A very plausible account of pre-LUCA life: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs…

No scaling laws for single-cell foundation models: when bigger atlases stop teaching the model anything In language and vision, the recipe has been simple: more data, bigger models, better performance. Single-cell biology borrowed that playbook. Foundation models for transcriptomics jumped from 1 million cells to atlases of over 100 million, on the assumption that scale would unlock the same gains. Alan DenAdel and coauthors put that assumption to the test, and the result is sobering. Working from a 22.2-million-cell corpus, they pretrained 400 models across five architectures (from PCA and a variational autoencoder up to the Geneformer transformer) and ran 6,400 evaluation experiments. They varied not just dataset size (1% to 75%) but also diversity, using cell-type re-weighting and geometric sketching to deliberately enrich rare cell types and transcriptional states. The finding: performance saturates almost immediately. On cell-type classification, batch integration, and perturbation prediction, most models hit their ceiling at roughly 1% of the corpus, about 200,000 cells. Beyond that, adding millions more cells changed essentially nothing. More diversity didn't help. Even spiking in genome-scale Perturb-seq data, to give the models perturbed phenotypes rather than just healthy ones, failed to move the needle. Larger models did score better overall, but they too plateaued early on data. Two points stood out. Simple baselines (PCA, logistic regression) often matched or beat the transformers. And the strongest model, SCimilarity, won not because of size but because its contrastive training objective is aligned with the downstream task. For single-cell data, what you train on and how you frame the objective matters far more than how much you collect. This reframes a quiet but expensive habit. In drug discovery, biotech, and any pipeline leaning on cell atlases, the instinct to keep scaling pretraining corpora may be burning compute for no return. The real leverage sits elsewhere: curating high-quality, task-relevant data and matching the training objective to the actual question you're trying to answer. Paper: DenAdel et al., journal license | doi.org/10.1038/s41592-026-0…

Everything you always wanted to know about plasmid chromatinization … but were afraid to ask dlvr.it/TSxQQv

Opposing roles of serine and charge in IDR condensate miscibility: nature.com/articles/s41589-0…

Now online! Deep-sea megafauna co-opts microbial energy metabolism genes to withstand ultra-long starvation dlvr.it/TSvF6t

Out now in Science! Our new study challenges long-standing assumptions about transcription factor specificity in eukaryotes. Novel single-molecule measurements of TF behavior in living cells reveal an independence of locus-specific binding from DNA sequence recognition.🧵 science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

In the latest issue! Transplantation of encapsulated mitochondria alleviates dysfunction in mitochondrial and Parkinson’s disease models dlvr.it/TSq3m5

Hello world, meet 1,000× Expansion Microscopy. 1,000,000,000× expansion by volume! A gel that starts at a few centimeters will then expand to the volume of an Olympic swimming pool. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… In our new bioRxiv preprint, work carried out between MIT and UMG, led by Helena Hu in collaboration with scientists from the labs of @eboyden3 Ed Boyden, Silvio Rizzoli, and myself, we present Thousandfold Expansion Microscopy. By enlarging biological specimens across multiple rounds of expansion, molecular-scale features, as small as the distances between adjacent amino acids, can be visualized with conventional optical microscopes. Democratizing super-resolution microscopy.

Online Now! Evolving strategies for lineage tracing: Genetic markers, synthetic barcodes, and natural variants dlvr.it/TSn429 #stemcells

How animals sense Earth’s magnetic field is one of biology’s enduring mysteries. Researchers in Science have now identified superparamagnetic macrophages in the livers of rock pigeons to be crucial for magnetic sensing. The finding uncovers an unexpected role for immune cells in sensory perception and may fundamentally change our understanding of animal navigation. Learn more in this week's issue: scim.ag/4uAKQDl

This is very impressive. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

Syngnathid diversity is a popular target for phylogenetic studies, illustrating central themes in comparative biology,: diversity of form and function with unity of plan. link.springer.com/article/10…

Inside bird eyes is a strange and mysterious structure called the pecten oculi. It looks like a pancake flipper, or maybe a radiator. Some 350 years after anatomists first described it, biologists finally figured out its purpose. quantamagazine.org/how-the-b…

fascinating technology, specific de novo DNA binders enable: - PAM independent targeted genome modification - synthetic transcription factors - sequence blockade therapeutics - synthetic regulatory circuits - DNA biosensors and custom diagnostics biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

The bird eye pushes evolution to its limit. @yasemin_sap reports: quantamagazine.org/how-the-b…

Cynanchum marnierianum succulent, also known as the "dead stick plant" due to its leafless, stick-like branches. It produces unique yellow-green flowers that resemble lanterns or bird cages. These unusual succulents are native to Madagascar and thrive in well-drained soil.

Indonesia logs 10 new orchid records, expands biodiversity map en.antaranews.com/news/41531…

A Treasure Trove of Cambrian Fossils Rewrites the Story of Early Life quantamagazine.org/a-treasur… via @QuantaMagazine

Watch as this plant’s chloroplasts shift in response to bright light (which turns on at the 20-minute mark, indicated in the upper left). These organelles are solving a packing problem: how to optimize photosynthesis without sustaining damage from dangerously intense rays. quantamagazine.org/the-hidde…

Four new species of Gyrinomimus whalefishes: zookeys.pensoft.net/article/…