Andrew Plested
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andrewplested.bsky.social
Andrew Plested
@andrewplested.bsky.social
Glutamate

ORCID: 0000-0001-6062-0832
Pinned
The latest version of our collaboration with Katalin Torok and her lab is up. We report some new glutamate sensors. Great work from Sara Bertelli in Berlin and the whole team in London (Holly & Oanh particularly).

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...



1/6
iGlu3Fast and iGlu3Slow, improved fluorescent reporters for detection of spontaneous glutamate activity in the brain
The genetically-encoded fluorescent glutamate sensor, iGluSnFR3, characterised by a high dynamic range and rapid on-kinetics, is an attractive sensor for glutamate imaging in the central nervous syste...
www.biorxiv.org
"we can estimate that our jet vitrification experiment has a time resolution of 21 µs"

🤯
Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-EM Based on Jet Vitrification www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #rhodopsins
November 26, 2025 at 5:58 AM
Marquez-Sharpnack said she was suspicious of the photos, in which the cookies were a little too perfectly pink. But her husband trusted the post because “it was on Facebook.” The result was a melted sheet of dough with a cloyingly sweet flavor. “A disaster,” she said.

#melted #UnreliableNarrator
NEW: AI “recipe slop” is overrunning search and social. Food creators say Google’s AI Overviews and glossy fake food pics are drowning out real, tested recipes — collapsing traffic and setting home cooks up for disaster, especially this Thanksgiving.

Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
AI Slop Recipes Are Taking Over the Internet -- And Thanksgiving Dinner
Food bloggers see traffic dip as home cooks turn to AI, inspired by impossible pictures
www.bloomberg.com
November 26, 2025 at 5:52 AM
What a neat way to make gold particles of higher order. Looking forward to see the tomograms of excitatory synapses with multiple labels (and much more)! #iGluRs
Out today, we can now multiplex receptor mapping at synapses thanks to a dimeric gold nanoparticle label optimized by Hoyoung that's distinguishable from monomers!

Dimeric gold nanoparticles enable multiplexed labeling in cryoelectron tomography | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
November 26, 2025 at 5:48 AM
Not that new, but worth a post - a nice calcium binding site in the pore of the trimeric Bile Acid Sensing #ionchannel BASIC.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The bile acid-sensitive ion channel is gated by Ca2+-dependent conformational changes in the transmembrane domain - Nature Communications
The bile acid-sensitive ion channel (BASIC) is inhibited by extracellular Ca2+ . Here, authors present cryo-EM structure of human BASIC in the presence and absence of Ca2+ , providing insight into the...
www.nature.com
November 26, 2025 at 5:45 AM
Simply a super paper! Beautiful and profound.
Yu Zhou, @chris-lingle.bsky.social et al. ask whether distinct β subunit isoforms coassemble in BK channel complexes or segregate into different complexes. They show that ternary β2:β3:α complexes form, consistent with a trinomial model of random mixing of β subunits. rupress.org/jgp/article/...
November 25, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
Today is the International day for the elimination of violence against women. In 2024, an estimated 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members worldwide. That is 137 women and girls every day. One every ten minutes. www.un.org/en/observanc...
International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women | United Nations
The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women aims to create awareness of the fact that violence against women is a human rights violation that impedes progress in many areas, in...
www.un.org
November 25, 2025 at 4:28 PM
This morning, I found I could no longer disable AI on Google with the -ai tag.

I switched to DuckDuckGo. The results are better and it´s easy to disable the AI summaries.
Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea
November 25, 2025 at 7:03 AM
Nice article about the leading computational model of water. The 8th most cited paper ever, with 45000 citations!

#biophysics #chemistry

news.yale.edu/2025/11/18/d...
Decades later, a Yale chemist’s water simulations continue to make waves
A look back at one of the most cited science studies of all time — Sterling Professor of Chemistry William Jorgensen’s landmark 1983 simulations of water.
news.yale.edu
November 25, 2025 at 7:00 AM
Elsevier & Ugc care group-2 journal
We will publish backdated papers also.
Best Regards,
Editor JETM

#AcademicSpam
#TheMindBoggles
November 25, 2025 at 5:31 AM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
i’m not crying you’re crying

xkcd: Fifteen Years

Fifteen Years
xkcd.com
November 25, 2025 at 1:58 AM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
reminder if you're german/germany-based, please consider signing!
November 24, 2025 at 8:15 AM
I signed this open letter against the blind adoption of "AI" in our science and in our universities, and I urge other scientists and university staff in Germany to do the same.

Otherwise it's a #RaceToTheBottom
November 24, 2025 at 8:58 AM
I always liked physics and didn’t know you could do a degree in engineering. Maureen overslept and by the afternoon we could no longer sign up for the MSc projects we wanted. So, on a whim, with zero biology between us, we chose “Genetic Engineering of a neurotransmitter receptor”.
What’s the lore behind choosing your career path ?
November 23, 2025 at 12:13 PM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
Why do people think England flags have been raised on lampposts?

White adults
National pride: 26%
Anti-migrant/minority sentiment: 49%
Both: 19%

Ethnic minority adults
National pride: 15%
Anti-migrant/minority sentiment: 55%
Both: 20%

yougov.co.uk/society/arti...
November 21, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
I do not like your AI slop
I do not want this worthless glop
I do not read its overviews
I don't care what Grok says is true
I do not like it here nor there
I'm tired of it everywhere
November 22, 2025 at 1:15 AM
Amazing public service from Ed Zitron. Amid all the claims of exponential improvements in AI, there is one thing growing exponentially- the hidden rate at which billions of dollars in costs are outstripping income. @edzitron.com www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
Exclusive: Here's How Much OpenAI Spends On Inference and Its Revenue Share With Microsoft
As with my Anthropic exclusive from a few weeks ago, though this feels like a natural premium piece, I decided it was better to publish on my free one so that you could all enjoy it. If you liked or f...
www.wheresyoured.at
November 22, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
"If the data is accurate...it would call into question the business model of OpenAI and nearly every other general-purpose LLM vendor" www.ft.com/content/fce7...
How high are OpenAI’s compute costs? Possibly a lot higher than we thought
Inference inferred, revenue reconstructed, cash burn quantified
www.ft.com
November 22, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
Another AI cover art. Sigh
The second November issue is online.

-> www.embopress.org/toc/14693178...

The cover features work by Tina Mukherjee and co-workers showing that #macrophage metabolic #reprogramming during dietary stress influences adult body size in #Drosophila.

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....
November 22, 2025 at 9:40 AM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
75 years young 😍
Happy Birthday Tina Weymouth, born on this day in 1950, Coronado, California

One of the greatest bass line ever:
Talking Heads - Psycho Killer - Old Grey Whistle Test

#punk #punkrock #postpunk #newwave #tinaweymouth #talkingheads #punkrockhistory #otd
November 22, 2025 at 7:47 AM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
Reposted by Andrew Plested
"We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces."
- Carl Sagan.
November 21, 2025 at 3:04 PM
This breathtaking article underscores the pivotal significance of..... EXCUSE ME did you swallow a dictionary, as we used to say.

But it's important to note that a vibrant tapestry showcasing our..... THAT'S ENOUGH!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
November 21, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
Ive seen this work from Prof Liqun Luo’s presented a few times now and its stunning and heroic.
November 21, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Andrew Plested
**NEW CHINA SOLAR EXPANSION STORY**

China has doubled the export of solar cells+wafers to assemble abroad in the last several months.

It still exports about the same amount of solar panels.

In October - for the first time - it exported more cell+wafers than panels 🧵
November 20, 2025 at 4:50 PM