klbr

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your CV? Genomicist: Once you include an outgroup, you'll see that it's actually an insertion in the career of other candidates

AI biorisk is real, negligibly affected by "pacing," but not existential—we need tangible defenses, not apocalyptic doomerism or head-in-the-sand minimizing. warontherocks.com/how-to-defen...

Kyber-crystal-focused carbonite etching for midochlorian morphological characterization

The hyperbole of "AI could never make a dangerous virus because it doesn't address a bottleneck" confounds me. AI systems are useful TODAY for modifying the properties of viruses in ways that are superior to what we could do ten years ago.

Looking for a postdoc to use protein structure to change the way we calculate evolutionary relationships so we can unlock the secrets of early life on earth. This is an urgent & impactful computational biology project. jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/280...

cloak and dagger navier stokes cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...

When Prof. Yonath so generously shared a meal with us young students, an administrator-type asked if she'd participate in a project about being discriminated against. "I don't want to talk to young people about that," she replied, "I think they need to hear about the joy of doing science first."

Is there something special about the field of radiology that causes academics in that field to preferentially be drawn to publishing dumbass op-eds about society?

Turned in my dosimeter today. End of an era!

I have never seen a double standing ovation at a scientific meeting before but it was a beautiful moment to see the warm reception of Ralph Baric and of his recent work on merbecoviruses, particularly at a time when he is being sorely persecuted despite his record of service to the country.

Maggie Cheung. I would probably learn a couple new languages as a fringe benefit

"Scientific systems rarely collapse through a single dramatic event. They decline incrementally: one technician dismissed, one laboratory left unrepaired, one instrument taken out of service, one young scientist deciding to build a career elsewhere." physicsworld.com/a/letter-fro... ⚛️🧪

Galloway is such an idiot blowhard. I'm sure he'll find some way to make UC worse

this is pretty funny but also reminds me of the time my 7th grade math teacher did not know what factorials were and told me "you can't just make up your own operation even if you decide that the exclamation point is a symbol for it"

Today is the 250th anniversary of Boston’s mass inoculation against smallpox on July 3, 1776. The city was effectively closed to commerce from July through September 1776. The mass immunization effort was cheered as evidence of true independence. Here's how I described it in my book:

The only logical conclusion is that ancient hominids reproduced via parthenogenesis

My "Human T-lymphotrophic Virus" hat is dying, so I need a new virus hat. Anyone got a lead? Old conference swag, some indie maker, etc?

As a biologist, (ergo a layman w/r/t national intelligence), I've found it surprising how, with each declassification, we see how little was added by SIGINT. I assumed we'd been monitoring gene synth and oligo sequences in China since, like, 2006. But when you're outside everything looks easy!

*Preprint Alert*: How do we measure resolution when biomolecules won't sit still? 🔬 Estimating it for a static cryo-EM reconstruction is standard. But what about a conformational ensemble? arxiv.org/abs/2606.14449 with the amazing henryhmattingly.bsky.social and @lukeevanshandle.bsky.social #cryoEM

Banning American scholars from writing articles or collaborating with counterparts in other countries is such a terminally idiotic form of shooting ourselves in the foot in terms of national competitiveness that it makes no sense to make this a term of receiving R&D grant support.

Just saw the news that HHS has hounded coronavirus expert Ralph Baric into retirement. Baric is an accidental hero who was doing blue-sky research on animal coronaviruses before SARS thrust him into the role of protecting us from pandemics. Without his work, SARS-CoV-2 would have been far worse.

This is interesting...our experience is we get devitrification under similar thermal annealing cycles (although we used buffered protein solutions instead of whole cells, so one possible difference is the intrinsic cryoprotectant ability of cells)

I suspect most cryo-EM experts leave unsaid that we all think filter paper blot-based plunge freezing will be obsolete in 10 years but we have no idea what technique will obsolete it.

the posting is live jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/270...

We had a cure for hemophilia A, until today. This feels so strange to say, or to contemplate: that we can un-cure a disease because of collective disinterest.

dicing up some grubs for old-fashioned diagnostic virology

At what resolution in cryo-EM do you see clear holes in aromatics? I see in some X-ray crystallography literature people are saying 1.6Å, but in cryo they seem quite visible at lower resolutions than this.

life achievement: replaced my chainsaw chain for the first time

She couldn't resist the opportunity to explicitly say she's punishing Harvard for hiring former elected or appointed Democrats. This level of explicitly partisan score-settling is wrong and un-American.

I know I haven't been active on here much lately but...I am hiring a core facility postdoc to own the Krios, do a lot of cryoET jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/249...

I was thinking to myself "what were the best years so far for USA? maybe 1998 and 2014?" This leads to my new hypothesis (nonserious) that the best years are going to be an inflection point in the median income (PPP-adjusted) with positive first derivative.

Trafficking studies that rely on following virus microinjected into the cytoplasm aren't valid if the virus in native cells would be inside a membranous organelle.

Since I got a third cryo-transmission electron microscope, I have more 'scope time than I know what to do with. If you have a project that requires a large amount of data collection, get in contact because we can probably work something out.

Wondering if your study section cancelled? I update this sheet daily. As of today, 56/124 study sections that should have met since Jan 2, 2025 have "not met as scheduled." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Next Thursday I am teaching in the morning, flying to Wyoming, dinner with the faculty, meetings/seminar all day, flying back on the red-eye. Feels like what my schedule used to be like pre-pandemic

This is great visual of what IDC is used for from the Council of Governmental Relations (COGR).

Thrilled to see the approval of a Nav1.8 inhibitor for pain. Has anyone tested whether the analgesic effects of suzetrigine and opiates are additive, synergistic, or antagonistic?