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floppleton.bsky.social
Postdoc working on RNA Nanotech & MD simulations @uniheidelberg.bsky.social & MPIP. GROMACS wrangler, oxDNA developer. Trapped in an epic struggle between posting about my actual job and the desire to LARP my childhood dreams of being a *real* biologist.
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Hey, what's up with books having sprayed edges these days? LET ME TELL YOU THE STORY! I was there! Thread: 1/13

I'm rereading my book Serving The Reich with increasing dismay, even horror. This, for example. Broaden "European" to "Western" and I have to say that I am no longer as confident in this statement as I was in 2013. That frightens me.

What’s this?? A politician who actually has a grasp on the problem of diverging productivity across different sectors of the economy and ideas that aren’t just the same old things??? I’m pleasantly surprised.

Breaking through the sampling barrier is be a huge advance for MD simulations! Now I want to see this done for DNA/RNA! 🧬

Olaf Scholz mocked British railways over “broken tracks and bad trains”, claiming that "nothing works any more” in the UK. Turns out: Germany rail problems have become so bad that Deutsche Bahn long-distance service is less punctual than even the worst operator in Britain. www.ft.com/content/d3b6...

📣NEW PAPER ALERT ⚠️ Finally out in Nature Communications, after unfortunately spending almost 1 year under review at Nature Materials 🤐 But very very pround of this work that was spearheaded by extremely talented PhD student Moritz Weck: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sure, since you asked so nicely! 1. McConnell and the Senate GOP kept Judd Gregg from joining Obama’s Cabinet and blocked Tom Daschle — a powerful senator! — from being Obama’s HHS pick.

hey for anyone who might want to actually own their kindle books instead of renting them, or who might be thinking of switching to kobo etc and will want to convert them to epubs, you now only have one week before amazon kills your ability to download its ebooks www.theverge.com/news/612898/...

On January 6th, 1995, my (now ex) wife and I boarded a flight from Heathrow to JFK on a one way ticket. We had two suitcases and about $900 in cash - this was everything we owned and we were moving to the US. We thought it was maybe for 2-3 years. I had visited the US once, for a conference, and

They are moving widdershins, counter-clockwise, a motion typically used for banishing, so I believe we are witnessing some sort of bird exorcism ritual, wherein they wish to banish the soul of dead Harris… elsewhere

Well this is an interesting preprint! DNA origami 🧬 assembled isothermally in DMEM with cells. Curious to see how much it changes after peer review. chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

I bow down to the great Bossett. But also, can anybody explain why Echidna+Quasar had such a low score?? I tried googling the combination but got nothing.

This paper on antiparallel vs parallel crossovers in DNA origami is elegant basic science on staple routing and assembly! That parallel crossovers have the same melting temp, but are kinetically unfavored, says some interesting things about the DNA backbone. 🧬 doi.org/10.1002/smtd...

This is how you do it. Thank you, @tupelopress.bsky.social!!!

#MetalSky Spotify users, have you noticed this? I’ve been missing releases from artists I love because they fall off my releases, and then I consistently find them from Bluesky posts instead.

And we thought tuition increases had leveled off…

Just a reminder to everybody working in molecular programming broadly that I set up a feed for our community! I’ve tried to add everybody I recognized or was posting about the field as approved posters, but feel free to DM me if I missed you!

Our perspective on synthetic life is out! It touches on everything from self-replicating chemistry, to biomimetic DNA nanotech (🧬), to minimal cells to answer the question: “when would we know that we created life?” Congrats to all involved and thanks for the brain-expanding discussions! 🧪

🧬 A new tutorial article from our student Sarah, walking step by step through DNA origami simulation using oxDNA model, with the help of oxview.org and oxdna.org free tools. No prior experience assumed, and also accompanied by a video: youtu.be/5-rgMekX8gE onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

This is an excellent summary of the nonsense happening at US scientific agencies.The chaos is bigger than science, but for all my scientist followers, this is your chance to slow down their attempted coup. Do not comply in advance, and when they force you, make it slow.

Can we all PLEASE take a moment to acknowledge that the new forbidden words include female, females, woman, and women which describe about half the population. But of course the words male or men are still allowed. Am I to understand that this is a direct attempt to defeud women's health research?

Just watch all those pundits that cry "keep politics out of science" (whenever it's suggested that scientists shouldn't be passive in the face of bigotry and pseudoscience) stay absolutely silent about this clear case of a political ideology interfering with science

It's the start of #BlackHistoryMonth! Do you know when the first University in the United States was made, which University it was, and who built it?

I think I figured out why California can’t build its high-speed rail system! New ETA: 2070

This is a big deal, y'all. Federal health websites are being stripped of content or removed in their entirety. Stick with this thread for a look at what's disappeared so far! 1/x

No one is telling us what to do, and we’ve received a lot of conflicting information. Many people were advised to pull funds on Jan 28th. This will be devastating for many folks. Check in on your fellows and see if your university can offer them emergency funds.

it's becoming increasingly clear that a major problem for the United States of America is that no one who lives here seems to understand how big, diverse, and complex the US is

Boosting to the molecular programming and science feeds 🧬🧪

NAR has been a great publication for for tools, web servers, and basic science on self-assembly for the DNA/RNA nanotech community! 🧬

How to achieve a high degree of functionalization on DNA origami in a cost-effective manner: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/... It's been great to work with Siliva Hernandez-Ainsa again - twelve years after we first published on DNA origami together!

Need forcefield parameters for a weird small molecule, modified nucleotide, or non-natural amino acid? Check out Grappa, a GNN approach to generating bonded parameters compatible with the MD engine of your choice! 🧬

On top of everything said in this very good thread about innovation and business decisions, I am skeptical that scaling alone can produce anything resembling AGI. Instead, you just get a more sophisticated model of language, which is neat, but still doesn’t capture other basic features brains have.

This would destroy graduate students on teaching/research assistantships, who often receive their tuition as a grant. The tuition amount is often significantly more than they actually make in a year. Imagine paying taxes on a 60k salary while only actually making 20k.