🦛 The Berlin Zoo announced the name of its newborn pygmy hippopotamus — a rare mammal native to West Africa: Broetchen, which is German for ‘bread roll’

We are releasing Carbon: a crazy fast DNA model Carbon is 275x faster than the next best model. So fast you can process the whole human genome on a single GPU in <2 days. Here are the tricks we used: When modelling DNA sequences a lot of the performance comes down to tokenizing the sequences in a smart way. BPE tokenizer struggle because there are no whitespaces and character (called base in DNA) level tokenizers waste a lot of compute on too many tokens. Carbon is built with a unique tokenizer: we split sequences in chunks of 6 bases, but during both training and inference we can work with single base resolution. That's similar to having word tokens but resolving them at the character level. All possible thanks to the DNA tokens unique structure. The architecture combined with the tokenizer makes the model 275x faster than the previous SoTA (Evo2) at this size. We built an interactive demo so you can explore how the model can generate DNA sequences, investigate the structure of genes, predict the effect of mutations, generate and fold proteins and even reconstruct parts of the tree of life. huggingface.co/spaces/Huggin…

อยากเล่นคอนเท้นนี้ คือปกติจะมีแต่คนโพสความสำเร็จลงในโซเชียล แต่ว่าทวิตนี้เราอยากให้คนเล่นโควทอวดสิ่งที่เราผิดพลาดหรือความไม่สำเร็จของเราลง เผื่อเป็นพลังบวกให้คนที่ผ่านมาเห็น ✨🤌🏻

🚨Applications are now being accepted for iDiv’s Summer School 2026: Passion for Collecting – Collection-Based Research in Plant Ecology! Meet the lecturers: 🔬Solveig F. Bucher – Herbaria & digital Collectomics @Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function 🌿Sebastian Gebauer – Collection-based biodiversity research @Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function 🌼Robert Rauschkolb – @PhenObs & phenological research using living collections 📅24–28 Aug 2026 📍Leipzig, Germany 🗓️Apply by 31 Mar 2026 🔗idiv.de/events/summerschool2…

Genome sequencing goes off-grid! 🚐🧬 Researchers from Johns Hopkins successfully sequenced the Red Coachwhip snake (Masticophis flagellum piceus) genome using a mobile lab in a camper van. Using a ONT Nanopore P2 Solo sequencing and Bento Lab, they show that genomes can be assembled at relatively low cost and without the need for a large laboratory! 🐍 Nuclear & mitochondrial genomes of Masticophis flagellum piceus sequenced 🐍 BUSCO completeness score better than most current snake genomes 🐍 All work done in field- or field-simulated settings A great step toward decentralising and democratizing genomics, especially for research in remote locations! You can read the article here: Scott & Mohr (2026). A Nanopore-Only Assembly of a Nuclear and Mitochondrial Genome of a Red Coachwhip (Masticophis flagellum piceus). Genes, 17(3), 307. doi.org/10.3390/genes1703030… Images copyright Alan F. Scott.