Sam Foley

🧪⚛️ Our paper is finally published in Phys Rev Research! doi.org/10.1103/cnfz... Can cells make decisions using equilibrium physical principles, without resorting to irreversible, energy-consuming signaling cascades? We say yes, with the help of self-assembling membrane proteins! 🧵(1/7)

As usual

Out now in Biophys. J: why do some immune cells switch their direction and move opposite to a chemoattractant gradient? doi.org/10.1016/j.bp... (movie from the original experiments by Malet-Engra et al.)

Nothing like spilling a full thermos of tea all over your laptop to remind you to check the integrity of your backups!

Grocery day again

I don't deny that dogs can sometimes be quite lovely but what I will say is I don't trust their opinions. If a cat recommended me an album it had bought, I'd totally check it out. If a dog did the same, I'd promise to listen to the album, out of politeness, with no intention of actually doing so

The Big 10 conference having 18 schools is silly. They need to add 2 more schools and rename to the Big Score conference asap.

A cri de cœur from a emeritus professor of biochemistry at Yale. inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinion-re...

BPS abstract day tradition

I had a Bitcoin wallet when they were worth ~1 cent each. I have many regrets.

Intruders under the blanket!

Intruders under the blanket!

Postdoc appreciation week is over, so please, STOP appreciating postdocs. They will get some more appreciation next year

Nicolaas van Kampen's essay on the Gibbs Paradox, in addition to being an insightful, no-nonsense explanation gas entropy and indistinguishability ("Quantum mechanics has no bearing on the question"), opens with some comments on physics education that were ahead of the times for 1984!

The time is nearly perfect for a movie about the famously chaotic and dramatic 1976 production of Star Wars, starring Ewan McGregor as Alec Guinness and Hayden Christiansen as David Prowse.

To add insult to injury, it's full of AI slop images.

Finally a more intuitaive way to learn pLDDT/pAE? 😎 sokrypton.github.io/protein_figh... (Character idea from @hannes-stark.bsky.social & Alex Waldherr)

Two types of academic correspondence are “apologies for the delay but I’ll need more time” and “hey do you wanna do this thing with me three years from now”

This is a really nice post about teaching and giving exams now that LLMs are everywhere. Rather CS-focused, but still interesting generally. ploum.net/2026-01-19-e...

I deleted my quote tweet of this yesterday because I figured I ought not react too quickly. But man, this is such a naively simplistic view that it's hard to take seriously.

Hyperparameters aren't enough; we need omniparameters

Perhaps important to note in Buckmaster's statement: "The program this fits into was not started by us nor was it proposed by a Large Language Model." Certainly puts a damper on the "zomg AI is solving all of math" narrative being pushed by OpenAI cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...

This is a great read.

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Physicist: The cup *was* half full of superfluid Helium-4, but it has climbed the walls of its container and the cup is now empty

Some fun with parallel curves

He likes grocery day

CMU biophysicists are flipping the script on cell membrane dynamics. They’ve developed a new theoretical framework that links membrane stress to lipid flip-flop, uncovering a key driver of membrane asymmetry. 🧪⚛️ www.cmu.edu/mcs/news-eve...

Oh boy, I better go find a phone book!

This sums up the frantic and coerced deployment of "AI" throughout public and private sectors. Results of even cursory audits are horrifying every time, invariably paired with forced adoption and retaliation for asserting professional norms. Colonialism is a cherry on top.

When you're rapidly approaching the grant deadline and finally have a complete draft

Watching a required university training video and... is Sameer here living in Cyberpunk 2077?

Is there a nice (standardized) way to indicate or hint at the integration measure of the functional when writing down a functional derivative? I find it annoying that I can't deduce the units of a functional derivative at a glance the same way I can for ordinary derivative expressions

Is there a nice (standardized) way to indicate or hint at the integration measure of the functional when writing down a functional derivative? I find it annoying that I can't deduce the units of a functional derivative at a glance the same way I can for ordinary derivative expressions

The 4th of July. Reservoir Hill. Baltimore, MD. 2026.

Homescreen weather widget was not designed with this weather in mind

Article by Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels about the value of academic research and the highly productive partnership between academic institutions and the federal government. Read it here: www.science.org/eprint/VXUK8...

Apparently autonomous teams of engineers require significantly higher capability than autonomous teams of researchers, for some reason. Setting aside whatever units "capability" is supposed to have. Inverse hallucinations? Fizzbuzzes/minute?

What if instead of a grant proposal, I could just put together a packet of all the scribbled down notes on random science ideas I've had and then the reviewer just picks the one they want to fund. I think it would save us both a lot of time.