Matthias Flotho

How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome in Academia When You’re Six Raccoons Living in a Fjällräven Parka Imposter syndrome is real. In a competitive field like academia, everybody feels like a fraud sometimes, whether it’s a scathing peer review, a nas...

In a competitive field like academia, everyone feels like a fraud sometimes, whether it’s a scathing peer review, a bad comment from a student, or being shooed away by campus security when you get caught eating apple cores and chicken bones out of the dining hall dumpster at 3 a.m.

We will have our next community meeting on Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 11AM CST/ 9AM PST !

Kexin Huang, will be presenting on Biomni: a general-purpose biomedical agent.

Details in 🧵

Partnering with Anthropic to supercharge research and help cure disease From months to hours, autonomous AI agents will accelerate research in the quest for cures.

Giving science a boost. ⚡🔬

We're partnering with @anthropic.com to design and deploy custom AI agents that will help scientists turn big data into scientific discoveries faster.

🔗 https://alleninstitute.org/news/partnering-with-anthropic-to-supercharge-research-to-help-cure-disease/

🧠📈

At the start of January, Johanna, @rorak.bsky.social and Sven traveled to Vancouver where Johanna presented our paper "Smaller and More Flexible Cuckoo Filters"(epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1...) at the ALENEX 2026.
(1/4)

PhD advertisement - Pausch lab | Patrick Pausch | 15 comments Please share! 📤 The Pausch lab at Vilniaus universitetas / Vilnius University is looking to recruit PhD students to work on: ⚔️ 🛡️: Bacterial Immune Systems (CRISPR, retrons, & beyond) 🧬 ✂️: De...

Great opportunity to join the lab of @patrick-pausch.bsky.social !

www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Figure 5. Sudden quarrelling of spouse due to misuse of wireless sensor technology: doi.org/10.5539/jpl....

We will have our first community meeting of 2026 on Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 11AM CST/ 9AM PST !

Ian Ferenc Diks (@ianfd.bsky.social) will be presenting on SingleRust: A High-Performance Toolkit for Single-Cell Data Analysis at Scale.

I’m going to halve my publication output. You should consider slow science, too If we don’t slow down, the research enterprise is going to crash, argues Adrian Barnett.

"The target was numbers, and quality was mentioned only in terms of a journal’s prestige, never the work itself."

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Pretty cool visualization tool for inspecting read alignments!
#datavis #bioinformatics #openscience

Check out the latest paper by @carmen-aguilar.bsky.social, which also involved our #HIRI group leader @emmanuel-saliba.bsky.social and his lab. It was recently published in @natmicrobiol.nature.com: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Congratulations to all authors! 👏🎉

The Parkinson's Disease Drug Tolcapone and Analogues are Potent Glycomimetic Lectin Inhibitors of Pseudomonas aeruginosa LecA

doi.org/10.1002/anie...

Mapping the brain to improve lives A collaborative effort between UW and the Allen Institute is creating a first-of-its-kind brain atlas, paving the way for breakthroughs in brain health.

Every brain tells a story. What will we learn when we listen?

Together with @uwmedicine.bsky.social, we're embarking on an ambitious mission - building a functional, cellular map of the human brain.
https://alleninstitute.org/news/mapping-the-brain-to-improve-lives/

Synergistic effects of co-pathologies promote neuroinflammation, protein pathology load, and neurodegeneration.

🧠 CRN Team Kordower developed a co-pathology mouse model combining tau, amyloid-β, & α-synuclein. They show co-pathologies synergistically trigger an amplified neuroimmune response, with expanded CD4+/CD8+ T cells & increased CD68+ microglia.

🔗 Check out the full #preprint: https://bit.ly/4jAHzzl

ggdiceplot 1.0.1 is out now!
From today, {diceplot} is deprecated and treated as the legacy implementation, all new development and features will go into {ggdiceplot}.
Repo: github.com/maflot/ggdic...
Docs: dice-and-domino-plot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Paper: tinyurl.com/ggdiceplot
#rstats #ggplot2

For anybody working on thermal imaging of faces: The thermal-face-alignment TFAN package has just dropped on pip.
github.com/openscivisio...

#computer-vision #thermal-imaging #thermal-recognition #thermal-landmarks #face-alignment

Copula modeling of gene coexpression in single-cell RNA sequencing data https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.04.692380v1

How does a bacterial small RNA evolve new functions?

