Zach Marin

So in a huge surprise to absolutely no one, it turns out that NIH director Jay Bhattacharya's new journal based on the premise of letting his friends and only his friends publish essentially whatever they want is full of crackpot nonsense from retired cranks.

Our multi-immersion oblique plane microscope manuscript is online now. A light-sheet system that can be adapted to different imaging tasks, including a volumetric correction for imaging in media of any refractive index. @amsikking.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fresh preprint from St Johnston lab in collaboration with Paluch lab. "Fast, 3D SMLM imaging modality, Intrinsic3D, which combines the speed and optical sectioning of oblique plane microscopy (OPM) with the nanometre resolution of SMLM using DNAPAINT". Amazing imaging, here is one of my favourite:

Once again, the Nobel prizes have been given to a bunch of nerds while all the recent advances that jocks have made in football go unrecognised 😞

Are you a biologist working with microscopy images? A computer scientist wanting to work with microscopy data? Their boss??? None of these, but curious how AI has transformed microscopy image analysis? 🔬🤖 This one's for you: 📄 doi.org/10.1146/annu... More in the thread! 🧵

This is *the* piece. Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell, speaks truth to the totality of failures at the university — and why students protesting the war in Gaza have faced far harsher consequences than any of the Cornell 7: www.thecut.com/article/what...

I've been working on a fast, high-ratio image compressor to try and alleviate the data storage issues myself and some of my colleagues have recently been facing. Before I 'release' version 1, it'd be great to gain some feedback regarding performance and missing features. github.com/jdmanton/rad...

Here's a balanced account of where the microscopy community stands on AI use by this year's Small World in Motion winner. My main issue is that no one seems to have seen the original data despite requests (no mention of it being reviewed by the organizers) www.the-scientist.com/allegations-...

An extremely well written evaluation of the case of Jason Arday and the underlying right-wing ideology and racism by @florianaigner.at www.florianaigner.at/blog/posts/2...

What if any dataset, any size, any number of dimensions, opened in a browser tab from a link? 🔬🧪💻 Luxar is out today: write it in Python, share it as a link, explore it in any browser. Open source. 🧵 @biohub.org Preprint: doi.org/10.5281/zen... Code: github.com/royerlab/luxar

You’re right—that plane shouldn’t have gone there. That’s my fault, and I should have made sure there wasn’t a terminal in the landing path. Would you like me to call emergency services, or assist with lining up takeoffs?

Here's a way to get a pure science shot on Bluesky: a custom feed that only shows the posts from people you follow that are linked to a DOI bsky.app/profile/pape...

Really cool! Smaller than GFP and reversibly binding last-generation rhodamine dyes. De novo pan-rhodamine binders for fluorescence microscopy from mammalian cells to extremophiles www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Congrats @bohuang.bsky.social @rhodamine110.bsky.social @mullinslab.bsky.social et al

A massive update: At least ~15 companies~ are selling scientists antibodies using faked validation data. We've documented 18,000+ manipulated images on 17,000+ products sold by leading laboratory suppliers including Thermo Fisher, Abcam, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Millipore Sigma and Bio-Techne. 1/🧵

I’ve often said (partly tongue in cheek) that spite can be a great motivator. But mudita (freudenfeude), the ability to be truly happy for others’ success, can be a much more reliable way to have a fulfilling career. Even if it can seem that way, science is not a zero sum game. Play the long game.

Exciting new preprint from Ignacio Vega Vásquez, Sauer lab, my team and collaborators: #Mega-ExM. From just ~20 NPCs imaged with a 10× objective on a confocal, we reconstructed the 3D structure at ~33 Å. A step toward optical structural biology in intact cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to share the first preprint out of the Nomburg lab! Many aspects of cellular immunity are shared across the tree of life. Here, we show that some of these conserved aspects of cellular immunity are mirrored by conserved effectors of immune antagonism. Thread below! 1/15

Nature did a short piece on our preprint about how LLMs will affect the practice of science; my more detailed thread is below.

