Ale Dau

UCSD MS Bioengineering🧬 | If you think you are too small to make a difference, you haven’t spent a night with a mosquito. -African Proverb

[Ale Dau @ale_dau]

@exequielstna 1.5M/21M

[Nature Microbiology @NatureMicrobiol]

Self-generated hydrogel ejects bacterial cells for localized biofilm dispersion https://t.co/5kIddnMV8y #MicroSky

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

You are literally standing on a planet that grows peaches.
PEACHES.
Not to mention cucumbers, strawberries, kale, apples, blueberries, and DRAGONFRUIT.
Out of dirt.
I cannot stress this enough.
DIRT.

[adel 🌟 @adelwu_]

obsessed w these watercolor/gouche/pastel paintings by cristina vázquez

she paints “moments when people are happy and don’t realize it”

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A newborn sperm whale can’t swim. It starts sinking the second it’s born. If nobody pushes it to the surface, it drowns in mile-deep water.

On July 8, 2023, a sperm whale named Rounder went into labor off the coast of Dominica. Researchers from Project CETI, a $33 million AI initiative out of MIT, Harvard, and Northeastern that’s trying to decode whale language, happened to be there doing routine fieldwork. They had drones in the air and underwater microphones running. What they captured over the next six hours just got published in two papers, one in Science and one in Scientific Reports.

Eleven whales gathered at the surface before Rounder even started delivering. Her mother, Lady Oracle, was there. So was her daughter Accra. Three generations in the water. But the wild part: half those whales belonged to a completely separate bloodline that normally keeps its distance from Rounder’s family. On a typical day, these two family lines split off to hunt in different areas and rarely cluster together. For the birth, they all converged before labor started. The unrelated family somehow knew it was coming.

The delivery took 34 minutes. Sperm whale calves come out tail-first with their flukes still folded from the womb. They haven’t developed the oil-filled organ in their heads that helps adult whales float, so the moment they’re born, they’re dead weight in the ocean. Every adult whale in the group, related and unrelated, started taking turns pushing the calf up to breathe. They kept this rotation going for three hours. When a pod of pilot whales (known to be aggressive toward sperm whales) and a large group of Fraser’s dolphins showed up during delivery, the adults formed a wall around the newborn until the threat passed.

The underwater audio is where it gets interesting. CETI’s microphones picked up the whales changing their vocal patterns during the birth. The click-based sounds they use to talk to each other shifted at specific moments, and vowel-like structures appeared in the recordings. This builds on what CETI found in 2024 when they ran machine learning on over 8,700 recorded whale calls and discovered sperm whale communication isn’t a basic 21-sound code. It’s a system of about 300 distinct sound combinations, with the whales adjusting rhythm and timing in real time, speeding up and slowing down the way a musician does mid-performance. A 2025 follow-up from UC Berkeley found these clicks also contain vowel patterns, something scientists had assumed only humans could produce.

Sperm whales carry the largest brain of any animal on the planet. About 9 kg. Roughly six times heavier than yours. The evolutionary analysis in the new Science paper suggests this kind of cooperative birthing goes back over 36 million years, to the common ancestor of all toothed whales. The calf was spotted a year later, swimming with its family.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Most people will read this and think optimists live longer because they eat better and exercise more. The study says something wilder.

Lee et al. controlled for smoking, diet, exercise, alcohol, depression, BMI, and socioeconomic status. The longevity effect still held. The most optimistic quartile lived 11 to 15% longer and had 1.5 to 1.7x odds of reaching 85 even after removing every behavioral difference.

Which means something is happening at the level of biology, not just habits.

Rozanski’s meta-analysis across 229,391 participants found optimists carry 35% lower cardiovascular event risk. Blackburn’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UCSF found pessimistic attitudes are associated with accelerated telomere shortening. Cortisol suppresses telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds the protective caps on your chromosomes. So chronic negative expectation literally erodes the structures that keep your cells from aging.

The loop runs: pessimistic cognitive style → sustained HPA axis activation → elevated cortisol → telomere degradation → accelerated cellular senescence. Optimists interrupt that loop at the top. They show less emotional reactivity to stressors, faster recovery from acute stress, and they default to reframing threats as challenges rather than catastrophizing.