Our new study reveals the stepwise evolutionary journey of UhpU, a 3′UTR-derived sRNA in E. coli and relatives. It evolved from a metabolically-focused regulator to one with expanded targets and biogenesis manner.

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

ggdiceplot 1.0.1 is out now!
From today, {diceplot} is deprecated and treated as the legacy implementation, all new development and features will go into {ggdiceplot}.
Repo: github.com/maflot/ggdic...
Docs: dice-and-domino-plot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Paper: tinyurl.com/ggdiceplot
#rstats #ggplot2

This is figure 2, which shows simulated effects of satellite trails in Hubble, SPHEREx, Xuntian and ARRAKIHS.

Approximately 96% of the images from some space observatories in low Earth orbit could be tainted over the next decade due to light contamination from satellites, according to an analysis in Nature. go.nature.com/3Y7eTUA 🔭 🧪

Bluesky butterfly #Academicsky #Altmetrics #HigherEd #MedSky #IMSky #Science

Altmetric logo

THREAD

One Year of tracking research communication on @bsky.app

This time last year we officially added the Bluesky social platform to the places where we track research communication and article sharing.

Here are some of the most viral articles that gained traction in the last 12 months.
1/14

Infographic with AI slop published in Nature Scientific Reports

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

Cleanifier: Contamination removal from microbial sequences using spaced seeds of a human pangenome index AbstractMotivation. The first step when working with DNA data of human-derived microbiomes is to remove human contamination for two reasons. First, many co

We are excited that our paper "Cleanifier: Contamination removal from microbial sequences using spaced seeds of a human pangenome index" is now published at Bioinformatics (doi.org/10.1093/bioi...).

You can find it at gitlab (gitlab.com/rahmannlab/c...) or install it via PyPI or Bioconda.

PBMCpedia: a harmonized PBMC scRNA-seq database with unified mapping and enhanced celltype annotation Abstract. Single-cell transcriptomic studies of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) offer valuable insights into immune states across diverse biolog

Just out:

PBMCpedia: a harmonized PBMC scRNA-seq database with unified mapping and enhanced celltype annotation

doi.org/10.1093/nar/...

#openscience #scRNAseq

💥 Fewer than 3,000 scientists worldwide are working on antibiotic discovery, and progress is slowing.

We need bold action to develop new antibiotics that are both innovative and accessible to everyone, everywhere.

That’s what drives GARDP’s DER programme.

This is BIG.

#WAAW2025 #AMR #ThisIsBig

Location: Join Zoom Meeting https://tu-dresden.zoom-x.de/j/67863904836?pwd=mVqoyB6DlxAbFAtN7kx0Ka62KHFmUJ.1 Meeting ID: 678 6390 4836 Passcode: BioV!s2025 Cancer care is increasingly guided by precision data, such as patients metabolomic, genetic, transcriptomic, or immune status. This poses a challenge for clinicians to communicate treatment decisions. To bridge this gap we therefore developed, evaluated, and adopted visual treatment timelines for cancer patient education. Data visualizations help humans to understand data and are especially effective to communicate risks, uncertainties, or large data and have proven to be a suitable help in cancer communication. Recordings of previous talks are available: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5kIQRQ6TU8Ifu_5h2iipUmIKCqhs50zx&si=Smchvhyu6_cX6kjZ

⏰ tomorrow, Nov 18, 5pm Berlin/4pm London
“Data Vis for Cancer Patient Education“ - a #DataVis #BioVis talk

Link & Abstract: alt-text and also:
biovis.net/2025/meetup/ (right under picture)

The Hektoria Glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula retreated by at least 8 km in two months, a rate nearly 10 times faster than previously measured for a grounded glacier, according to a study in Nature Geoscience. go.nature.com/4nETBYJ ⚒️ 🧪

Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing - Research Professional News Buckling of commercial models alongside maturing of community-led efforts promises major shifts, says Caroline Edwards

Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing

#AcademicPublishing #WCRI2026 #WCRI

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...

piRNA-directed DNA methylation may not be a mammalian invention, but can already be found in the germline of axolotl salamanders
Donal O’Carroll and coworkers
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections ExxonMobil’s own climate models showed that fossil fuel use would cause climate warming.

Here is our Exxon study in Science, with @naomioreskes.bsky.social and @geoffreysupran.bsky.social !
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Now also online ggdiceplot:
github.com/maflot/ggdic...

#datavis #openscience