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Daniel Asarnow

@dabiophysicist.bsky.social

1.3K followers 1.1K following 830 posts

Postdoctoral scholar in Veesler Lab @ UWa. Former UCSF Biophysics & SFSU & UCSC Biochemistry student & Exploratorium Explainer. He/him. I take tiny pictures, in 2 & 3 dimensions. https://github.com/asarnow

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · Dec 30

Apoferritin on the rocks ❄️🧊🔬

Cryo-EM image of apoferritin particles partly overshadowed by two nanoscale crystals of cubic ice. Some ApoF particles are strikingly visible even through the "ice cubes."

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 1h

Must be the free market at work...

The Moratorium on US Medical School Enrollment, from 1980 to 2005: What Were We Thinking?

In the 25 years from 1980 to 2005 the US population increased by 70 million, but the number of MD graduates from US medical schools remained static at approximately 16,000 per year,1 and the number of...

www.amjmed.com

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 18h

Discussed this classic paper with my undergrad reading group today. Still great 😎 🧪🔬

Direct observation of the rotation of F1-ATPase - Nature

Nature - Direct observation of the rotation of F1-ATPase

www.nature.com

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 1d

Curious what the empirical component is said to be?

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 2d

Gough

maps.app.goo.gl/L7V61wxjJcSH...

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 3d

What’s the word where you’re from that, when pronounced exactly as it looks, identifies a tourist immediately?

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 2d

For a minute I definitely thought you were talking about the Model M

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 2d

NOMPC (5vkq) - heavy protein for gentle touch (in flies and fish). I know you did a Piezo recently but I swear this is completely different

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 2d

You might like Tree Style Tabs, it arranges them vertically in a sidebar and unloads old tabs from memory, so you can have even more of them. It appears I have 2,568 tabs open on my laptop

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 2d

I have more than 10x that number open on my laptop, so don't sweat it

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 2d

and some people use Tree Style Tabs

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 2d

I only have 2568 tabs open on my laptop so no worries then

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 3d

Also dreams that frame themselves as recurring but aren't

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 3d

Golden age of public television

Almanac | Barney on fire | Season 1997 | Episode 44

The real reason Barney caught on fire earlier this week...

www.pbs.org

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 3d

But they put it all on the line, to wear that suit

ACTOR SUFFERS SMOKE INHALATION IN 'BARNEY' SUIT

An actor playing “Barney,” the purple dinosaur loved by millions of children, suffered smoke inhalation when a cooling fan inside the 60-pound suit shorted out during filming of the TV

buffalonews.com

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 3d

When this happens to me I never know if I really had the previous dream or not

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 3d

Nice, thank you! Fwiw not skeptical of the improvements, I've read that in California higher income students were more likely to opt out of testing so wondered about the comparison

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 4d

Now actually quite a common sight in Italy as I learned this summer

Operazione Strade sicure - Wikipedia

it.wikipedia.org

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 4d

That's actually why I like SPDs, they've unclipped in all my crashes

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 4d

I only have 1 bike in Seattle, it's got half and halfs

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 4d

I'm only surprised Kan selection was classified as "gain of function" before pseudotyping

David Tobin @tobinlab.bsky.social · 5d

Important piece from Sarah Stanley at Berkeley on new NIH definitions that can be construed to arbitrarily halt research that is both safe and important to public health and future cures www.statnews.com/2025/10/06/g... via @statnews.com

The NIH ordered me to stop my ‘dangerous’ gain-of-function research. It isn’t dangerous at all

Safe gain-of-function research is necessary to identify new treatments for diseases like for tuberculosis — but the NIH has imposed unfounded stops.

www.statnews.com

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 5d

In-line replies on the listserv, invented c. 1986

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 5d

Some dose models really do say that a little bit of radiation is beneficial, it's an unresolved controversy!

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 5d

And even the single-seat F-105 carried 14,000

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 5d

Then replace "red dot" with "neutron star collision telescope" & imagine seeing the list for that someday!

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Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 5d

Counterpoint - perhaps there is still much to be done

Infini-gram: Scaling Unbounded n-gram Language Models to a Trillion Tokens

Are $n$-gram language models still relevant in this era of neural large language models (LLMs)? Our answer is yes, and we showcase their values in both text analysis and improving neural LLMs. This wa...

arxiv.org

Daniel Asarnow @dabiophysicist.bsky.social · 8d

Is it normal for SimpleFold to leave a bunch of stuff tangled in a knot right on top of the packed core of the rest of the structure (clashing terribly)? Alpha would loop it around the outside, maybe feed the active site its own tail...definitely less jarring #alphafold

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