing?" and it's not gonna be us!

Penn rejects White House proposal for special funding treatment With the decision, Penn became the third university to decline the offer.

👏 👏 👏

www.thedp.com/article/2025...

USC rejects Trump education compact aimed at shifting the university to the right USC interim President Beong-Soo Kim said in a statement that he had sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education turning down the Trump offer.

👏 👏 👏

www.latimes.com/california/s...

A flyer for the Bioimage Analysis Beginnings Bootcamp - blue and white with a picture of cells on the top. It says "Learn core bioimage analysis skills using open-source tools for light microscopy. Open to participants at all skill levels." It also says it will be held a the Broad Institute, 415 Main Street, Cambridge MA USA, on Monday to Friday January 12th-16, 2026, from 9-5pm. Registration is $750 academic, $1250 industry, and applications are open at broad.io/BAB3

Big news! Our week-long #bioimageanalysis bootcamp is BACK! Learn how to think about bioimage analysis like the pros do, learn what corrections you should (and shouldn't!) apply to your images, learn open source tools, and more. Apply NOW at broad.io/BAB3 for our January 2026 course!

The McLean team deserves all the credit for noticing the mitochondria by eye! It was a slog quantifying it, but the major insight was seeing it by eye, and the major work here was cataloging all the patients and preparing their cell samples. Very glad to be included in this important project!!

Most axonal mitochondria in cortical pyramidal neurons lack mitochondrial DNA and consume ATP - PubMed In neurons of the mammalian central nervous system (CNS), axonal mitochondria are thought to be indispensable for supplying ATP during energy-consuming processes such as neurotransmitter release. Here...

It just goes to show that the more we think we know, the more there is there is to learn!

Here is the paper mentioned

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38405915/

I personally have no idea, because it’s outside my expertise, but I’m guessing the researchers that we cite in the discussion who discovered that would have some speculation, or maybe even solid theory or evidence!

Neat! I don’t know if there’s a connection.

Interesting connection!

Mostly no! Which i am excited about, because existing treatments are not great for most patients. So we’d love to have medicines with a very different mechanism than the existing ones.

People often dismiss cell biology as just “looking at stuff”, which makes seminal discoveries like this even sweeter. Congrats @drannecarpenter.bsky.social and team

Awww 🥰

Psoriasis and Bipolar Disorder: Understanding Their Connection Explore the connection between psoriasis and bipolar disorder, their shared risk factors, and strategies for managing both conditions effectively.

Psoriasis!

www.everydayhealth.com/skin-conditi...

The origin of novel traits in cancer - PubMed The traditional view of cancer emphasizes a genes-first process. Novel cancer traits arise by genetic mutations that spread to drive phenotypic change. However, recent data support a phenotypes-first ...

Oooh, that’s really consistent with this growing story that phenotypes, not just genotypes, drive cancer!

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39112299/