Milo Imbeni

iconic shot of Lucas Pinheiro Braathen on the podium

no, it simply isnt.
People are talking about capital using gAI as an excuse to conduct mass lay-offs, about students losing learning because theyre being lied to about gAI in education, about the mass theft of the work of artists and authors to train LLMs, about CSAM and nonconsensual sexual images.

How did life arise from simple chemical building blocks?

New #LMBResearch led by @edogia.bsky.social in @philholliger.bsky.social group has identified a small self-replicating ribozyme that could be the answer.

Read more: mrclmb.ac.uk/news-events/...

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

Ooooh. Cool new paper on origins of life. A simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.

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

elodieunderglass I can confirm that most birds have a detectable amount of wiring behind the eyes - blinking lights and buttons and sliders and frizzy things that spark and chirp and beep. They also have a lot of soul that can communicate with ours because the programming is fairly compatible. Vultures are clever and curious, swans are clear and lawful, chickens have a lot of personality, caged parrots are dissociated and disinherited and frankly worrying, falconry-trained birds of prey are tremendously businesslike. And owls are absolutely lovely beasts with their own irreplaceable validity. but they are basically stuffed with polyester fiberfill. They have one button, like a child’s toy dinosaur that opens and closes its mouth when you press the back of its head. And it isn’t even a sophisticated electronic button it’s just a lever that rocks back and forth to make the claws open and close. I think they may have actually evolved independently from sponges. Their skulls simply exist to create holes that funnel sound and light, and as a place to hang a giant hinged beak. An owl is just an empty tube like a windchime that the wind whistles through, and you can drop meat down it. They use the meat to generate feathers, and then emit the bones in pressed little packages like those machines that flatten a penny and stamp it with the logo of a theme park. I think that’s the gist of it - most birds are electronics of varying levels of sophistication, but owls are just a system of levers and pulleys. No elevator music in those skulls, just the wind echoing through empty caverns of slightly irritating design. Absolutely fantastic.

finally found this tumblr post expounding on how stupid owls are piraticoctopus.tumblr.com/post/6741867...

🔬 In this new Open Access paper, the authors propose a new method that does not require a lot of computing power and works even for small datasets that are more typically seen in life sciences. To maintain competitive performance with respect to state-of-the-art methods, their denoising...

This looks phenomenal. I want to read every paper.

I have yet to see any evidence that there is a market for AI-generated books outside of people being tricked into thinking they are not AI-generated books. AKA, it is a project of scamming and deceiving people, and really should be treated as fraud

Inside the incredible, infuriating quest to explain consciousness Will brain science deliver answers about consciousness or hit another wall?

Prediction: In 10 years, “hardest problem” articles like this will shift from the challenge of ”C and perception“ to “C and emotions/mood“. The first is fascinating. The second is required to understand psychiatric functions & conditions.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...

Deploy Insect Farming for Food and Feed This solution involves industrially farming insects, such as crickets, mealworms, and black soldier fly larvae, to produce protein for human consumption, livestock feed, or pet food that is less resou...

Many people think that eating insects could be a good solution to climate change.

Nope. Not really.

Read more here, and see why Project Drawdown says this is "Not Recommended" as a climate solution.

drawdown.org/explorer/dep...

Expansion Microscopy Has Transformed How We See the Cellular World | Quanta Magazine How physically magnifying objects using a key ingredient in diapers has opened an unprecedented view of the microbial world.

Expansion microscopy may be the hi-res hero that many biologists have been craving.

"Nested spatiotemporal theta–gamma waves organize hierarchical processing across the mouse visual cortex" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

traveling waves-related, supershiny looking figures, apparently made in Julia: github.com/brendanjohnh... makes me want to learn it 🙂

#VisualizationInspo

Draghi: “L’Europa diventi una vera federazione se vuole avere potere” Il discorso dell’ex premier e presidente Bce a Lovanio: ”Nel nuovo ordine mondiale l’Europa rischia di diventare subordinata, divisa e deindustrializzata allo …

Draghi: “L’Europa diventi una vera federazione se vuole avere potere”

First dance

Book with paper roses

Laughing during a toast

You nerds will appreciate this.

