Nick Stroustrup

‘Congress has your back’: US senators tell scientists they want to protect NIH budget Senate budget bill includes small increase for the health-research agency — but faces a long road before being signed into law.

‘Congress has your back’: US senators tell scientists they want to protect NIH budget
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

And here I was thinking the way to solve hunger was food.

New blog article on Statistical Thinking: confidence limits for bootstrap overfitting-corrected predictive performance measures for regression models, useful for strong internal validations including confidence bands for debiased calibration curves: fharrell.com/post/bootcal #statistics #StatsSky

🚨🚨🚨

Please RT!

We're looking for a postdoc to join an exciting joint project between our lab @upf.edu & @crg.eu (Barcelona) and the Sander lab @mdc-berlin.bsky.social (Berlin) investigating how alternative splicing and microexons influences the maturation of pancreatic islets.

Deadline: 30/09/25👇

scatter plot comparing average age of lawmakers vs. median age of population across a bunch of contemporary democracies, showing that the United States is a real outlier, with lawmakers averaging almost 60 years old vs. a median age of the population of just 38. South Korea and Japan come closest with average lawmaker ages around 55, but their populations are older, and most countries on the chart cluster in the 40s.

Lots packed into @adambonica.bsky.social's new On Data and Democracy post, but I haven't seen this chart getting the attention I think it deserves. US lawmakers are remarkably old, and the gap here between population age and lawmaker age is exceptional.
data4democracy.substack.com/p/on-data-an...

The proteostatic landscape of healthy human oocytes
Elvan Böke and colleagues @bokelab.bsky.social find that mature human oocytes show reduced activity of lysosomes, proteasomes and mitochondria, highlighting reproductive differences between humans and mouse
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

People say “look we automated science” then show you a machine that does a 30-year-old method efficiently

That’s cool! But to me, the heart of science is the 0-to-1 moment. You automated the 100-to-1000 stage

YouTube video by ARDD Nicholas Edward Stroustrup at ARDD2024: Systematic mapping of organism ... population asynchrony

My group's paper about lifespan variability is a long read,
www.cell.com/cell/abstrac..., but now you can learn about our work in a more accessible way, from a talk I gave at ARDD 2024 available on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lfw...

What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business? The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP). Here's why that threatens the future of human cognition—and how to save ourselves.

After the latest round of grading papers, I wrote about AI, ChatGPT, the death of the student essay, and what it means for the future of human cognition.

A citadel of herons Thirty years ago, a family of herons set up home at Barcelona Zoo; today more than 125 pairs nest there

Also: www.barcelona-metropolitan.com/in-the-city/...

come visit us in Barcelona! Here you can get bombed by birds and bitten by bugs all you like may-october. We even have a charismatic invasive parrot species duking it out with the pigeons in the streets.

though who knows knows what mischief can be done using LLMs trained on scientific rebuttals...

This is such a great development. So much work is put into these referee reports and everyone--trainees, team leaders, journalists--has something to learn from them.

Reply to: Reply to: False positives in the study of memory-related gene expression In the Nature paper “Spatial transcriptomics reveal neuron–astrocyte synergy in long-term memory” published on March 14th, 2024, authors Sun et al. claimed to identify cell-type specifi…

I wrote a review of a recent paper on false discovery and multiple testing correction. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2025/06/16/r...

Colossal scientist now admits they haven’t really made dire wolves Despite a huge media fanfare in which Colossal Biosciences claimed to have resurrected the extinct dire wolf, the company's chief scientist now concedes that the animals are merely modified grey wolve...

www.newscientist.com/article/2481...

Microscopic image of C. elegans, with fluorescent green labeling certain proteins

The 2025 Embryology course is underway at the MBL! As the students dive in, enjoy this throwback from the 2021 course by Rebecca M. Varney.

These male C. elegans spicules were imaged on a Zeiss Micro 900 with laminin proteins labeled with green fluorescent protein. #sciencestartshere

A lot of people know about the Germans in the space program, but the more relevant engineer might be Qian Xuesen, the MIT/CalTech aerospace professor who co-founded JPL and was sent to recruit the Germans.

We deported him the 1950s. He became the leader of China’s missile program.

Don't forget that they have already started their own journal, edited by some of the the wrongest people on earth with EiC @andrewnoymer.bsky.social. Perhaps they will insist on NIH scientists publishing there (and similar)?

publichealth.realclearjournals.org/about-us/edi...

www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST3...

They say it can’t be done, but here we are, California is generated 106% of California’s entire state electricity demand from renewables.

California has a population bigger that 154 other countries around the world. It’s the 4th largest economy, in the world.

Let that sink in.
#energysky #greensky

NIH to prioritize human-based research technologies New initiative aims to reduce use of animals in NIH-funded research.

Another serious contender for this year's bad idea olympics: www.nih.gov/news-events/.... Animal models provide the ground truth for any high-tech approach for studying disease and for most of translational medicine. Without animals, we'll quickly lose contact with reality.

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations!

These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs.

Save and share the post!

What is the noise and what is the signal?

Another way to read these numbers is that the ERC is massively under-funded. The EU could double the ERC budget three times, and even if the average return on grants halved each time you expanded, you'd still be making a profit.

Happily, the lab's -80C strain collection survived on emergency power.

During yesterday's penninsular blackout, my daughter got a lot of practice with the phrase "No funciona". La luz? No functiona! El horno? No functiona! El metro? No functiona!

Anyone old enough to remember the human genome project press releases circa 1995 or so?

INCREDIBLE opinion by Wilkinson refusing to stay Judge Xinis's orders in the Abrego Garcia case, condemning DOJ's arguments as "shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear."
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Drawing the line is easy. It's knowing which end to put the arrow that earns you the six figure salary.