We are in no small part made of virus. Over millions of years, our DNA has accumulated so many viral snippets that they now make up 8% of our total genome. quantamagazine.org/how-virus…

An AI revolution is sweeping through education. But teachers who can convey the excitement of thinking and learning are irreplaceable go.nature.com/3VbVDHw

Hannah and Simone co-taught a crash course on cryoEM to the 1st year Stanford medical students !

Microbial genomes have been extensively mined for new proteins, but the noncoding sequences between genes remain largely unexplored despite encoding important regulatory and functional information. In our new work, we asked whether gLM2 could help systematically discover these intergenic features. tatta.bio/intergenic-sae

Congratulations to Stanford Medicine sleep researcher, Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD, on receiving this year’s Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, one of the most prestigious science prizes in the world. He discovered that narcolepsy stems from a deficiency of orexin in the brain, opening the door to new sleep therapies. stan.md/4xGWHkT #LaskerAward

Last call! 📣 Join us tonight at 6:00 PM ET to talk with Hertz Fellows about the application and interview process. Meet tonight’s speakers and get your login here — if you haven’t already: bit.ly/Info-Sept10 Bring your questions and hear directly from our Fellows about what makes a strong candidate, applying without published research, navigating a gap year, preparing for interviews, and more. Can’t make it tonight? Join us Monday, Sept. 14 at noon ET for our next application info session. Register here: bit.ly/Sept14-Info #HertzFellows #2027HertzFellowship #Fellowship #GraduateStudents

More atomic force microscopy videos. These show Cas9 "searching" through DNA and then cutting it. It's surprising how long the DNA cut takes. It'd be cool to see similar videos for bridge recombinases. These were published by the great @hnisimasu in 2017.

Giant viruses are so cool 🤩

This is a wild overstatement of what was actually achieved. But “AI successfully remixed a small number of mostly already-observed, largely synonymous mutations and in a few rare cases managed to make it nonlethal” doesn’t sell hype as well

The muon is a heavier cousin of the electron. Every particle in existence has some small effect on its movement. By measuring exactly how the muon “wobbles,” physicists might be able to infer the presence of as-yet undiscovered particles. quantamagazine.org/physicist…

Congratulations to Simone (@simone_alma), Collin, and Max (@maxewilkinson) on their paper - out today- on terminase sensing by Avs2 and Upx! (1/4) nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

The Origins and Evolution of the RNA Virome in Land Flora: Molecular Plant cell.com/molecular-plant/abs…

None of RNA’s remarkably versatile forms are built to last — not even within the cell that they came from. quantamagazine.org/cells-acr…

Quantifying protein unfolding kinetics with a high-throughput microfluidic platform: Cell Systems cell.com/cell-systems/fullte…

We’re so excited to share our new paper, where we tackle the wealth of structural and functional diversity of anti-phage sensors across bacteria (1/6)

Congrats Sofia, Hyunbin, and everyone in the lab on their paper on bacterial sensing of the phage proteome!!

Happy to announce our paper on the DRT3 anti‑phage defense system has been published in Cell! Many thanks to @SternbergLab and @shsternberg for the fantastic collaboration! cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092…

Life finds a way, even in some of the harshest environments on Earth. Meet the extremophiles: quantamagazine.org/the-organ…

Congratulations to the Michelle Chang Lab, publishing “Targeted enzyme discovery using metal-coordination mining” today in @Nature. Great work from Yanni and Michelle. Full paper: nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

High schoolers doing chromatin profiling? @FredHutch's Dr. Steve Henikoff explains how open science tools are being used to teach the next generation of scientists. Interview with @SpringerNature: springernature.com/gp/resear…