Lara K. Mahal

We're inviting teachers in grades 1-3 to test drive lessons about baby mammals and their mothers’ milk!

These lessons use stories and simple activities to help students learn about growth, nutrition, and introduce the concepts of taxonomy and adaptation.

#EduSky #iTeachBio #EduSci #EvoEd 🧪 🛟

3 infant #pertussis deaths this year in Kentucky. "Of the three infant deaths reported over the past 12 months, all three were not vaccinated, nor were their mothers."

We first tested maternal vaccination for whooping cough over 80 years ago. It's safe & effective & might have saved these babies.

And this is 10x in academia and other work settings

Come hear a Nobel Laureate talk about her cutting edge research! Free and open to all.

🧪 #glycotime

YouTube video by Tiera Tanksley Howard University AI Panel

I need everyone, esp anyone working in education or tech (but really everyone) to WATCH THIS CLIP of @drtanksley.bsky.social discussing the technologies infiltrating our schools & psyches and how she is addressing it with our young people. youtu.be/5mtcSL4S3HQ

It's Friday, and apparently bluesky is ready for this fun revelation:

Dinosaurs lived on the other side the Galaxy.

Stylised townscape with tall buildings under swirling snowy in a purple sky

Marianne von Werefkin,
Swirling Snow, 1915
Expressionist painter
#WomensArt

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What if We Can't Rely on PubMed? - Absolutely Maybe PubMed is incredibly reliable. And a lot depends on it. It’s an ecosystem built around MEDLINE, the steady feed of new publications…

I was just thinking about this again yesterday

What if We Can’t Rely on PubMed? absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/02/14/w...

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Chart: Relative Vaccine Efficacy (Primary End Point).

In a new phase 3 trial, people randomly assigned to receive a flu shot made with modified mRNA were 34.5% less likely to be diagnosed with an influenza-like illness than people given a standard flu shot made with inactivated virus.

We need to stop the anti-science attacks against mRNA vaccines!

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SAVE THE DATE! Stoked to organize the 2026 Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting with @rashmi-priya.bsky.social, @lowelab.bsky.social, and Shelbi Russell. Come learn about Biomedicine, Biomechanics, and the Biosphere, August 24-28, 2026. Registration dates, etc., coming soon! Please RT

Stolen from the Internet: a walk-in freezer with a big poster of Christopher Walken taped on the door. There's various restaurant related items around but out of camera view.

If you need me, I'll be crying in the walken freezer.

AI unreliable in identifying retracted research papers, says study LLMs don’t reliably identify retracted papers, a new study finds. (Image: DALL-E) Large language models should not be used to weed out retracted literature, a study of 21 chatbots concludes. …

Not only were the chatbots unreliable at correctly identifying retracted papers, they spit out different results when given the same prompts.

Sarah holds up an advent calendar showing a page with an anglerfish that says "Light up the darkness"

Hi, it's me again

I have these calendars. They are so pretty. @megstampede.bsky.social made them. They have a bunch of animals on them, like crows and humpbacks and cuttlefish and salamanders.

Each month has facts about the animals AND actions you can take to help them

Get one at Squidfacts.net!

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Are you looking for female speakers in CryoEM for seminars and conferences? Are you a woman in CryoEM and not yet on the ‚woman in CryoEM‘ list? Find your speakers and add/update name and affiliation! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Overcoming the eIF2α Brake in Human Cell-Derived Translation Systems Cell-free translation from human cells is a powerful platform for studying mammalian gene expression and building synthetic biology tools, but productivity is often curtailed by inhibitory phosphoryla...

Excited about Kolya Aleksashin's new work, enabling preparation of active in vitro translation systems from primary human cells and difficult-to-edit cells (fibroblasts and cardiomyocytes). This opens new opportunities to probe mechanisms of translation regulation.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📢 Today we celebrate International Day of LGBTQIA+ People In STEM!

📷 A drop of rainbow” (Lara Barrio): 🔴🟢🔵 With just three fluorescent markers it's possible to generate 7 colour combinations that allow researchers to track multiple cell populations in #Drosophila.

#LGBTQSTEMDay #PrideInSTEM

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www.ualberta.ca/en/news/spot...

Here’s another look at our recent publication—this time with a Folio piece into what we found and why it matters. Check out the new post highlighting the key insights from the study.

People can access this data on our labs website: amsrguofa.ca/datasets/

CERN celebrates LGBTQ+ in STEM Day

Today we celebrate and highlight the work of and barriers facing LGBTQIA+ people in science, technology, engineering and maths. To mark the date, the Progress Pride flag will fly above the Esplanade des Particules for the third year.

🔗 home.cern/news/news/ce...

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As it says In the post

Part 172 of 200 in historically interesting things to inspire your ttrpg dnd

An ancient Roman mosaic depicting a rabbit driving a chariot pulled by geese.

Mark your calendars for November 27th from 2:30–3:30 PM PST for a talk from Dr. David Vocadlo for a talk on “Chemical Glycobiology Tools for Discovery and Translation in Neurodegenerative Diseases.”

For more details, visit: www.sfu.ca/neuro-instit...

Prashant Singh in the lab of Tina Iverson at Vanderbilt published this image of the bacterial 🦠flagellar motor, a detailed molecular model made possibly by CryoEM 🔬.

The similarity to mechanical motors are strong enough we can use terms like stator, rotor, rod & gearing to describe it.

The harassment tax A senior faculty member asked me into his office. I assumed it was to talk about agricultural data. It was the fall of 1991 and I was untenured, 32 years old, and 7 months pregnant. He was in his 60s ...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

16% of graduates students in STEM fields in the US are Chinese nationals.

If we cut funding from any professor who has been the graduate advisor of a Chinese student in the last 5 years RETROACTIVELY, research in the US will grind to a halt.

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