Tamas Nagy

"Because manuscripts reflected real progress towards our field’s goals, our assessment systems began relying on them as primary metrics...which is obviously flawed...Generative AI has broken this already-flawed proxy completely" journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

🎉 Our paper is out today in @science.org! How does the intestine maintain the right balance of cell types? We find that signalling rhythms matter! So proud of our three shared first authors, Sonja Weterings, @hiromuneeto.bsky.social & @jddeleede.bsky.social! 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very excited to see this published! #ERliterature

I think “ending aging” is gonna be a second given that we barely understand the molecular logic failures that lead to aging phenotypes. Hard to fix what you don’t understand.

6 days to register a comment on NIH Request for Information (RFI) on Changing Reporting Outcomes for Peer Review. They are proposing to hide the impact scores and percentiles. 🤔 funding decisions will not be transparent👎🏼. Register a comment while you still can rfi.grants.nih.gov?s=6a2b1c22c3...

"The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks" That's exactly right - a critical read on the future of AI (safety): www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Excited to announce that the Rikki Garner lab has opened its doors in beautiful Austin, TX! Our interdisciplinary lab @utaustin.bsky.social MBS investigates tissue fluidity as a universal physical regulator of multicellular patterning in health and disease. www.rikkigarnerlab.org 1/n

Even with all the advancements in automated cell tracking getting us to 90%+ accuracy...that's still a lot of broken tracks over long movies! Our brains are pretty good at this so I made Vizsla 🐕, a little @napari.org plugin, to help you fix your tracks manually. 👉 pypi.org/project/napa...

Wowowow. This some spectacular imaging. Amazing watching the immune cells migrate on top of the epithelia!

newrepublic.com/post/215117/...

Interesting how similar this is to neutrophil/immune cell migration under confinement…huh.

I've struggled to get nice, pixel-perfect borderless animations out of Napari for presentations, but I recently hacked up a nice script for it. I'm pretty happy with the results! More info 👇 tamasnagy.com/blog/2026/na...

I've struggled to get nice, pixel-perfect borderless animations out of Napari for presentations, but I recently hacked up a nice script for it. I'm pretty happy with the results! More info 👇 tamasnagy.com/blog/2026/na...

This is such a good point. Given that genAI reproduces large chunks of code verbatim from open source software without crediting the original author...suffice to say, it's probably doing the same exact thing when writing.

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.

Watch a muscle fiber take shape. 🔬 This microscopic video captures a muscle cell fusing with a developing muscle fiber, with cell membranes visible in purple and yellow. The Rando Lab uses live-cell imaging to understand how cells coordinate muscle regeneration. Credit: Tamas Nagy/Rando Lab

New Toettchlab paper alert! Harrison Oatman just published his beautiful work combining software design for "smart" microscopy+optogenetics and some really beautiful work understanding EGFR-driven collective cell migration. www.cell.com/cell-systems...

Interesting work that shows that frontier models are basically not improving in reliability despite them appearing to do better on benchmarks. Reliability is key to trust. Hard to imagine LLMs being trusted with critical operations until this is solved, *if* it can be. arxiv.org/pdf/2602.16666

New paper 🧵 What if the "landscape" that guides cell differentiation isn't fixed, but is sculpted, in real time, by the very cells moving through it? We call this a 'sandscape' : grains of sand that carve dunes as they move, while the dunes' shape simultaneously steers where the grains go next.

Excited to share our new paper, now published in Nature Cell Biology! 🎉 We asked a fundamental question in cell biology: How do cells maintain polarity while migrating? Especially how do cancer cells navigate confined spaces? www.nature.com/articles/s41556-026-01981-1

This is clearly top 1% quality data

Very excited to be sharing our new paper, just out in Nature Cell Biology! The big question we investigate: How do migrating cells put their front 🔴 and back 🔵 in the right place?

Got to play around with Holotomographic imaging of muscle cells yesterday via the @uclastemcell.bsky.social imaging core and the results are pretty spectacular 🤩 You can see everything from mitochrondria to lamellipodia to macropinocytosis…with no labels!

It really is concerning how few people know that this is the case.

TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...

We invented “triplet tumbling microscopy” (TTM) to track protein-protein interactions in living cells! Tag your protein with GFP and see it interact with *untagged* binding partners www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

Trainees jump on this! Juan is an awesome human and he’s gonna do some amazing science ✨ Can’t wait to see what he gets up to!

What if you got to work with some of your best friends on a science project? I can't publish how fun this was, but I can show you the data (🧵)! Last week, we posted our second neutrophil swarming paper to bioRxiv and I wanted to post my favorite videos here~ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our paper is now out in Science! Super excited to share our discovery that #mitochondria #pearling is the elusive mechanism driving the regular distribution and inheritance of #mtDNA nucleoids 🧬 [1/6]

For me, the most maddening thing is when AI boosters, or detractors, all seem to agree that AlphaFold is an unmitigated good and useful tool showing the power of AI. I disagree. It's hit and miss. And the misses are REALLY expensive. Especially when the conversation suggests it is ALL HIT.

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

A high-affinity split-HaloTag for live-cell protein labeling. And much more. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So excited to be drowning in new "findings". Coming soon to a journal near you! 🫠 github.com/aiming-lab/A...

Federal funding for US biomedical research is moribund. Since October 1 2025, NIH is -80% in new grants and -70% in values (total dollars). Labs are closing down and researchers are leaving science. To what end?

Do folks have a preferred protocol for bleaching fluorescent proteins prior to doing Immunofluorescence? I tried a 3% H2O2 + 12mM HCl solution but I had severe cell detachment problems (despite everything being fixed).

@science.org Evolution of error correction through a need for speed | Science #evolution 🧬🔬 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Interesting study from *Anthropic* that found that AI use didn’t significantly speed up development on a novel task (w/ new Python async lib) but it did hurt understanding. Unsurprisingly, AI seems best at regurgitating common patterns and isn’t that helpful for novel ones. arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

Why is it that small animals like insects have a landspace body plan when viewed head-on, but larger animals like elephants are taller than wide? With @m-v.bsky.social, we find out in our new preprint titled 'Size and shape of terrestrial animals' - arxiv.org/html/2602.00...

Really excited to share our new paper in @nature.com! We uncovered how a physical instability of the cytoplasm coupled with the cell cycle drives cytoplasmic partitioning in early embryos #zebrafish #drosophila. Read more in this🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩 @poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de

For all the talk about accelerating science, tools like this will likely slow things down because we have wade through mountains of AI garbage. The consequences need to grow for faking results.

Peer review science relies, more than we care to admit, on what @zey.bsky.social calls "load bearing frictions" that make it difficult to fake good science, and on trust that most ppl also value science itself & won't cheat just for personal gain. This creates the wrong environment for that to hold.

Blog post: Chance favors the (theoretically) prepared mind Data is big, machines are learning, so what good is theory anyway? Isn't most discovery driven by serendipity anyway, with theory mostly a "post-mortem"? I argue that this view discounts the value of theory. open.substack.com/pub/arjunraj...