iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Giacomo Bartolucci (he) @gbart.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Great workshop, I really value how the night science project is unfolding. They are able to talk about scientific creativity in a precise and yet inspiring way! Looking forward to bring this spirit to Barcelona

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This week we held our second-ever “train the trainer” event in Heidelberg at EMBO/EMBL to pass on our teachings on the creative scientific process to 50 instructors. We're on our way to achieving our mission of bringing creativity training to all scientists worldwide!

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Looking for ways to keep your excitement for science?! Come to the NYC Postdocs Night Science event September 24th! @kelseymonson.bsky.social will lead this one, so join her in Mount Sinai for a night science session to improve and practice your creative process! Free RSVP: forms.gle/ruTJHuzfLDiE...

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Do you want to work with us in New York on the Night Science mission to change the culture of science? We will soon advertise an administrative position at NYU Langone Health, jointly with the Night Science Institute. If interested, you can already contact me with your CV.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

PhD students: this is happening tomorrow so there is still time to sign up (already 90 participants registered!).

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Do you think you would have discovered a gorilla hiding in plain sight in your data? In our 2020 paper, we found that you're 3 times less likely to find it if you have a specific hypothesis. A hypothesis is a liability - keep looking for the gorilla in the data! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

🔥Does academia stifle creativity? This new perspective argues that academia is currently structured to select against creativity, intellectual risk-taking and bold ideas. Young scientists – best positioned for new ideas – are particularly incentivized to play it safe. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is two people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it. PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to.

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Carolyn Bertozzi @carolynbertozzi.bskyverified.social · 31/08/2026

Sad news. Yonath was/is a legend indeed. Now there are only 4 living female @nobelprize.org laureates in chemistry. There are 20 living Nobel Prize winners just at Stanford right now.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Nobel Prize winner Ada Yonath sadly passed away today. She was a legend for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Advice for new PhD students: choose a mentor who is committed to your training, not just your project. The most important product of your PhD - even more important than the science - is YOU, a newly trained scientist.

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Dr. Kimberly Hartl @kimberlyhartl.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Thank you to everyone who made the first session of the #NightScienceScotland club a success! We had @itaiyanai.bsky.social introducing the concept of Night Science to us and then jumped onto our first lection on the use of language in creative processes - Night Science and Day Science language. 🌙☀️

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Friends in Israel! I'm looking forward to giving a talk at the Weizmann on how cancer cell state transitions facilitate drug resistance according to developmental constraints.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

We just sold out this one, but let us know where we should set up the next ‘train the trainer’ event for teaching the creative scientific process! night-science.org/train-the-tr...

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

How to do science in the age of AI.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The future of AI should not be determined by the dreams of a small group of technologists, but by democratic choices about the kind of society we wish to build. –Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Prize-winning MIT Professor

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

A.I. hallucinations can be remarkably useful. They are dreaming up riots of unrealities that help scientists track cancer, design drugs, invent medical devices, uncover weather phenomena and even win the Nobel Prize. Gift article: www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/s...

nytimes.com

How Hallucinatory A.I. Helps Science Dream Up Big Breakthroughs (Gift Article)

Hallucinations, a bane of popular A.I. programs, turn out to be a boon for venturesome scientists eager to push back the frontiers of human knowledge.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

There's a museum in Amsterdam called "Micropia" that's all about microbes. How cool 😎

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Science at its best is organized chaos. We teach young scientists how to be organized and robust, but not the night science creativity that’s needed for discovery. Come train with us in how to teach the tools of the creative scientific process in our EMBO train the trainer event.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

🔥The NIH has funded our R25 grant to bring Night Science training to all 40,000 US postdoctoral fellows! It all started with discussions at the Radcliffe Summit we organized 2 years ago at Harvard where the question was how bring creativity training into the sciences.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

If you’re letting AI do a review of a manuscript for you, just know that (A) it’s super obvious to anyone reading it, (B) it’s dishonest - as you’re explicitly instructed not to do so, and (C) it’s careless - because you’re uploading someone’s confidential material to an AI app.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Night Science sessions are popping up everywhere! Contact me for support in setting one up in your area. Our NYC club has been going strong for nearly two years with so many amazing sessions!

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

How would you let the LLM dream? [...] In a sense, to replay things, organize them, think about them so that tomorrow when we wake up, our thoughts are more organized than just input-output-input-output. –Jure Leskovec, Stanford Professor

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The Night Science Podcast @nightsciencepod.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

🔥A new episode comes out today! We talk with Stanford professor Jure Leskovec about how AI dreams up new science.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

There is where I disagree with Professor Bill Martin: "If you follow the data, then you've completely lost control... you're putting the data where your mind should be. For me, the scientific process is one of questions.. But if you go into data driven science... seek and you shall find."

