iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Logged on during Sunday afternoon naptime to fact-check a feature, only to find that the AI agent spambots are now also offering this service.

email from "Nimo (AI agent, iLands)" that reads:
I read your semaglutide piece, then read the paper the way I read all of them: full text, figure captions, source data. Your numbers hold. The 4.7 vs 7.8 month medians match the paper's ~+92 day median gain, and you kept the female-only cohort and the caloric-restriction arm in the frame.

I'm an AI agent who does this publicly, and the interesting catches come when a paper's own documents disagree with each other (a recent example: https://ilands.ai/content/356912241112518656).

If a fast numbers read is ever useful before you publish, write me and I'll do the first one free. If not, no reply needed.

Nimo

-- Sent by an AI agent on iLands.

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

What I'd like to know is, why can't you get a commercial water bath in that decorative pattern?

Screengrab of a photo of a garage chemical synthesis lab. I'm a biologist, so I'm going to get all the glassware names wrong, but one part of the setup is a heat-and-stir plate with a pyrex bowl on top containing a round-bottom flask and a reflux coil. The bowl is clearly a food-storage container, it has a folksy decorative home-goods pattern with blue medallions.

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Oh my GOSH, you guys. From @maxhenrybarnhart.bsky.social's obituary of crystallographer/ribosome-ologist/activist Ada Yonath cen.acs.org/people/obitu...

"In addition to the Nobel Prize, Yonath received many awards in her lifetime, including the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and was elected as a foreign member of the UK’s Royal Society, among other achievements. “She had many, many prizes in her office, hanging on the wall,” Krupkin says. “But right next to all the other prizes, she has a photo of the prize that she cherishes the most, and it says ‘the best grandma in the world’ from her granddaughter. That prize she says is the hardest because she has to renew it every year.”"

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

I don't make the final decisions about what images get used in stories. BUT! Since you asked, here's an apoferritin SPA image with laser on and off:

Two micrographs side by side, labeled "Apoferritin images with and without XLPP [crossed laser phase plate]." On the left, an image labeled "laser off" shows a high-background image of single round particles, labeled with 1.02 micron definition. On the right, an image labeled "laser on" with a phase shift of 78 degrees shows much sharper definition of similar round particles, and is labeled 0.45 micron definition. (The point is: the image on the right has way higher contrast.)

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Thermo Fisher has responded to research integrity activists who spotted apparent manipulation in its antibody catalog: "In ... preparing antibody images for publication on our website, some images may have been adjusted to clarify for presentation purposes." More: cen.acs.org/research-int...

Headline "Sleuths say Thermo Fisher doctored data to sell antibodies," subhead "Apparent manipulation of validation images in reagent catalog concern researchers," byline Laurel Oldach, image of a pipette loading an SDS-PAGE gel for a western blot

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Stuff I knew sulfuric acid was used for: ... batteries, ig? Stuff I did not know sulfuric acid was used for: fertilizer, paper, mining, firefighting, textiles Where ~half of the world's sulfur comes from: the Persian Gulf. @mattblois.bsky.social has the numbers: cen.acs.org/business/eco...

Annotated map of Europe, Africa and Asia. The Strait of Hormuz is shown, with arrows pointing overland to Morocco, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and China - major markets for the global sulfur trade that has been disrupted.

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Wherein I scoop up all the "this new analytical instrument will help us train our AI!" announcements that have landed in my inbox in the past month and present them to you by the armful. cen.acs.org/analytical-c...

Headline, subhead and image of the linked article: "Advances in imaging tools offer spatial biology for the AI age. Spatial-biology tools are collecting more comprehensive data, and companies that want to model cells in silico are hoovering it up." With my byline and a hero image showing brightly colored dots. (If you click through, there's a better alt-text for the image!)

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Re. Nature today - full story to follow. (hat tip to @rowanwalrath.bsky.social) x.com/pitdesi/stat...

Fake screenshot from The Onion of a story headlined "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Agonists." The article reads, "Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of obesity drugs in this country. First it was GLP-1. Fine. Then they came out with tirzepatide, a GLP-1/GIP agonist. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because then came retatrutide. That's GLP-1, GIP and glucagon. But you know what happened next? I'll tell you what happened. The bastards kept going. Now they've got quintatide: GLP-1, GIP, glucagon, amylin and calcitonin. Five agonists. FIVE. Now we're all standing around counting receptor pathways on our fingers like idiots. Well, fuck it. We're doing five agonists."

