Melvin Williams

This illustration shows consecutive stages during operation of a molecular catenating machine.

This week in Science, researchers report an artificial molecular motor that can twist a molecular thread to form a mechanically interlocked molecule. The approach creates opportunities to fabricate mechanically interlocked molecules with precise structural control.

Learn more: scim.ag/40FboGP

Spider Builds Fake Spider Decoy The new spider, thought to be a member of the genus Cyclosa, might build these decoys as part of a defense mechanism to confuse or distract predators

“Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, a spider is at work building an elaborate, fake decoy of itself. In its web, it busily goes to working crafting its doppelgänger out of leaves, debris and dead prey insects…”

#scicomm
#sensoryecology
#falsesignal

www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/s...
🧪 🕷️

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com!

We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments

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

This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

A method for delivery of exogenous nucleic acids during the non-ovipositional phase in honeybees - Apidologie Honeybees are essential global pollinators and key model organisms for studying insect social behavior. Genetic manipulation is crucial for understanding honeybee biology, but current methods rely on ...

Development of ReMOT reagents for honeybee!

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

OEB is pleased to welcome our new Co-Chairs Professors Ben de Bivort and Mansi Srivastava! @debivort.bsky.social

Shifts in bee diet breadths are associated with gene gains and losses and positive selection across olfactory receptors Abstract. Bees are palynivorous insects that vary widely in the number of plant families from which they collect pollen. Their evolutionary history has bee

🧬 Shift between specialized & generalized diets in #bees is associated with evolutionary changes in their sensory genes. Generalists lose odorant receptors (ORs) and gain gustatory receptors (GRs), while specialists diversify existing genes 🌸🐝 #genomics #pollinators
academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Let’s go tide pooling!

New Cell Structures Discovered in Squid Skin Lead to Bioengineering of Tunable, Multispectral Materials | Marine Biological Laboratory An exciting study in Science this week extends what we thought we knew about structural color in nature — from the constant, brilliant blue of Morpho butterfly wings to the ultrafast, dynamic camoufla...

By examining squid skin cells three-dimensionally, researchers, including MBL's Roger Hanlon, have unveiled the nanostructures that allow these animals to dynamically change their appearance from transparent to a dazzling array of colored states.

Learn more! www.mbl.edu/news/new-cel...

Our new paper is now out in @jexpbiol.bsky.social!!! We had all sorts of fun generating LED stimuli for mosquitos to investigate their visual preferences in the presence of different odors. The paper is open access and available here: journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

A retrospective analysis of 400 publications reveals patterns of irreproducibility across an entire life sciences research field The ReproSci project retrospectively analyzed the reproducibility of 1006 claims from 400 papers published between 1959 and 2011 in the field of Drosophila immunity. This project attempts to provide a...

Reporducibility in fly immunity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... great paper. To me the fact that people who move between teams do better research is quite interesting. Collaboration imho is key to good science.

Ugh, not another “de-extinction”!
“Changing a living species by editing a few genes to get something that looks like the extinct creature is not the same thing as re-creating the extinct creature.”
whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/07/09/n...

Is there a “diabetes epidemic” among children in the US?

No.

0.35% percent of people under the age of 20 have diabetes.

86.6% of those are type 1 diabetics, which is autoimmune.

0.046% of people under the age of 20 have type 2 diabetes in the US.

RFK Jr & MAHA love to lie about basic facts.

Insane that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of eukaryotic diversity most likely…

BEHOLD! One of Earth's greatest lineages of life: the lil wiggle arm guys, Meteora.

These single-celled critters, originally found in deep-sea sediments, are SO DIFFERENT from other lifeforms on Earth that they're likely in their own kingdom (as in, the Animal Kingdom, the Plant Kingdom etc). 🧪🌿

Kissing Bugs Are Creeping Into Florida Homes—and They're Carrying a Dangerous Parasite A third of kissing bugs collected across the state carried Trypanosoma cruzi, new research finds.

Kissing Bugs Are Creeping Into Florida Homes—and They’re Carrying a Dangerous Parasite

A third of kissing bugs collected across the state carried Trypanosoma cruzi, new research finds.

gizmodo.com/kissing-bugs...

A photo of a female yellow fever mosquito. Photo credit: Adam J. Blake.

We all have our favourite colours, but Adam Blake & Jeff Riffell have discovered that mosquitos can change their favourite colour, preferring to land on green when they smell flowers or dirty pond water, but love every colour when they smell dirty socks

journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Photo of Mansi Srivastava

Mansi Srivastava is a Guest Editor for our special issue on lifelong development #LifelongDevSI. In this interview, Mansi talks about the importance of studying development across the lifetime of an organism and how this relates to her own research:
doi.org/10.1242/dev....

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

A 🧵 1/n

Cool idea that stems from integrating learnings from animal behaviorists with leading edge vaccine technology 👏

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Thank you so much!!😁

Absolutely thrilled to share that I’ve officially started as an OEB PhD student in the Extavour lab at Harvard!! Super excited for this journey and to learn and grow as a scientist🧑🏽‍🔬🪰🦗

The problem is that the more I understand, the less it makes sense. Something is not right

It's out!! Some more wizardry from @henriqueslab.bsky.social @christlet.bsky.social labs! Try it, you will love it.
Grateful to have been involved in it's awesome project

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 long-range spatial correlation, is...

Morphogenesis alert! A unifying physical principle links gastrulation in frogs, fish and flies! Stoked to be part of this new paper with Xin Li in Dave Thirumalai's lab and Robert Huebner in my group and a co-lab with @peiferlabunc.bsky.social and Margot Williams.
1/n

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

Machine learning reveals genes impacting oxidative stress resistance across yeasts - Nature Communications Yeasts are exposed to oxidative stress during routine metabolism, bioproduction, and interactions with other organisms. Here, the authors use a machine learning classifier to identify genes that are p...

Very happy to share our new paper on how machine learning predicts gene family expansions which contribute to oxidative stress resistance across diverse yeast species:

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

Daniel J.C. Kronauer Interview with Daniel Kronauer, who studies the evolution and function of insect societies at Rockefeller University.

Check out our latest issue where we interview @danielkronauer.bsky.social, who studies the evolution and function of insect societies at Rockefeller University. www.cell.com/current-biol...

How to spy on condensates - Nature Methods Scientists track how these membraneless biomolecular foci self-organize for their cellular tasks.

How to spy on condensates: technology feature in
@natmethods.nature.com
Our views on the topic, by Hyman,Rosen,Brangwynne, Sabari, Kappel,Xu & myself, presented here
@hymanlab.bsky.social @brangwynnelab.bsky.social @bsabari.bsky.social @kallikappel.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do you know what happens if you squeeze a #cell?

If the #confinement is high, the nucleus (green) will be super tense & the compressed cells will react like this👇🏽changing their #cytoskeleton (magenta)

Full: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#scicomm #microscopy #sciencesky @focalplane.bsky.social 🧪🔬

🧪 Winner of the 2018 Nikon Small World in Motion : 16 hours of Zebrafish embryo growing its sensory nervous system

🔬 Dr. Elizabeth M. Haynes & Jiaye "Henry" He - University of Winsconsin