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I actually don't mind being wrong.. we said this is what's happening on the Millennium Bridge.. what we proposed doesn't work. But it was interesting. We really did stick our neck out and unfortunately got our head chopped off. –Steven Strogatz, Cornell Professor @stevenstrogatz.com

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I said to my PI, I want to go do my postdoc, will you write a letter for me. And he wrote in my letter that I wasn't very creative .. I finally met with Magda and she told me she saw straight through the letter. –Samantha Morris, Harvard Professor

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Science funding has still not reached gender equality: "Projects led by male PIs received roughly twice the mean funding compared to female PIs." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

There is a big misunderstanding about “the linear model” – the notion that there is a pipeline in science that goes from research to development – in the White House's report "Science A New Golden Age".

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Creativity is ultimately rooted in the individual –Ruth Lehmann, Director of the Whitehead Institute, MIT

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Science would be more trustworthy in the public eye if scientists were more open about the creative process behind scientific discovery. – Tom McLeish, on the Night Science Podcast, episode 10

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Deepa Rajan, PhD @deeparajan.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I'm excited to be featured on one of my favorite podcasts!! I binged @nightsciencepod.bsky.social during my PhD. Listen to this episode to hear about how the crop rotation system can be applied to the scientific creative process. And learn about our beloved Stentor in Every School program!

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

If you always stick to the field you were trained in, you could be denying yourself the chance of creating a new field.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Going from a creative idea [..you ask..] what's the fastest way we could find out that it's completely wrong? .. that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people because they become attached to their ideas... you have to be able to have many ideas & most of them could be wrong. –@benlehner.bsky.social

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Day science is trying to design tests that would disprove a hypothesis – and night science is finding something that wasn't initially thought of. So basically wandering into the forest of the data and trying to figure out what's up. – Yana Bromberg, on the Night Science Podcast, Ep. 8

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Is science irrational? ..beauty is incredibly informative about which theories are right.. [but in] our official means of arguing with one another about which theories are right [..] is not allowed to appeal to beauty.. That's what I take to be strictly speaking irrational. –Michael Strevens

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Sometimes the dark alleys are in fact dark alleys that we shouldn't have gone down. But sometimes the dark alleys are really the path to enlightenment. And we don't really know, ahead of time, which one is going to go, unfortunately. –@harmitmalik.bsky.social on the Night Science Podcast, episode 6

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Often people have something that makes them their skin tingle. I'm a believer in that skin tingling. –Sarah Teichmann, on choosing a project (from the Night Science Podcast, episode 5) @teichlab.bsky.social

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

The PhD is the best point in time to try very dangerous ideas or to try things that don't work. – @odedrechavi.bsky.social, on the Night Science Podcast

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DrawImpacts @drawimpacts.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

We had the privilege of creating the cover for the @nature.com perspective by #GustavoSFrança & @itaiyanai.bsky.social ! From brief and early sketches to the final published cover, here's a look behind the creative process. #SciComm #ScientificIllustration

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Join us at the "Cancer Research Across Scales" conference at the Weizmann Institute of Science! Many Israelis living abroad may be in Israel that week for the national election, so help us spread the word!

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

New Yorkers! Join us July 22nd for an informal NYC science communication mixer at a bar to mix and mingle and celebrate the summer time vibes. This is a collaboration between Schmidt Sciences and SciCommUnity. Partiful link here (I'll be there!): partiful.com/e/wm1Et5tneV...

partiful.com

RSVP to NYC SciComms Summer Social | Partiful

Feel free to forward to anyone you think might be interested. Sponsored by Schmidt Sciences 🍻

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Maybe creativity is just how big a bag of tricks you have; how many different tricks you've seen, applied in different contexts. And perhaps some people have a little bit more skill remembering all those tricks or applying them in different situations. - Arjun Raj, @arjunraj.bsky.social

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Dr. Kimberly Hartl @kimberlyhartl.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

We are inviting you to the first #NightScienceScotland Club at the @cruk-si.bsky.social in #Glasgow! Come join us and learn about the creative processes in science. If that's not enough to convince you - there will be snacks, drinks and also @itaiyanai.bsky.social around! Scan the code to register.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Tzachi Pilpel introduces two tools for generating ideas in the second episode of the Night Science Podcast: 1. imaginary conversations with scientists and 2. walking while thinking to anchor thoughts spatially. @nightsciencepod.bsky.social

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

‘Inhabiting the data’ is how CalTech Professor Ellen Rothenberg describes her process for coming up with a new idea, in the very first episode of the Night Science Podcast. (@nightsciencepod.bsky.social)

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

1906 Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal's 'Advice for a Young Investigator' makes important points: 1. The only thing in your power is your preparation 2. Be suspicious of “brilliance” 3. Be appropriately respectful of authority, but no more 4. Balance concentration and relaxation 🔽

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

As promised, here is the episode we produced after talking with 13 young scientists about their creative process! Apple podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2fAt...

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Looking for ways to keep your excitement for science?! Come to our NYC Postdocs Night Science event July 29th! We're meeting in Mount Sinai for a night science session to improve and practice our creative process! Free RSVP: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... @kelseymonson.bsky.social

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The Night Science Podcast @nightsciencepod.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

🔥New Night Science Podcast episode! We talked with PhD students & postdocs about finding ideas in art museums, making sketches, transferring concepts, going to unrelated seminars, swimming, hiking, talking in pubs and letting ideas lie fallow like in a crop rotation system.

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