iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 21/04/2026

Describe a problem in the Arab world that requires R&D to solve and describe the solution. You can get $2500. Excited to announce a technical essay contest called the sifr prize. Open to anyone anywhere. sifrprize.com

sifrprize.com

the sifr prize

What should exist for science and technology in the Arab world, but doesn't? An essay contest with thousands of dollars in prizes.

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Cameron Dale MacQuarrie @cdmacquarrie.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

New pub from @ArcadiaScience 🧵 We found that C. smithii — a freshwater green alga — undergoes wild morphological transformations when grown on Marine Broth. Huge cells with mysterious wisp-like appendages. Here's what we saw. thestacks.org/publications... [1/9]

thestacks.org

Morphological transformation of Chlamydomonas smithii grown in Marine Broth medium

Marine Broth induces extreme morphological transformation in C. smithii: Cells shift from typical ellipsoid shape to amorphous forms with thin wisp-like appendages containing mitochondria, revealing u...

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 15/11/2025

If anyone at #sfn25 near the poster floor has hand moisturizer that I could use I will name my second-born after you

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Seemay Chou @seemaychou.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

We’ve been heads down @ArcadiaScience for a bit but the @arenabioworks news this week caused me to dump thoughts. hard things are hard; don’t be such a fucking hater. Reflections on parallels w our own institutional experiment here seemay.substack.com/p/big-experi...

seemay.substack.com

Big experiments are only big if they can fail

Some reflections on Arena Bioworks' unexpected wind down as a fellow institutional experimentalist

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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

Excellent post by the creator of the hoax FormatMyPaper.com. "We’re a community of experts, terrified of a harmless prank site, yet seemingly unbothered by the multi-billion dollar publishing industry that actually takes our copyright, our labor, and our intellectual property every single day."

ubadah.substack.com

Beware giving this site your unpublished data

Users noticed the website had fake testimonials and a domain name registered seemingly overnight.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 25/10/2025

Scientists themselves determine what is valued within science. Yet we act as if beholden to external managers, bean-counters who confuse the production of papers with scientific progress. We don't have to find better ways to navigate the prison of metrics-driven scientific assessment.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 25/10/2025

Ubadah Sabbagh is referring to closed-access for-profit publishing here, but I keep thinking about how perfectly it describes the general push to incorporate large language models into the scientific workflow in the interest of higher "productivity". ubadah.substack.com/p/beware-giv...

What does a reaction like this reveal? It reveals a kind of learned helplessness. A mind so accustomed to the constraints of its environment that its first impulse is not to imagine a different world, but to seek a more efficient way of navigating its own prison.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 23/10/2025

PSA: Many of you may have noticed a website floating around called formatmypaper(dot)com. People rightly noted something was fishy. I dig into what happened here: open.substack.com/pub/ubadah/p...

open.substack.com

Beware giving this site your unpublished data

Users noticed the website had fake testimonials and a domain name registered seemingly overnight.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 13/10/2025

If you've been hearing a lot about "AI Scientists" and wondered how much is real, how much is hype, and what's possible, so have I. So I spent some time thinking about it and this came out. open.substack.com/pub/ubadah/p...

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 22/08/2025

excited about applying engineering + AI to frontier biology? we’re building tools @arcadiascience.com to help scientists move faster and smarter, and we’re hiring software engineers and applied ML engineers to join us. if that’s you, apply and let's talk:

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Ahmed G. Ibrahim @ahmedgibrahim.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

This week, I continue my discussion with @ubadahsabbagh.com, Chief of Staff at Arcadia Science. We discuss his transition to industry, perspective on the state of academic research, and his visionary endeavors. www.podbean.com/eas/pb-3spkv...