The part nobody talks about from this paper: the authors explicitly state optimism is modifiable. This isn’t a personality trait you’re born with. Cognitive reappraisal training, morning sunlight for cortisol rhythm regulation, deliberate breathing protocols for vagal tone, structured gratitude practices. All of these shift the prefrontal cortex patterns that determine where you sit on the optimism spectrum.

A 35% reduction in cardiac events from a trainable psychological variable is a bigger effect size than most supplements on the market. That’s the real story buried in this abstract.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

“There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

This is a nice Quanta article on mechanical forces in biology.

The flow of wine down the sides of a glass (called the Marangoni flow) "is similar to the flow of the tissue in the gastruloid" of a developing embryo.

A cell is a vibrating bag of molecules, but those molecules can drive both chemical and mechanical forces!

I'd argue that biotechnology has made a great deal of progress in altering genes to encode new molecules for chemistry, but has lagged quite a bit in manipulating those genes to drive new mechanical forces, which will be essential for reprogramming development and many other things.

[Essayful @Essayful]

C. S. Lewis on reading fiction

[json @JsonBasedman]

>it's porn!
>it's social media!
>it's the internet!
>it's the pill!
>it's plastic!

No, you idiots, it's that children are an economic benefit to you when you're a pre-industrial farmer and they're an economic liability to you when you live in a city and send emails for a living.

[le tour de robyn @robyn_emz]

Presenting: The VIBES CLASSIFICATION for the 2025 Tour de France.

#TDF2025

[Scott Barclay @BarclayCard18]

It is inarguably monstrously impressive to get over losing the French Open from 3 championship points up and win Wimbledon against the same opponent weeks later. Insane.

[Neil Renic @NC_Renic]

Nothing beats that incredible moment during research when you think, “I’m the stupidest person alive”

[4everRFfan @4everRFfan]

This @ROLEX video dedicated to @rogerfederer is a masterpiece. Watch it without moderation!

[miss white @cinecitta2030]

Italo Disco is the soundtrack of the summer

[Sofi @sofiagrciiia]

un día mí abuela me dijo: "no hubiéramos aprendido a andar en bicicleta si alguien en quien confiábamos no nos hubiera soltado" y uff cuánta razón tenía

[Charlotte’s Mum @RobynPorteous]

I am begging you all to read some fiction. A drop, a crumb even.

[Karly Kingsley @karlykingsley]

I don’t know how else to explain this…if you’re cheering for someone else’s rights to be taken away, you’re cheering for your own to disappear too. This isn’t cake. You don’t get more by refusing to share. Either everyone has rights, or no one really does. Thats it. It’s simple.

[Lukáš Ronald Lukács @lucxsronald]

Today has to be the most beautiful day of sports this year… 🤯

Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner produced one of the best GrandSlam finals ever or maybe even the best. The longest Roland Garros final in history with Alcaraz coming back from 3 Match Points for Sinner.

Then the long-awaited battle between the legend and a future legend. 40 years old Ronaldo vs. 17 years old Yamal. 23 years of difference What an epic final of the Nations League, Ronaldo even scoring and getting the trophy.

And then my cycling, with getting the royal battle between the bests of the bests on a sprint stage where nobody expected it. Vingegaard attacking, Evenepoel closing the unimaginable gap alone and Pogačar vs. Vingegaard in a sprint… wow.

And the last of what I know it does not mean that much to the world, but the Czech Ondřej Cink in 34 years of age making his dreams finally coming true and he with the MTB World Cup. You cannot imagine how much it means for the Czech cycling fans. It shows that dreams can come true.

And what a dreamy day it was. ❤️

[Mr Blue(Pede B)🇩🇰 @cycletips123]

Thats a crazy top 4 😳
Aliens have arrived.
On a sprinters stage…

[Hugh Kearns @ithinkwellHugh]

A PhD means making a significant and original contribution to body of knowledge. This doesn't mean winning the Nobel Prize. #PhDchat #PhDforum #ECrchat #postdoc