iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Jakub Zeman

Reese Richardson @reeserichardson.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

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/🧵

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Ali Shaib @alishaib.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

our 5th paper of 2026 is out: ONE microscopy www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Protein shapes, #sub-nanometer precision, conventional #fluorescence #microscopes, and now #ONEpy. 3 more papers in revision, more this year. We’re only getting started. #optical #structural #biology is becoming a field

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Real science: 1. Is not correlated with the amount of funding 2. Progresses slowly, usually taking many years 3. Leads to more questions than it answers 4. Advances when we disengage a bit and have improvisational discussions 5. Is too serious a thing to be done in a non-playful way

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Oded Rechavi @odedrechavi.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Gloves are off! TODAY WE RELEASE THE 1% A list of the year’s very best papers 👇 (see thread)

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

We're excited to welcome Leoš to Frankfurt soon! He'll be sharing fascinating insights about biological systems where start codons don't matter much, and stop codons make more sense than expected. Don't miss his talk on June 16 at Campus Niederrad! #translation Info: mbu.cas.cz/en/aktuality...

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Johan Duchêne @johanduchene.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

@sholtodavid.bsky.social Have you seen this WB from ThermoFisher? Still anti-p53 antibody, but another clone (MA-12648 instead MA5-12557). It also looks like that the band in lane 3 was rotated and reused in lane 4. Moreover, it seems that same band was used for the 2 different clones.

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Sholto David @sholtodavid.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

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RCSB Protein Data Bank @rcsbpdb.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Try this new online training game from Leandro F. Estrozi designed for newcomers in structural biology, with a focus on cryo-EM and cryo-ET map interpretation: rico.ibs.fr/helixplo...

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Anna Poetsch @apoetsch.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Are you looking for a new challenge? We are looking for a Deep Learning Engineer. With this role you would set up deep learning infrastructures with the goal to understand genomes 🧬 and ageing 👵 .

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Cellular phallus. Unfortunately, it was not discovered in Brno.

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Kurianlab @kurianlab.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

It's our 12-year anniversary. Grateful to work with a great group of young scientists in those years. very proud of what we have done, and very thankful for sticking with our lab values in very tough times indebted to @erc.europa.eu @cpi-exstra.bsky.social @goetheuni.bsky.social current lab

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

@lufthansagroup.bsky.social cancelled my flight more than 4 weeks ago. Since then, they have not been able to reimburse me despite repeated requests. I need to wait for hours on their chat to get zero answers. Don't be like Lufthansa. I am filing a complaint with the German Luftfahrt-Bundesamt.

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Florian Jug @florianjug.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

We've spent the last year building something at @humantechnopole.bsky.social that we think is genuinely needed: #AI that works across biological scales and data modalities, not just within them. A thread on what we're doing, why, and who we're looking for. A 🧵... 1/9

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Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

I appreciate someone took the time to write this. I profoundly disagree with their view, but if I take the spirit of what they're saying as a good faith attempt to raise a mental issue, there's at least a conversation to be had. Let's have it 1/🧵 www.science.org/content/arti... #AcademicChatter

science.org

Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student

“It can competently perform a lot of the work I need immediately,” this professor writes

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Jordy F. Botello @jbotello.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Some molecular machines, like ribosomes, can persist for long periods of time in cells. Could molecular aging of ribosomes shape how proteins are made? In our new preprint we track ribosomes as they age in cells and uncover unexpected effects on translation (1/10) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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Michaela Müller-McNicoll @mixmue.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

We are excited to share our new preprint: iCLIP3 — an improved protocol for transcriptome-wide mapping of protein–RNA interactions at single-nucleotide resolution.

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Contrary to what the photography might suggest, the first #RNAConfluence was a great event!

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Andy Moore @aaandmoore.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

An intracellular meteor shower. EB3 comets tracking growing microtubule plus-ends in a cultured cell.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Professors: we must start teaching the creative scientific process to PhD students and postdocs! Register for our April 24 train-the-trainer event in New York to learn from us how to teach it. night-science.org/train-the-tr... Register by Jan. 30th for a free Night Science Podcast T-shirt!

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Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Attend the 2. RMU-RNA Salon X-mas Meeting to find out your new favourite RNA modification! December 18, 2025, Niederrad Campus, Frankfurt bit.ly/2_Xmas_RMU_R...

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Reposted by Jakub Zeman

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

“Just because you are offended doesn’t mean you are right.” Ricky Gervais

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Our new preprint, full of exciting data, is now available. Have a look! QKI ensures splicing fidelity during cardiogenesis by engaging the U6 tri-snRNP to activate splicing at weak 5ʹ splice sites www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

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PastelBio @pastelbio.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

An Optimized SP3 Sample Processing Workflow for In-Depth and Reproducible Phosphoproteomics pubs.acs.org/doi/10.... --- #proteomics #prot-paper

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Reposted by Jakub Zeman

Nature @nature.com · 11/07/2025

Researchers are making ever more sophisticated mini organs in the lab — and now they can grow their own blood vessels go.nature.com/4nNF3ri

go.nature.com

Mini hearts, lungs and livers made in lab now grow their own blood vessels

These sophisticated models will be used for human-development studies and drug testing.

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

One day, scientists will discover Adobe InDesign/Affinity Publisher/… for figure assembly and our lives will be much easier…

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

A review of the history of protein-RNA friendship.

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

Germany of the 21st century: A place where there is a massive problem for all major personal parcel delivery companies to deliver an order. #OrdnungMussSein

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Feedback without specifics is not feedback. It’s frustration.

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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

'Night science' is what you do when you're not sure what's the question.

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Dream big. Dare to fail. Fuck dull, incremental science.

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Anna Poetsch @apoetsch.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

We have several open postdoc positions! We do computational biology 🧬🖥️ and deep learning to understand the genomics of genome instability and (somatic) genome evolution in ageing and cancer. Interested? 👉🏻 more details: tu-dresden.de/cmcb/biotec/...

tu-dresden.de

Open positions

We are looking for Postdocs! If you are interested in the lab in general as a postdoc, please feel free to apply with an open application, including a letter of motivation and a CV …

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Jakub Zeman @jakub-zeman.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

I visited the lab where I did my PhD today. They moved two floors upstairs since I left in 2020, they have got new stuff, many new students and postdocs. Yet, there are still boxes with my name around, and they are about to finish the 3C protease I purified back then. 🧡 #ProteinPutification #eIF3

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