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 15/05/2025

folks, we’re hiring for scientist roles - lab tech - protein designer - molecular biologist - project scientist all onsite, all for creative people who believe in open science & wanna build cool shit. plus other stuff but that’s in the postings jobs.lever.co/arcadiascience @arcadiascience.com

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 03/05/2025

>march 10 @arcadiascience.com announces new form of rapid publishing >apr 18 team reads a preprint, finds it interesting >9 work days later, team publishes results validating and extending model this is how science should be. open, rapid, with the community arcadia-science.github.io/2025-geno-ph...

arcadia-science.github.io

Cross-trait learning with a canonical transformer tops custom attention in genotype-phenotype mapping –

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Arcadia Science @arcadiascience.com · 30/04/2025

And the artist, Audrey Bell! www.aebellillustration.com

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 30/04/2025

Not only do we do cool science but we have a badass illustrator for our pubs

Graphical abstract depicting diverse types of ticks on a phylogenetic tree

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 03/04/2025

popped over to make sure its still there

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Heba Gowayed هبة جويد @hebagowayed.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

This message is for immigrants — everyone from naturalized citizens to the “undocumented”— you may decide to do some things differently and that’s ok, smart even. Be gentle to yourself & remember that fear is the authoritarian’s greatest weapon.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 22/03/2025

prudent reminder for scientists today, from a thousand years ago

The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
Ibn al-Haytham

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 18/03/2025

my tl is once again flooded with dead palestinian children killed by israeli bombs we pay for

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 23/02/2025

fast forward two months later, i spent 10 hours today with a group of bay area investors, tech entrepreneurs, creatives, academics, lawyers, and scientists planning projects to develop education and tech sectors in syria. we’re cooking 💚

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 08/02/2025

Whether from this indirects policy or some later thing, many labs will be shuttered. And I bet the first to go won't be those who mastered scientific theatrics & wasting taxpayer dollars, those skilled at prestige games and cronyism, or those rife with sexual harassment & abuse.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 07/02/2025

New job @arcadiascience.com! Ideally you've got a few years of experience post-PhD, in academia or elsewhere, and have some computational fluency in addition to experimental expertise. Added bonus, you'd get to join our pastry-fueled preprint comment parties like the one we're having today :)

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 01/02/2025

Pleasure speaking with Katie @thetransmitter.bsky.social for her well researched story.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 31/01/2025

Academic scientists, I’m curious to hear what guidance (if any?) your institutions have offered re the disruption and uncertainty around NIH/NSF funding

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 13/01/2025

“Relationships need repetition and structure to grow. They need rituals and habits.” www.theatlantic.com/family/archi...

theatlantic.com

The Easiest Way to Keep Your Friends

It’s a little boring, a little type A, and a lot better than letting relationships fizzle.

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Virginia Arechavala @varechavala.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

Que fantástica iniciativa para promover el rigor científico y premiar a quienes no suelen ser reconocidos por hacer las cosas "bien", aunque hacerlo así no valga para promociones, ni de puntos en esa investigación "al peso" a la que nos estamos acostumbrando...

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 09/01/2025

NINDS just launched a $50K prize competition for early-career scientists championing research rigor beyond their normal duties. Do you organize workshops, journal clubs, or do work to try and shift culture? This could be you. www.challenge.gov?challenge=ni...

challenge.gov

Challenge.Gov

Challenge.Gov is the official GSA government website supporting prize challenges and prize competitions that are sponsored by the US federal government. Here federal agencies provide prize awards to ...

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 07/01/2025

When choosing a model organism, scientists often focus on a handful of species. But the tree of life offers much more, so how can we leverage it? Scientists @arcadiascience.com mapped 1 billion+ years of evolution and developed a rational approach anyone can use: doi.org/10.57844/arc...

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 03/01/2025

New Year’s resolutions to consider: More critical thinking in 2025. More dreaming in 2025. More skepticism in 2025. More disruption in 2025. More courage in the face of status quo in 2025.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 01/01/2025

Some things never change. 9th century landlord in Baghdad complaining his tenants might reduce the value of his property.

beat the summer heat, families would have slept up on the nat roof at night and in the cool basement (sirdab) for their afternoon siestas.
In contrast, life for the poorer residents of Baghdad was in overcrowded multi-storey buildings, with floors separated by beams of palm-tree trunks, which were far more solid than the clay and sun-dried bricks that made up the walls and held the buildings together. In one account, a ninth-century Baghdadi landlord complains - as have all landlords before and since - about his tenants who
constantly risk burning the building down by cooking on the roof, reducing the value of the property by clogging the drains, yanking on the doors and breaking the locks and hinges, and pounding their laundry on the floor instead of on the stone provided for that purpose.
f

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 27/12/2024

i’m the only passenger on this 737 for the next 5.5hrs AMA

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 25/12/2024

I made atayef and I think I just invented the atayef cannoli???

