Nick Stroustrup
@nstroustrup.bsky.social
1.2K followers 270 following 69 posts
A British/American group leader at @crg.eu . We study the biology of aging using molecular genetics, engineering, systems biology, and probabilistic machine learning. Lab page: http://lifespanmachine.crg.eu
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nstroustrup.bsky.social
moonbow last night over our neighborhood
nstroustrup.bsky.social
Thrilled to hear that our BBVA fundamentos grant was funded. Thanks to @bbvaenespana.bsky.social for their support of new causal methods in aging. With only 4 of these awarded each year in the life sciences, a special congrats to our post-doc Jeremy Vicencio for teaming up to make it happen!
crg.eu
Congrats to @nstroustrup.bsky.social and Jeremy Vicencio for a new grant from Fundación BBVA's Fundamentos programme to support a pioneering project on the biology of ageing. The proposal seeks to build better biomarkers of ageing.

www.crg.eu/en/news/bbva...
nstroustrup.bsky.social
Not every day...and not today either as this is not a viable egg.
nstroustrup.bsky.social
There's some super interesting nemography going on these days!
wormsrock.bsky.social
C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
jeremymberg.bsky.social
All my emails to Director Bhattacharya now available...

jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g...
Cover of "Fifty Shades of 'Jay'" with emails from Jeremy M. Berg to NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya.
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
hankgreely.bsky.social
OH NO!
"The White House issued a proclamation today, Sept. 19, 2025, around 4:36 PM PDT imposing a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa holder who enters the U.S. after Sept. 21, 2025, 12:01 AM EDT. In CA, this will take effect tomorrow, Sept. 20, 2025, at 9:01 PM PDT." Emergency notice at Stanford.
nstroustrup.bsky.social
Do we know whether LLMs do a better job impersonating a statistician or a dean?
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
jomcinerney.bsky.social
Extraordinary paper. I LOVE this sentence:

“This translates to a net lateral gene transfer rate of ~250 genes L−1 seawater day−1 and involves both “flexible” and “core” genes. “

Must read in detail, but these numbers are amazing. academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...
Net rate of lateral gene transfer in marine prokaryoplankton
Abstract. Lateral gene transfer is a major evolutionary process in Bacteria and Archaea. Despite its importance, lateral gene transfer quantification in na
academic.oup.com
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
maartenvsmeden.bsky.social
If you think AI is cool, wait until you learn about regression analysis
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
banditelli.org
DOUBLE PELICAN DIVE AFTER SUNSET!!!! wooooo! What a way to end the week!

time to sleep and prepare for the horrors and joys of the next one

🪶
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
profsimonfisher.bsky.social
If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇
Notes from Beethoven’s genome
Wesseldijk et al. compare the genomic information collected from Ludwig van Beethoven with population-based datasets used to quantify musical achievement.
www.cell.com
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
briantylercohen.bsky.social
And here I was thinking the way to solve hunger was food.
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
f2harrell.bsky.social
New blog article on Statistical Thinking: confidence limits for bootstrap overfitting-corrected predictive performance measures for regression models, useful for strong internal validations including confidence bands for debiased calibration curves: fharrell.com/post/bootcal #statistics #StatsSky
fharrell.com
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
mirimiam.bsky.social
🚨🚨🚨

Please RT!

We're looking for a postdoc to join an exciting joint project between our lab @upf.edu & @crg.eu (Barcelona) and the Sander lab @mdc-berlin.bsky.social (Berlin) investigating how alternative splicing and microexons influences the maturation of pancreatic islets.

Deadline: 30/09/25👇
www.upf.edu
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
jayulfelder.bsky.social
Lots packed into @adambonica.bsky.social's new On Data and Democracy post, but I haven't seen this chart getting the attention I think it deserves. US lawmakers are remarkably old, and the gap here between population age and lawmaker age is exceptional.
data4democracy.substack.com/p/on-data-an...
scatter plot comparing average age of lawmakers vs. median age of population across a bunch of contemporary democracies, showing that the United States is a real outlier, with lawmakers averaging almost 60 years old vs. a median age of the population of just 38. South Korea and Japan come closest with average lawmaker ages around 55, but their populations are older, and most countries on the chart cluster in the 40s.
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
embojournal.org
The proteostatic landscape of healthy human oocytes
Elvan Böke and colleagues @bokelab.bsky.social find that mature human oocytes show reduced activity of lysosomes, proteasomes and mitochondria, highlighting reproductive differences between humans and mouse
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
synbio1.bsky.social
People say “look we automated science” then show you a machine that does a 30-year-old method efficiently

That’s cool! But to me, the heart of science is the 0-to-1 moment. You automated the 100-to-1000 stage
nstroustrup.bsky.social
My group's paper about lifespan variability is a long read,
www.cell.com/cell/abstrac..., but now you can learn about our work in a more accessible way, from a talk I gave at ARDD 2024 available on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lfw...
Nicholas Edward Stroustrup at ARDD2024: Systematic mapping of organism ... population asynchrony
YouTube video by ARDD
www.youtube.com
Reposted by Nick Stroustrup
bencollins.bsky.social
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business?

The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.

The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times.

That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working.

You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step.

If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.