iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

UCSF Asilomar retreat t-shirt, 1990

Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Saw the new film by @elliotkirschner.bsky.social about Robert Reich’s last class taught at UC Berkeley. It’s a film about @rbreich.bsky.social’s remarkable life, but also about the power of teaching and the classroom. Check it out!

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

Court invalidates NSF 15% indirect cost cap. Strong ruling. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

The Clearwater sloop docking at Cold Spring on a beautiful day on the Hudson. Clearwater has been the symbol of the very successful effort to clean up the Hudson River for almost sixty years and is a great example of how bringing information to people can effect change. www.clearwater.org/about/

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Some good news from NIH - they have restarted the intramural training programs for postbacs and postdocs. www.training.nih.gov/research-tra...

Screen cap from NIH training and education web site.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Up close, the Statue of Liberty is still a powerful reminder of what French citizens of the 1870s, coming out of two decades of imperial rule, saw as hope in the American promise of liberty and representative government, itself recently threatened by a civil war.

Statue of Liberty in a black and white photograph

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

On a beautiful spring day here in NYC I visited the registration hall of Ellis Island, where my grandparents arrived from Italy 125 years ago. The Statue of Liberty is visible through the door window, the symbol of why they were coming to the US.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

NIGMS administrative supplements are back! These are given at the discretion of program officers and are not reviewed by study sections. Renewing obsolete equipment is a priority. loop.nigms.nih.gov/2025/03/nigm...

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Many of these grants are fellowships and training grants supporting smart young people interested in bettering the world through their research. It is sad to see NIH funding used as an indiscriminate tool of retribution.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

The first NIH posting to the Federal Register since the inauguration appeared today. It lists several study section meetings. Great news! www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

From the cemetery of Trinity Church, which survived 9/11, to the new World Trade Center on a beautiful day in NYC

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

It's orchid time at the New York Botanical Garden! Darwin published "Fertilisation of Orchids" in 1862, presenting evidence for coevolution of insects and flowers, in support of the theory of natural selection he proposed three years earlier in "Origin of Species." @nybg.bsky.social

An orchid at the New York Botanical Garden

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

This is catastrophic for US research universities as it ignores the real cost of doing research. The US academic-gov’t partnership forged post-WWII is the greatest creator of knowledge in history and is critical to US economic and technological competitiveness.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Lots of things with two flagella have one “tinsel” flagellum and one “whiplash” flagellum. Possible?

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Not a bad place to get some work done.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Carnegie Hall’s amazing influence on more than a century of American music shown in a wall of album covers. Here for the annual late December performance by the New York String Orchestra, a training ground for young musicians. www.newschool.edu/new-york-str...

Carnegie Hall display of albums recorded there

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

Beautiful work! There does seem to be some unexplained magic happening between these two key steps, though:

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Thread about the curious case of the red polenta from early 1800s Italy. Bizio's letter shows him to be an excellent microbial experimentalist, and has comments on publishing of the era, and many a disparaging remark about others competing to solve the mystery! pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

First page of "Bartolomeo Bizio's letter..."

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Happy Holidays from Rockefeller University, with a fresh coat of snow. @rockefelleruniv.bsky.social

The entrance to Rockefeller University, with fresh snow.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

New preprint shows that T7 protein kinase massively and promiscuously phosphorylates the E.coli proteome within 5 minutes of infection to defeat host defense mechanisms. Congrats to first-author @tarabartolec.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Figure from preprint on T7 protein kinase

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

It’s painful to read the abstract knowing what was to come. And a reminder: we still don’t have a vaccine, despite great effort.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

“Acanthocystis turfacea with ingested rotifer” From the beautiful Hudson transparency collection at the University of Exeter. specialcollectionsarchive.exeter.ac.uk/collections/...

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

How do great discoveries sometimes come from unexpected findings? It’s right there in the first paragraph of Fleming’s paper: a contaminated plate led to the discovery of penicillin. Much work was required to turn the discovery into practice, but this simple observation started it all.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

This was first discovered by the Japanese botanist Sakugoro Hirase in 1896 and is an example of retention in primitive branches of the evolutionary tree of complex cellular functions that are completely lost in newer branches. Evolution has seen much innovation, but also a lot of loss! 2/2

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Ginkgo leaves are blanketing NYC in yellow. Little known #cilia fact: the sperm of Ginkgo trees are large cells with ~1000 cilia arranged in a spiral that have to swim a short distance to fertilize the egg. 1/2

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Visiting with the legendary Rudy Pensa of Rudy’s Music and talking about the history of the great NYC-area guitar builders John D’Angelico, Jimmy D’Aquisto and John Monteleone.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

How did we get here, with a prominent anti-vaxxer nominated to lead Health and Human Services, with its $1.7T budget? Much of it can be traced to this retracted 1998 paper, falsely linking the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. 1/3

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

As many have been predicting, Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford is being nominated as NIH director.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

I suppose…if you leave out all homologous recombination-based methods, which had been used to accomplish precise gene editing in bacteria and yeast for decades before that. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2199782/

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

It's worth looking back at the response to vaccination as a cure to major scourges. Pasteur's vaccine for rabies (hydrophobia) in 1885 was world news. The writer of this letter to the London Times the next year was convinced that anyone in danger should "submit to this little operation." 🧪

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Thought experiment: teach a genetics course using only what is on this Austrian postage stamp.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Amazing how effective the variations on GLP-1 activation are for weight loss and diabetes. 🧪

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Have you ever wondered where the Venn diagram came from? Wonder no more as you peruse John Venn’s delightful 1880 paper on the topic. philpapers.org/archive/VENO...

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Schloss Charlottenburg, in the infrared.

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Cells have many ways to lose their #cilia during cell division or development. My favorite is chytrid fungi, some of which rapidly reel it into the cell. This is Chytriomyces hyalinus, 10x time-lapse. For what happens next, see pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33103844/

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Once you get far from the centriole home base, all bets are off! From www.cell.com/current-biol...

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Just returned from Berlin for the amazing Falling Walls Science Summit. Cem Özdemir, Germany’s newly-appointed Federal Minister of Education and Research, spoke there as his first official act: “We are, and will continue to be, a liberal democracy informed by science.”

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

Google Bard/Gemini not quite there yet on cell biology…

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

Good FAQ for the new NIH Simplified Review Framework for R01s and most other grants: grants.nih.gov/faqs#/simpli...

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 02/10/2023

Congratulations to Karikó and Weissman on the Nobel Prize! The 2005 paper that is the basis for the award has a simple hypothesis - that modified bases prevent the immune response to exogenous RNA - which is then tested by well-designed experiments. A classic. www.cell.com/immunity/ful...

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Tim Stearns @stearnslab.bsky.social · 29/09/2023

Wallace, you have to get on the AI bandwagon. From ChatGPT (GPT-4):

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