The year is 1959. Eisenhower is on his second term, Castro just kicked Batista out of the country and Ray Charles’s Let the Good Times Roll is topping the charts.

Bands have been known to declare “No Synths!” on their albums. This statement was a badge of pride indicating that the artists hadn’t used any modern trickery in their recordings. Today, the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) in science has created a similar scenario. Advocates argue that these tools improve every aspect of science, including the publication process.

We’re excited to announce the initial release of crown maps for 100 million trees in the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with information on location, species identify, size, and alive/dead status. Using NEON’s remote sensing data we’ve been developing computer vision models to locate tree crowns for all individuals visible from above and classify those crowns to species (Weinstein et al. 2019, 2020, 2023; Marconi et al. 2022).

We have a new paper out describing how vesicles move inside cells. The paper in a nutshell In science-speak We analysed how small vesicles are transported in cells. In contrast to large vesicles and organelles, which move using motors inside cells, our analysis revealed that passive diffusion is the main mode of small vesicle transport. In normal language Inside cells, molecules are moved in tiny transport packets called vesicles.

The Weecology lab group run by Ethan White and Morgan Ernest at the University of Florida is seeking a Project Manager to conduct and manage a long-term field study of breeding wading bird colonies in the Florida Everglades.

The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student interested in ecological forecasting of desert rodents to start Fall 2024. This position is funded on an NSF grant to study ecological forecasting under novel conditions using data from the Portal Project, our long-term field site located in southeastern Arizona.

Last week an exciting new addition to the R ecosystem was announced: webR. webR lets you run R from inside your browser, without installing R ¹ . This is a really exciting development for educational materials, because it makes it possible to provide interactive materials where students can modify, create, and run code right inside a web page with zero setup.

Here is a summary of the info I gleaned from asking for recommendations for the best human cell line. These were my criteria: For context, we currently use a number of human cell lines in the lab: HeLa, RPE1, HCT116, SKOV3; as well as many others in the past: HEK293, DLD-1, U2OS. I consider HeLa to be the almost perfect cell line.

I recently did a webinar for ASCB called “From Microscope To Figure”. For posterity, I am re-posting the webinar here with some additional info.

When preparing images for publication, it is good practice to check how accessible they are for colour blind people. Using a simple bit of code, it is possible to check an image – or a whole figure – in ImageJ for accessibility. For example, Figure 1 from our recent paper. Originally looked like this: Using the script we can see how it appears to people with different types of colour blindness.