Nick Stroustrup's Avatar

Nick Stroustrup

@nstroustrup.bsky.social

A British/American group leader at @crg.eu . We study the biology of aging using molecular genetics, engineering, systems biology, and probabilistic machine learning. Lab page: http://lifespanmachine.crg.eu

1,189 Followers  |  269 Following  |  69 Posts  |  Joined: 01.09.2023  |  2.0185

Latest posts by nstroustrup.bsky.social on Bluesky

Video thumbnail

moonbow last night over our neighborhood

05.10.2025 08:00 — 👍 5    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Seleccionados 12 proyectos de investigación acerca de cuestiones centrales en tres grandes áreas de conocimiento, en el marco del Programa Fundamentos Fundación BBVA - Fundación BBVA FÍSICA, QUÍMICA Proyectos seleccionados: “Reticular enzyme-like catalysis” (RETICAT) Investigadores principales: Miquel Costas Salgueiro (Universitat de Girona) y Daniel Maspoch Comamala (Institut Cat...

www.fbbva.es/noticias/adj...

02.10.2025 10:57 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Thrilled to hear that our BBVA fundamentos grant was funded. Thanks to @bbvaenespana.bsky.social for their support of new causal methods in aging. With only 4 of these awarded each year in the life sciences, a special congrats to our post-doc Jeremy Vicencio for teaming up to make it happen!

02.10.2025 10:56 — 👍 10    🔁 1    💬 2    📌 0

Not every day...and not today either as this is not a viable egg.

30.09.2025 19:29 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

There's some super interesting nemography going on these days!

25.09.2025 11:35 — 👍 3    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0
Cover of "Fifty Shades of 'Jay'" with emails from Jeremy M. Berg to NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya.

Cover of "Fifty Shades of 'Jay'" with emails from Jeremy M. Berg to NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya.

All my emails to Director Bhattacharya now available...

jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g...

22.09.2025 17:08 — 👍 187    🔁 54    💬 12    📌 11

OH NO!
"The White House issued a proclamation today, Sept. 19, 2025, around 4:36 PM PDT imposing a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa holder who enters the U.S. after Sept. 21, 2025, 12:01 AM EDT. In CA, this will take effect tomorrow, Sept. 20, 2025, at 9:01 PM PDT." Emergency notice at Stanford.

20.09.2025 03:49 — 👍 6    🔁 6    💬 1    📌 1

Do we know whether LLMs do a better job impersonating a statistician or a dean?

16.09.2025 10:41 — 👍 22    🔁 6    💬 0    📌 2

Ups!

09.09.2025 19:31 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
Preview
Net rate of lateral gene transfer in marine prokaryoplankton Abstract. Lateral gene transfer is a major evolutionary process in Bacteria and Archaea. Despite its importance, lateral gene transfer quantification in na

Extraordinary paper. I LOVE this sentence:

“This translates to a net lateral gene transfer rate of ~250 genes L−1 seawater day−1 and involves both “flexible” and “core” genes. “

Must read in detail, but these numbers are amazing. academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

07.09.2025 16:33 — 👍 13    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 1
Preview
¿Será posible vivir 150 años como dicen Putin y Xi Jinping? “Con los desarrollos de la biotecnología, se pueden trasplantar continuamente órganos humanos y las personas pueden vivir más y más jóvenes, e incluso alcanzar la

Será posible vivir 150 años como dicen Putin y Xi Jinping?

www.lavanguardia.com/ciencia/2025...

07.09.2025 07:39 — 👍 5    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0

If you think AI is cool, wait until you learn about regression analysis

12.08.2025 11:44 — 👍 119    🔁 20    💬 5    📌 4
Video thumbnail

DOUBLE PELICAN DIVE AFTER SUNSET!!!! wooooo! What a way to end the week!

time to sleep and prepare for the horrors and joys of the next one

🪶

10.08.2025 05:30 — 👍 2437    🔁 302    💬 85    📌 31
Preview
Notes from Beethoven’s genome Wesseldijk et al. compare the genomic information collected from Ludwig van Beethoven with population-based datasets used to quantify musical achievement.

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

07.08.2025 11:09 — 👍 180    🔁 88    💬 7    📌 10
Preview
‘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...

01.08.2025 14:51 — 👍 79    🔁 29    💬 3    📌 2
Post image

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

01.08.2025 07:38 — 👍 22762    🔁 4327    💬 2032    📌 516

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

24.07.2025 19:08 — 👍 27    🔁 9    💬 3    📌 0

🚨🚨🚨

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👇

23.07.2025 14:27 — 👍 48    🔁 65    💬 1    📌 3
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.

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...

20.07.2025 17:14 — 👍 659    🔁 288    💬 21    📌 39
Post image

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....

16.07.2025 11:03 — 👍 10    🔁 2    💬 2    📌 0

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

13.07.2025 15:51 — 👍 11    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 1
Nicholas Edward Stroustrup at ARDD2024: Systematic mapping of organism ... population asynchrony
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...

08.07.2025 08:54 — 👍 5    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0
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.

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-...

07.07.2025 14:28 — 👍 4289    🔁 913    💬 50    📌 151
Preview
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.

19.06.2025 10:44 — 👍 909    🔁 362    💬 72    📌 142
Preview
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/...

21.06.2025 21:35 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

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.

21.06.2025 21:34 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 2    📌 0

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

17.06.2025 08:05 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

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.

17.06.2025 07:57 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0
Preview
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...

16.06.2025 21:31 — 👍 145    🔁 40    💬 7    📌 7

@nstroustrup is following 19 prominent accounts