[0/1] Excited to share our new preprint DECODE-Plex! After many people efforts, we developed a deep-learning framework for multi-channel SMLM, enabling simultaneous localization and color assignment of densely packed emitters across multiple channels. biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thoughts on the various Trump administration proposals to revamp US science funding - and what they all have in common:

1. The new Trump / Kratsios plan for US science appears explicitly designed to destroy US universities. Diverting money to tech donors is probably just a bonus. Gift link.

Listening to Music to Make Microscopes To Listen To Music To www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ5D...

FlatMux: an optimized microscope system for multiplexed 2-photon imaging of neuronal activity with voltage sensors. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We need to change norms around sexual harassment Yesterday Tessa West spoke up about a sexual harassment complaint she filed against John Jost. Not only is he a senior colleague in the dept of psychology, but he is one of the most prominant figures in the field of social and political psychology.

the degree to which they want to destroy one of the jewels of the American republic—our exceptional research universities—is just gobsmacking

Excited to see this collaboration now in print. Dye chemistry meets AI-designed proteins. Three small, orthogonal tags; lifetime modulation; split versions. Request the free dyes at dyes.janelia.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

As an AI hater, it's with deep regret I inform you that I agree. Claude Code is very useful.

The end of this article correctly touches on what Corey Doctorow calls reverse centaurism (www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...), where humans end up working in service to AI rather than the other way around. By using LLMs to write articles, we force reviewers to screen for machine made errors.

An analysis of public comments on a White House proposal to change the way federal contracts and grants are doled out shows widespread opposition. www.statnews.com/2026/07/15/t...

I have taken the powermeter that was on the optics table and which you were probably saving for later Forgive me it was useful so sensitive and so fast

Thanks for the kind words, but equal (if not greater) credit goes to @benpatrickwill.bsky.social for helping us by identifying the AI slop to begin with. Highly recommended read - particularly for the unbelievably disgraceful use of GenAI faces. nobreakthroughs.com/the-scientis...

Hunh. AI search becomes a lot less useful if you can't access to 20% (blog.cloudflare.com/application-...) of all websites. Are we heading back to web directories? www.adweek.com/media/publis...

When I explain to peeps how much we do in research labs for how few $$, they simply don’t believe me. I once explained it to a famous person from Pixar, he looked me square in the eye and said “You mean all the cancer, vision, and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be %#ing kidding me!”

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

A newly identified species of fungus attacks the famous “zombie mushrooms” that control ants.

Thermo Fisher now has a page up in response to our observations. They flatly deny that images were manipulated or fabricated while repeating that images were "optimized for presentation and clarity on the website", no lie, six times. www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/l...

🔬 Happy to share our new paper showing that fluorophore brightness open a new dimension in SMLM microscopy ! Thanks to all authors @laurent-le.bsky.social S. K. Sreenivas @emmanuelfort.bsky.social ! @ismolab.bsky.social @instlangevin.bsky.social @cnrs.fr rdcu.be/fmIeD doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Thermo Fishy

🔬🚀 It's out! Run 100s of imaging experiments before touching a microscope. #VLab4Mic reproduces them in silico from PDB/AlphaFold to help you image right first time. From rockstars Damián Martínez & Bruno Saraiva, inaugural preprint of @mariodelr.bsky.social new lab www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We present: Index-agnostic oblique plane light sheet microscopy of centimetre-scale cleared tissues at subcellular resolution www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hello #world, meet 1,000× Expansion Microscopy. A small gel would grow to the size of an Olympic swimming pool, while amino-acid-scale distances become visible with ordinary light microscopy. Led by Helena Hu from @eboyden3.bsky.social's lab, in collab with us. Story: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Meet MagLuc: a magnetically-controlled luminescent protein. This is a foundational tool for remote control of biological processes, also known as "magnetogenetics". Can you tell when the magnetic field turns on and off? From @mariaingaramo.bsky.social and the team at @nonfictionlabs.bsky.social