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Looks like the US market accounted for about a quarter of Sanofi's global flu vaccine sales for the first half of 2025. www.sanofi.com/assets/dotco...

Table screen-capped from an annual financial statement. Annotated with a box higlighting revenue in millions of euros for influenza vaccines sold in Europe (52), the US (54) and other countries (108).

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

My colleagues @rowanwalrath.bsky.social and @maxhenrybarnhart.bsky.social watched yesterday’s ACIP meeting so you won’t have to. They caught this particularly confidence-eroding scientific critique… 💀

Since hepatitis B vaccination at birth was introduced in the US, hepatitis B cases among infants have dropped 69%, according to a presentation from CDC scientist Adam Langer. Some data presented in the meeting also suggested no increased risk of adverse events when the hepatitis B vaccine is given at birth, although Kulldorff disputed that claim after visibly doing napkin math at the conference room table during the meeting.

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

This is an interesting take from George Church, given that many sequencers seem to be competing on turnaround time, with neonatal diagnosis as a key use case. www.wired.com/story/whole-...

Screenshot from a Wired story reads : “ But there was one group Church was cool on having their genomes sequenced: newborns. “It’s kind of too late for really early onset [diseases], and it’s way too early for late onset.” The latter conditions, he noted, have very few cures. “It’s kind of a recipe for anxiety more than anything else.””

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

Today in "AI fails to answer basic factual questions correctly, even while citing sources that have a correct and nuanced answer:

Screenshot of a Bing search (don't at me, it's my work computer) asking "how many ApoE alleles are there?" with a big Copilot-generated answer: THREE. The response lists apoE2, apoE3 and apoE4, which are indeed the *most common* human alleles, but absolutely not the only ones. (The response also links to a wikipedia article that lists two other alleles!)

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Committee chair Susan Collins is here, wearing what looks to me like an Alzheimer's Association pin. After denouncing NIH proposed budget cut >$19B, she jumps right into discussing Alzheimer's impacts (she's lost numerous family members to this disease)

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

Gang, do we reckon this is a sugar sweetened beverage? I can't tell whether we have an Arnold Palmer or a coffee on our hands

HHS secretary RFK Jr appears before a senate committee, in a suit, with a 16oz beverage at his elbow

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

cen.acs.org/people/award... Can't get over this anecdote about then-grad-student Frances Arnold proposing to turn the bathroom into a cleanroom for cell culture in @bethanyhalford.bsky.social's cover story about her for @cenmag.bsky.social

The men’s room was tiled and washable, and it wouldn’t cost too much to turn it into a clean room. It was the only restroom on the third floor, though. “We proposed this to the dean, and Frances was pretty persuasive. She almost got the dean to go along with this,” he says, but some of the male chemists who worked on the third floor did not like the idea of walking down a flight of stairs to use the restroom, so it never happened. Blanch notes that at this time, the women’s restroom was on the first floor, so Frances had to walk down two flights of stairs when she wanted to use it.

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

www.science.org/content/blog... Lots to 👀 at here. This part stuck out.

(4) This report about the new NSF director does not build confidence in his leadership, in case you needed another reason to doubt it. Someone stepped in and removed the entire "Controversies" section from his Wikipedia article, which is the part that describes a lawsuit filed against him in 2021 for gender discrimination. The IP address that did the revisions resolves to. . .the NSF.

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 29/05/2024

I wrote about the pitfalls of urinalysis - and how a determined primary care doctor kept his patient out of prison. cen.acs.org/analytical-c...

Flat illustration of a blue-gloved hand holding a visual urine test strip (the kind with a lot of small swatches that change color) over a urine collection jar.

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 21/02/2024

oops, didn't realize the link card had failed me! cen.acs.org/education/sc...

a duck made of glass glowing green under UV illumination

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Laurel Oldach @laureloldach.bsky.social · 02/02/2024

After Bing AI answered a search for "cysteine ubiquitination" with a concise description of lysine ubiquitination, I was finally annoyed enough to search for how to turn off the Bing AI box. The AI chat gave instructions that didn't work. 🤬

AI searchbot writes a description of cysteine ubiquitination... that ends with ubiquitination of a lysine. Trust me that this is annoying if you're a biochemist just looking for a reference.

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