Kevin Merchant

Pint of Science Munich Explore Pint of Science Deutschland events in Munich

Grab a pint & dive into science! 🍻

Pint of Science is back in Munich:
🗓️ May 19–21, 2025
🕢 19:30–22:00

#HelmholtzMunich researchers share big ideas – from AI to antibodies.

🎟️ Info & tickets: t1p.de/lvpuv

#pint25 #pint25de

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 96: Nothing you write is ever wasted. It’s all part of your training. That’s why you should never feel bad about the work you cut, or the hours you spend on work that stays unpublished. Every part of the process makes you a stronger writer.

How it started // how it's going

The CDC Has Been Gutted Thousands of CDC employees who worked on things like preventing HIV and lead poisoning have been told they were subject to a reduction in force. Experts say people will die.

The CDC has been gutted

www.wired.com/story/cdc-gu...

New blood test identifies hard-to-detect pancreatic cancer with 85% accuracy A new blood test could help doctors detect pancreatic cancer earlier, potentially improving survival rates for one of the deadliest cancers.

Goosebump producing news this week out of Oregon Health and Science University in the diagnosis of pancreatic CA.
They developed a groundbreaking blood test, called PAC-MANN. This new test can find pancreatic cancer in just 45 minutes, even in its earliest stages.

American Thoracic Society | Advocacy The American Thoracic Society is the world's leading medical society dedicated to accelerating the advancement of global respiratory health through…

Today, President Trump ordered the firing of federal employees who are still in their probation period. "The firing of federal employees will have immediate and adverse health consequences for the American public," said ATS President Irina Petrache, MD, ATSF. Read more: shorturl.at/nNegx

Here's a script: "“Hello, my name is [XX], and I live on [XX]. I am a [biomedical researcher at the State University], where I study [briefly describe your research]. This research is funded by the [NIH] and is crucial because [in one sentence explain why your research is important to the public].

Image with text that reads: It's happening now: I know it's totally overwhelming but here are just a handful of things happening in US Science & public health RIGHT NOW. I need you to know, so you can realise how you are being defrauded from a healthy, disease free future, with thriving science. I need you to know, so you can tell others.

Huge thanks to my sister for helping put these together.

If you want me to believe a Nazi salute was just an “enthusiastic” gesture from a “genius” who, btw, vocally supports Germany’s neo-Nazis, go sell your bridge somewhere else. I’m not buying it.

Science publishing is about to suck even more

2 people told me today I've been using a lot of LinkedIn like wdym😳
All I do is like important papers or posts or send/accept connections
Haven't even posted or reposted anything

Would be great if LinkedIn won't tell my connections every single thing I Like because I'm trying to train my algorithm to show me my domain's papers😭
Bluesky just isn't as "fun" (or receptive) as Twitter was but LinkedIn seems to come closest to peak academic Twitter for staying up to date with lit

“Collectively, we have a longer term (though not too much longer) decision to make. That decision is: Are we going to do climate change together, or separately?”

A cartoon depicts a group of children sitting around a campfire, listening to a storyteller. The background shows a desolate landscape. The text quotes the storyteller, humorously commenting on environmental destruction and the financial success of carbon offset developers.

There’s an interesting story to be written about CO₂ removal and money but it’s not this one.

1. I feel like this is such obvious advice that it gets taken for granted & consequently no one says this to young scientists but READ PAPERS, read all the papers. As you move up in your career you will have less & less time to do this. Read everything that appeals to you not just in your field

Decivilization May Already Be Under Way The brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshe...

The warning about "decivilization" didn't come after any one of a number of school shootings. It didn't come after January 6. It was after a health insurance company CEO's shooting wasn't received with national mourning:

www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Morphological map of under- and over-expression of genes in human cells Cell Painting images offer valuable insights into the state of a cell and enable many biological applications, but publicly available arrayed datasets only include hundreds of genes perturbed. The JUM...

Now on biorxiv! The JUMP-Cell Painting Consortium’s paper:

“Morphological map of under- and over-expression of genes in human cells”

This is the genetic perturbation portion of the JUMP’s dataset; our chemical perturbation paper will come in a few months
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

There's a new #RDKit blog post introducing some new functionality that I'm really excited about: doing efficient substructure and similarity searches in very large chemical libraries:
greglandrum.github.io/rdkit-blog/p...
#ChemSky

There's no bookmark here so I guess I'll just RT so that I can find it again🤔

Good news everyone! A new version of graph-tool is just out! @graph-tool.skewed.de

graph-tool.skewed.de

Graph-tool is a comprehensive and efficient Python library to work with networks, including structural, dynamical, and statistical algorithms, as well as visualization. 1/N

#networkscience

Going to uninstall Twitter and see if my brain starts recovering from the extreme conditions it has been subjected to since post-Musk era😳