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Megan Hochstrasser @meganhoch.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

#PubDrop! We've been experimenting with a more scientist-led approach to open publishing at @arcadiascience.com. After 6 months, here's what we've learned about putting researchers fully in charge of sharing their work… 🧵 1/8 research.arcadiascience.com/pub/result-e... 🧪#ScientificPublishing

Diagram of how various facets of Arcadia’s publishing model have evolved where the biggest improvements are in areas that enhance the external replicability of the model, and the biggest emerging issue is the slow time to publish.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 19/12/2024

The chokehold journals have on science is largely the choice of scientists. We can make different choices.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 18/12/2024

NIH just announced new public access policy. Publicly funded research should be freely available from *day one*. Zero embargo period. Begins December 31, 2025. www.nih.gov/about-nih/wh...

nih.gov

NIH issues new policy to speed access to agency-funded research results

The 12-month embargo period before manuscripts resulting from NIH funding must be made publicly available is removed.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 17/12/2024

"Academia is not really collaborative. In industry, I have to collaborate with equals. In my first week after leaving Harvard, I sat down in a room with eight other executives, and for the first time, I was with eight other full-grown, working adults..." www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harv...

harvardmagazine.com

Harvard Professors Leaving for Private Sector Research | Harvard Magazine

Three distinguished scientists on leaving academia to advance biomedical research

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Michael Eisen @mbeisen.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Peer review - or rather our reverence for its current manifestation - costs us $10b a year directly and arguably more in delays to scientific progress. No discussion of its value can occur without balancing it against its cost.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 13/12/2024

Good morning to free Syrians everywhere 💚 Lots of work ahead but we all deserve this moment. From the Umayyad square in the heart of Damascus, joy.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 12/12/2024

Reminder that most things in science are as they are because we’re letting them be, as if the norms we have are some immutable laws that descended from mt olympus We literally can just imagine something better and choose it. We all have agency.

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 09/12/2024

Federal *nondefense* R&D funding boosts worker productivity significantly more than defense or industry R&D, with returns of 140-210% on investment. Post-WWII data shows it drove 20% of productivity growth. www.aaas.org/news/researc...

aaas.org

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 08/12/2024

Im in disbelief. The tyrannical dynasty that’s caused so many of us generations of pain, imprisoned and exiled my family, has ended. Hard to know what’s next in these conditions. But I’m relishing with my friends and family that we can, if only for a moment, finally breathe.

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Darius Valevicius @dariusliutas.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

There should be an open repository - like bioRxiv, but much more casual - where people can document their failed projects that aren't worth the trouble of trying to publish. A massive graveyard of hypotheses with rich indexing, focusing on methodological choices. #neuroskyence #psychscisky #science

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 29/11/2024

Reading and talking about science outside of my normal field is SO invigorating

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 24/11/2024

academics love complaining about how busy they are but will send you 10-paragraph dms and argue in an endless thread

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kaela @kssphd.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Stoked to be apart of @vox.com 2024 #FuturePerfect50 & even more stoked to talk about defining concepts for yourself, the myth of objectivity, a Sza tweet I live by and how annoying I find resiliency Big thanks to Celia Ford for one of my fav interviews ever 🖤

Screenshot of article head line with a picture of Kaela in the upper right corner.

FUTURE PERFECT
Only 1 percent of neuroscience faculty is Black. Kaela Singleton hopes to change that.
Whatever you do, don't call the Black in Neuro founder "resilient."
by Celia Ford
Nov 21, 2024 at 6:00 AM EST
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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 21/11/2024

Let's give this a go on bsky...WE'RE HIRING! We have multiple really cool positions I'd love to see some creative and passionate people apply to (all PhDs): - Protein Designer - Protein Biochemist - Talent Recruiter #chemsky #bluesci #AIsky @arcadiascience.bsky.social jobs.lever.co/arcadiascience

jobs.lever.co

Arcadia Science jobs

Job openings at Arcadia Science

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Ubadah Sabbagh @ubadahsabbagh.com · 20/11/2024

On the topic of funding absurd research by NIH and other federal agencies, they funded scientists: - watching flies fuck - giving rats massages - spending years on why jellyfish glow - tracking penguin poop from space - using horseshoe crab blood

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