Suraj Shankar 🏳️‍🌈

Out today in Phys. Rev. Fluids, our 'Arrested development and traveling waves of active suspensions in nematic liquid crystals'. The bend instability in active suspensions pairs off against bending resistance in LCs to tell quite a story! 1/20

people.math.wisc.edu/~spagnolie/P...

I’m thrilled to share my first review about microbial ecology + mosquito-borne disease control! Bacteria block pathogen development in the mosquito gut, but which bacteria will produce long-lasting results in the field? Let’s think about colonization and persistence in the mosquito gut! (1/4)

Congrats Kirsty!

Publishing scientific papers is an obstacle course. There are many aspects to this but lengthy review times are one. That's why I am very excited about the new initiative @biologyopen.bsky.social, @biologists.bsky.social open access journal: Fast & Fair 1/n 🧪
journals.biologists.com/bio/pages/fa...

This was a fun exercise... reflecting on my accidental path into science, the questions that drive our lab @crick.ac.uk , and thoughts on building a more inclusive scientific community. Grateful for the opportunity @focalplane.bsky.social and Subhajit .

Have you ever thought about inflating tissues?
Or maybe quickly deflating those inflated tissues?

New #EpithelialMechanics pre-print: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
🧵 with pressure control, multiscale buckling, controlled wrinkling

Our two sister papers on combinatorial metamaterials published today in @physrevresearch.bsky.social, a result of a fantastic SKCM2 collaboration with Chaviva Sirote-Katz at Tel Aviv and Tamás Kálmán at Tokyo shokef.tau.ac.il

Emergence of cellular nematic order is a conserved feature of gastrulation in animal embryos Nature Communications - The morphogenetic events that occur during gastrulation involve dramatic cell- and tissue-level changes. Here they show that propagation of nematic order, leading to...

Scientific collaborations come in many flavors & are fun because they expose you to new areas of science. That was definitely the case for this paper, out today. We were definitely in the passenger seat but it was fun to go along for the ride 1/n
rdcu.be/euiZB.

On Sticks, Karats, and Charades: The Structural Dismantling of American Science The displacement of NSF employees from their headquarters opens a new front in the dismantling of American leadership in science.

good take on the current state of the State attack on scientific infrastructure by @joshuasweitz.bsky.social

joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/on-sticks-...

Chloroplast acquisition without the gene transfer in kleptoplastic sea slugs, Plakobranchus ocellatus The newly opened genome of a kleptoplastic mollusk, Plakobranchus ocellatus, indicated that sequestered plastids retain their activity within the animal cell without horizontal algal gene transfer to ...

You hadn’t heard of kleptoplasty before? It is a pretty amazing phenomenon indeed. I was lucky to learn about it when this paper came to @elife.bsky.social a few years ago: elifesciences.org/articles/60176

500-million-year-old fossils reveal how the starfish got its arms | Natural History Museum How echinoderms evolved such an unusual shape has long troubled biologists.

Great write-up on our paper by @joshlukedavis.com @nhm-london.bsky.social www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

Flight simulator for moths reveals they navigate by starlight Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 18 June 2025

This week on the Nature Podcast 🔊 Flight simulator for moths reveals they navigate by starlight

https://go.nature.com/461KE6E

Woah! Such an important study published in Nature today! Quick thread with some of their key figures!
🧵

“Why Are We Funding This?” Long-standing myths about “silly science” have contributed to the reckless slashing of government-supported research.

My latest for American Scientist Magazine helps give scientists the tools to fight back against politicized charges that our research is silly or pointless- tools that will work whether you’re asked “why are we funding this” from your asshole uncle at Thanksgiving or an asshole US Senator.
🧪🌎

Barbara McClintock portrait

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬

Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

Great work from Mochulska & Francois developing a generative framework for systematically building Dynamical Landscapes of cell fate decision making using modular dynamical components

Important step to interpretable and predictive models of cellular differentiation

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

After being stuck in Hong Kong after ISSCR meeting unable to fly back home, I managed to get on a plane to London to stay with family, only to learn in the air that our institute was hit. My team is all safe. My lab sustained serious blast damage but we shall overcome! #PeaceNow tnx for messages :)

Weizmann Institute rn

Minuscule worms form living towers to hunt for food Scientists observe the nematode’s behaviour in the wild for the first time.

Scientists observe the nematode’s behaviour in the wild for the first time

https://go.nature.com/4dXCMFc

Bethesda Declaration — STAND UP FOR SCIENCE Support NIH Staff Now!

4. Most importantly though, Jay, despite his espoused commitment to science and the scientific process, is destroying the NIH and is NOT equipped for this job.

As seen in the Bethesda Declaration...which you should go read, sign, and share: www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

SEVERAL KEY THEMES FROM THE HEARING:

1. Jay is REALLY pushing off accountability on the budget saying that it is "a negotiation between congress and the administration"

I think he is distancing himself from Trump to remain "neutral" & avoid fallout when it (inevitably) comes.

Dynamic Landscape Analysis of Cell Fate Decisions: Predictive Models of Neural Development From Single-Cell Data Building a mechanistic understanding of cell fate decisions remains a fundamental goal of developmental biology, with implications for stem cell therapies, regenerative medicine and understanding dise...

Our latest "Dynamic Landscape Analysis of Cell Fate Decisions: Predictive Models of Neural Development From Single-Cell Data"

A rigorous mathematical foundation for Waddington's landscape to study cell fate decision making

Applied to ventral neural tube development

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A closed feedback between tissue phase transitions and morphogen gradients drives patterning dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.06.658228v1

War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength

Squid study sparks interdisciplinary insight into the physics of growth Often, physics can be used to make sense of the natural world, whether it's understanding gravitational effects on ocean tides or using powerful physics tools, like microscopes, to examine the inner w...

🧪⚛️

Squids are awesome!

Here's a very interesting example of how studying living systems reveals new phenomena and regimes of physics. In this case packing and order. Work from the group of @simonepigolotti.bsky.social at the @oistedu.bsky.social

phys.org/news/2025-06...

US science is being wrecked, and its leadership is fighting the last war Facing an extreme budget, the National Academies hosted an event that ignored it.

The failure of the National Academy of Sciences USA to make a clear and unequivocal statement about the disastrous Trump administration science policies — it lets all of us down and dooms them to eventual irrelevance.

Our paper on hyperdisordered packing is out! Chromatophore arrangement on squid skin reveals an exotic form of disordered packing, caused by the interplay of cell insertion and surface growth journals.aps.org/prx/abstract...

New paper out in @pnas.org

We followed cells migrating along signalling gradients in 3D, and found they collectively behave as a living droplet - a self-propelling fluid that grows.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

For multimessenger astronomy, you really need 3 detectors online to localise sources. With KAGRA all having a long way to catch up, and LIGO India only just starting construction, we'll have many years before we could make it back to current abilities even if everything goes perfectly