iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

👉 The Niethammer lab has two postdoctoral openings. We’re looking for researchers interested in how organelle mechanotransduction and redox signaling shape early responses to tissue injury. If interested, please reach out to me with a CV and letter of intent written in your own words (🚫 AI).

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Zebrafish Rock! @zebrafishrock.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Electrochemical response triggers organ growth, following tail injury in a #zebrafish embryo. Credit to @ritamateus.bsky.social, @nerlielisa.bsky.social, & @liujinghui.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday

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Jorge Ferreira @jorgeferreira.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Don´t know yet what you´ll be doing next April? Why not join us for a great meeting in Porto? Registration for Forces across scales is now open! meetings.embo.org/event/27-for...

meetings.embo.org

Forces across scales

This EMBO Workshop on Forces Across Scales will provide an integrative perspective on mechanobiology, a rapidly advancing field that examines how mechanical forces shape biological systems across mol…

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Drawing by hand is not just a nostalgic/cute way to generate visuals. A good scientific drawing generates a faithful model of reality through careful observation and humble craftsmanship - it epitomizes good science.

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Once in a while a student like Zaza comes along - so unafraid, and with so much skill, determination and pure, contagious joy for science and discovery, you remember that you also picked the job for meeting just such people. www.mskcc.org/news/2026-gs...

mskcc.org

2026 GSK Chairman’s Prize Recognizes Research on How Cells Sense Injury | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

This year's GSK Chairman’s Prize was awarded to Zaza Gelashvili for his research on how cells sense injury.

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

👉1/3 We are looking for a research technician to join our lab at Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City. This is an ideal position for a recent college graduate (e.g., from the NYC area) interested in basic biology and gaining hands-on research experience before graduate or medical school.

https://www.mskcc.org/research/ski/labs/philipp-niethammer

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Join us at the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School in one of the great cities of the world! www.sloankettering.edu/gerstner/wel...

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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

When threatened, a pufferfish fills its stomach with water (or air), reaching 3-4X their original size. That requires specialized adaptations. What you see below are the caltrop-shaped spines that change configuration with expanding skin. But these aren't the /bones/ of the fish. They're scales.

Deflated and inflated dermal scales in one of those fake taxidermy kits, showing the weird beak of the animal, big eye sockets, and lots of little caltrop spines that appear to intercalate together, then expand out.

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The strongest "methods" of philosophy are those that throw you out of cozy "sureness" and the "well established". If you let this happen, you start philosophizing. No academic titles needed.

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Philosophy is not about being "sure", it is exactly about the opposite 😜.

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Laura Bianchi @laurafbianchi.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Ever wondered how epithelial cells clear apoptotic cells while maintaining tissue cohesion?🍝🔗 Check our new paper in which we show that E-cadherin plays a dual role in regulating basal cortex dynamics upon phagocytosis while maintaining connected tissue organization www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

De novo E-cadherin/catenin complex formation controls basal epithelial mechanics and force transmission for apoptotic cell clearance - Nature Communications

Epithelial cells remodel their shape during phagocytosis while preserving tissue cohesion. Here, authors show that the E-cadherin/catenin adhesion complex is repurposed at phagocytic contacts, where i...

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Jan Lammerding - Lab @lammerdinglab.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Interested in nuclear mechanobiology and want to know what some of the big open questions are in the field? Read our recent editorial with input from >15 leading experts in the field, along with a list of review articles on nuclear mechanobiology: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.com

Nuclear mechanobiology: a brief history and five unresolved questions

Published in Nucleus (Vol. 17, No. 1, 2026)

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

A 15-year history of my lab in signed champagne bottles. We always find some reason to celebrate: papers, fellowships, prizes - 🙏 to all the good people in the lab. Yet we have never opened the BIG bottle - now it's time 😅. Hope it fits on the shelf.

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I just updated LCS turbo adding a compatible Connector app at Zenodo. The Connector connects logical or marker/scRNAseq clusters across different experiments/data sources into Cytoscape compatible enrichment networks. Hope it is useful - I count downloads as ❤️. zenodo.org/records/2064...

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Independent thinkers are rare, technically adept followers are plenty. Understanding/questioning what is closest to us -current concepts, life, reality, ourselves, etc- is the most difficult thing. It has never been different. No wonder that many people prefer to 👉 „shut up and calculate“ 😉

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

EZM2026 setting a very high bar for future social events 🍾🥂

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Phil Abitua @ohnolog.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

So proud of @sydsat.bsky.social, the lab’s first graduate student, for leading this work! Special thanks to the Searle Scholars Program and the Royalty Research Fund for making it possible. Check out the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

Early immune cell development precedes gastrulation in annual killifish

During embryogenesis, cell types arise in a predictable order because developmental regulators act sequentially. But how evolutionary changes in morphogenesis reshape the signaling environments that a...

