Schering Young Investigator Award 2025 by the Schering Stiftung for Agnes Toth-Petroczy @tothpetroczylab.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social. She receives the award for her work on the evolution, diversity, and function of proteins. Congratulations! 🎉 www.mpi-cbg.de/news-outreac...

This type of technology is used on cryptocurrency hardware wallets. Even though no technology is 100% safe, that's as good as it gets.

I think technology can at least mitigate the other side of the problem, which is that our incentive structure is broken. Ideally we'd fix the latter was well.

I agree with both points.

On the technology side, we have things like Secure Element Chips, where the signing happens directly on the hardware. The private key never leaves the device (e.g. it could happen inside an AFM). The image and its metadata would already be signed when it reaches the user.

This is doing the rounds in my messages with colleagues, and is a very real threat to the field of microscopy 😬.

Given one (published) microscope image probably costs between $100 and $10,000 (or more) to make - the lure of "oh I will just ChatGPT it" is very much there.

Yes absolutely. And ideally microscope manufacturers should have their instruments digitally sign all raw images, this way faking raw images would become very difficult.

I knew from the beginning, have been following this story...

lol, of course.

Interesting. For me, looking 15 min on a story like that, this is puzzling how it can happen. I hope these types of disputes can be conclusively settled in the future, once instruments digitally sign raw data that is appended to all manuscripts.

Reminds me of: www.linkedin.com/posts/mu-yan...

Seems to be a weird compression artifact (?) What does the journal say? The author seems to be helpful in providing the raw images (though the scale bar is indeed off :D)

True. Those manipulations were always just the tip of the iceberg.

Fair! There is a potential solution we had originally discussed, but it didn't make it into the final version: If manufacturers make their microscopes *digitally sign* all raw images, they become very hard to fake. This is done already for things like forensic data but rarely in academic research.

Full story: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

AI can now generate fake microscopy images that are nearly impossible to detect. A serious threat to scientific integrity—and we’re not prepared for it.

Commentary in @natnano.nature.com

#nanotechnology

Big congrats to first author Syuan-Ku Hsiao, and big thanks to our collaborators Alf Honigmann, Carsten Werner, and Markus Mukenhirn (@markusmukenhirn.bsky.social)!

Read the full story here: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

#CellBiology #Organoids

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DyNAtrix also allowed us to measure "resonance bands" of the cell's mechanical interactions with their environment, revealing the timescales at which these interactions take place.

(Check out Supp. Info. Note S1 to understand how exactly this works) 🤓

#Mechanobiology

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Here you see a kidney cyst inverting its polarity after we added synthetic DNA signals.

These signals enter the material and "flip switches" that change its stress-relaxation time.

For the first time, switching ECM stress-relaxation can be done reversibly and during an ONGOING cell culture!

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Exciting application of our programmable #CellCulture matrix #DyNAtrix.

By creating a mechanically reconfigurable microenvironment, we can now invert & guide epithelial cell polarity in real time.

#DNAnanotech

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