Erik Poppleton

This is an excellent article on the non-linearities in weaning ourselves off fossil fuels! As the number of extraction/refining/consumption points decrease, the system grows more susceptible to individual failures, which will cause problems unless proactively predicted and protected against.

Yeah, I’m gonna need this.

Structures of mRNA come to life thanks to some innovative use of DNA-PAINT 🧬

Full of courage because they’re no longer invertebrates.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Neat paper! Boosting to the MP feed 🧬

Megan is, in addition to being a brilliant physicist, one of the most gifted communicators about complex topics in our field. Don’t miss our latest edition of the Molpigs podcast!
🧬

Megan is, in addition to being a brilliant physicist, one of the most gifted communicators about complex topics in our field. Don’t miss our latest edition of the Molpigs podcast!
🧬

An interesting discussion on English time-words in the 1600s that I don’t remember being covered in @englishhistpod.bsky.social

As an enthusiast of both DNA origami and phage, this work is so exciting to see! Check out this article about "Bacteriophage-Mimetic DNA Origami Needle" from the laboratory of Kurt Gothelf. I love the concept, idea, and execution! 🧬🦠💉

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Developments in one of the long-running questions in DNA origami diagnostics/therapeutics: how folded is your structure after exposure to biology 🧬

I am very excited to share our pre-print that was just released on the bioRxiv entitled "Biomolecular Condensates Dictate the Folding Landscape of Proteins" doi.org/10.64898/202...

Very grateful for @jerelleaj.bsky.social and the members of the Joseph Group for their support on this project! (1/4)

On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences) (Apologies for the length of this post, which means it gets cut off in the email version.

My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

Important thread for people who don’t know about/use Bluesky’s powerful feed curation features:

Excellent discussion on funding, bureaucracy, and the economics of basic research!

I see you tweaked the creature generation rules…

New year, new benchmark structure prediction tool! 🧬

Happy new year! A step change in RNA structure prediction, powered by top Kaggle-ers in a collaboration lead by Stanford University and NVIDIA

Happy to have played a small part in the new RNAPro model, significantly outperforming AlphaFold 3 as well as VFold (CASP winners)

And since you want numbers:
- 50% or more decrease in new data center construction
- An increase from $20/month, but not from Google to crowd out the less-diversified OpenAI and Anthropic
- 30% decrease in Nvidia, Oracle (and Tesla, because why not) share prices followed by exciting financial news.

For the LLM industry:
- significant slowdown or halt in new data center construction.
- squeezing existing paid tiers of LLM use, even as inference costs fall
- contagion via the financial markets where falling share prices of the usual suspects and defaults on loans result in VC/bank crises.

Ph.D.s Can’t Find Work as Boston’s Biotech Engine Sputters A life-sciences job in Boston used to be a sure path to a high-paying career, but empty labs and unemployed grads now herald tougher times in the city.

This article is a good look at what happens when an industry (biotech in this case) runs out of steam:

www.wsj.com/tech/biotech...

Is the AotY list mostly the big melodeath releases from this year? Yeah, call me basic. Was it a good year for melodeath? Also yes.

Can’t get the texture of the guitar on the Amorphis album out of my head.
#metalSky #AotY2025

Ooh, I missed that! I really liked their last album. Thanks!

A lot of angst whether to put Unreqvited or Orbit Culture in that last slot, but decided for some diversity.

Is the AotY list mostly the big melodeath releases from this year? Yeah, call me basic. Was it a good year for melodeath? Also yes.

Can’t get the texture of the guitar on the Amorphis album out of my head.
#metalSky #AotY2025

And we found something chemically heretical:
Spatially organized pH gradients within single organelles. 8/n

Edit of the @dril tweet “turning a big dial taht says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right” except racism is crossed out and replaced with worm.

Yeah, it’s suspicious that they didn’t cite design methods or state how they ensured closure. I would for sure flag that if I were a reviewer for this paper.

CytoDirect: A Nucleic Acid Nanodevice for Specific and Efficient Delivery of Functional Payloads to the Cytoplasm Direct and efficient delivery of functional payloads such as chemotherapy drugs, siRNA, or small-molecule inhibitors into the cytoplasm, bypassing the endo/lysosomal trapping, is a challenging task fo...

See also: figures s2-s7 of this paper for a very similar structure and application which specifically accounted for curvature.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Hairygami: Analysis of DNA Nanostructures’ Conformational Change Driven by Functionalizable Overhangs DNA origami is a widely used method to construct nanostructures by self-assembling designed DNA strands. These structures are often used as “pegboards” for templated assembly of proteins, gold nanopar...

I didn’t look too closely at this paper, but presumably the design must have enough curvature to overcome the Hairygami effect? The Hairygami paper showed that if you don’t compensate for the entropic effects of the overhangs, you don’t get preferential closure. 🧬

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....