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Journal of Cell Science @jcellsci.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Our Special Issue: Cell Biology of the Nucleus is complete Explore our Toc: journals.biologists.com/jcs/issue/13... Our cover image shows the posteriorly positioned nuclei (Nup50-mCherry - pink) of notochord cells in Ciona embryos. See article by Peng et al. journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

JCS Cover: Posterior nucleus positioning in Ciona notochord cells. Co-expression of hCD4–eGFP (green, cell boundary) and Nup50–mCherry (pink, nuclei) in notochord cells in Ciona embryos. The cells and the nuclei are 3D reconstructed and highlighted by Imaris software. See article by H. Peng et al. (jcs264699).

Special Issue on Cell Biology of the Nucleus
Guest Editor: Abby Buchwalter

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Can somebody implement a bot-safe preprint server pls? I'd love to submit our preprints somewhere safe from gold-digging AI venture capitalists that, while pretending to do us a service, end up milking the scientifc community as usual.

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

"Humanity is put to the test, claimed, and challenged by a power that becomes manifest in the essence of technology and which humanity itself no longer controls." nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/heide...

nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Getting second thoughts too, sad…

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Now live: LCS 3.0 engine rebuild with C++ with command line our GUI interface. Optional bioconductor edgeR filters and stats (slow), and fast internal stats (correlationdistance & welch test). Can be integrated into any bioinformatics pipline as executable. (1/5)🧵 zenodo.org/records/2063...

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

I am (well...AI is) currently porting LCS 3.0 from MATLAB to C++ to compile it into binaries that can be used by standard bio-info pipelines. Stick around...

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American Museum of Natural History @amnh.org · 05/06/2026

Smile like Megalochelys atlas because it’s #FossilFriday! This species was one of the largest known land turtles & lived during the Late Pliocene ~2 million years ago. This specimen’s shell measures some 7.4 ft (2.3 m) long and in life, it may have weighed more than 2,000 lbs (907 kg)!

A photo of Megalochelys atlas on display in the Museum. The giant turtle's skeleton is a dark brown color.

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Cell Biology J-Club @cellclub.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

A membrane-permeable small molecule biosensor accesses intractable cells and animals without genetic manipulation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

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Philipp Niethammer @niethammerlab.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

If the technicalities of writing and convincing become cheap „word math“, will this help us to finally embrace depth of thought over form and persuasion? Less word-pushing , more scientific creativity? Or just more slop? www.nature.com/articles/s44...

nature.com

Thinking is not only writing - Nature Reviews Bioengineering

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) raises valid concerns about the loss of cognitive work embedded in scholarly writing. However, universally dismissing AI-assisted drafting mistakenly conflates ...

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Martin Haesemeyer @haesemeyerlab.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

New preprint from the lab, led by Bradley Cutler. With the @james-gagnon.bsky.social lab we use zebrafish to show that fever is not a reduction in the perception of warmth. Immune signals instead increase the valence of warming stimuli while cooling turns aversive. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Conceptual model of how PGE2 signaling alters temperature encoding in medullary circuits to change the valence of heating and cooling stimuli.

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Wallace Marshall @wallaceucsf.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

so maybe this protein is acting as a calcium sensor to let the cell keep track of its current stimulation state or past stimulus history. right now, almost any hypothesis can be on the table. in case you missed the paper you can read it here: www.cell.com/current-biol...

cell.com

Molecular pathways for learning in the single-cell Stentor coeruleus

Rajan et al. explore the molecular basis of habituation in the unicellular organism Stentor coeruleus using a combination of pharmacological methods, proteomics, transcriptomics, and RNAi. These exper...

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Tamas Nagy @tamasnagy.com · 08/05/2026

My PhD work showed that resting neutrophil -> activated/prime neutrophil is a pretty big volume change needed for motility :) Super fast, only a couple minutes to swell so not like other slower changes elifesciences.org/articles/90551

elifesciences.org

Neutrophils actively swell to potentiate rapid migration

Actin-independent water influx complements actin-driven cytoskeletal forces to potentiate chemoattractant-induced migration in primary human neutrophils.

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Wallace Marshall @wallaceucsf.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

It’s starting to seem like changes in cell volume are turning up in many different cases of cell state transitions. Would be nice to collect examples.

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Zebrafish Rock! @zebrafishrock.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Leukocytes in a zebrafish larva moving towards a pipette filled with a chemoattractant (arachidonic acid). Credit to @niethammerlab.bsky.social @mskcancercenter.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

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