I got married on Saturday! It was wonderful.

It was at a rare and historic book library, and we leaned into the theme.

Table centerpieces were books checked out of our library based on our interests, themed to that tables’ guests.

And Eileen made paper roses.

The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Could Flood the Earth. Can a 50-Mile Wall Stop It? Scientists have long opposed polar geoengineering. Some now believe it will be necessary.

There is a part of me that’s kinda like, yes queen go off

Master Projects DANGELOLAB

We have several Master’s thesis projects available in the D’Angelo lab, spanning different areas of lipid biology/biochemistry. If you know someone who might be interested, we’d really appreciate you sharing this. #lipidtime
www.epfl.ch/labs/dangelo...

… due to the fact that they cause faulty proteins to be made, but actually most of the dysfunction seems to occur in regulation.) So gene regulation is central to the way we work. But it is immensely complicated. /11

Norway’s oil fund yielded NOK 2362 billions in 2025, enough to DOUBLE the current budget of Norwegian Research Council for the next 214 years. 🤷‍♂️
www.nbim.no/no/nyheter-o...

🧪 We are excited to share this novel open access paper on Phasor Mixing Coefficient to analyze colocalization, developed by folks @i2janelia.bsky.social and @aicjanelia.bsky.social. This is also the first technical paper jointly published with our sister imaging center @malacridalab.bsky.social!

We have two funded postdoctoral positions available. Topics encompass:

-Next gen light-sheet fluorescence microscopy instrumentation

-Structured illumination microscopy and other approaches to extend the resolution limit.

-Nonlinear microscopy combined with adaptive optics / phase conjugation

One of the perks of living in San Francisco is free visits to the Photonics West trade show. Sharing my notes for those missing out: nicost.github.io/microscope-t...

The Alzheimer’s therapeutic Lecanemab attenuates Aβ pathology by inducing an amyloid-clearing program in microglia - Nature Neuroscience Lecanemab, a leading therapy for Alzheimer’s disease, induces an Fc-mediated transcriptional program in human microglia, linked to osteopontin and enhanced plaque phagocytosis, suggesting alternative ...

Beautiful work once again with FIRE mice. Reprogramming microglia for the win!

9. We’ve become so used to all this that we hardly notice it. But isn’t it extraordinary? Almost everyone wants one thing, and almost everyone who represents us – whether in politics or the media – wants the opposite. Yet we tell ourselves we live in a democracy.

7. Immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, women, transgender people, disabled people, students, protesters: anyone and everyone must be blamed for our dysfunctions, except those causing them. Ever more extreme “culture wars” (a euphemism for divide-and-rule) must be waged.

10/ Politicians igored them because warnings alone do not compel action in the face of organised vested interests.

Fossil capital.
Extractive industries.
Short-term political incentives.
Institutional inertia.

These were always the real obstacles, not a lack of credibility.

Cytoarchitecture: easy to get, mostly solved, sometimes corresponds to function, often doesn't.

Connectivity: difficult to get, mostly still not known, causally determines function.

Quantitative Imaging: From Acquisition to Analysis Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses -- a private, non-profit institution with research programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, bioinformatics.

Re-upping: if you want to learn microscopy and image analysis - REALLY learn them, in an intense and hands on way - this is a really great place to do it. Applications close Jan 30

meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...

🔬🚨New preprint alert! 🚨🔬

We developed quantitative expansion microscopy (qExM) - a method to accurately count proteins in situ by combining expansion microscopy's improved labeling with statistical estimators borrowed from ecology

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#SuperResolution #CellBiology

That sounds great, can't wait to try it!

GitHub - TheDeanLab/navigate: navigate - open source light-sheet microscope controls navigate - open source light-sheet microscope controls - TheDeanLab/navigate

Navigate can now run entirely with ASI's Tiger Controller, eliminating the NI data acquisition board altogether, simplifying the optoelectronics, and providing deterministic frame-to-frame operation. Documentation coming soon... github.com/TheDeanLab/n...