Laurel Oldach

@laureloldach.bsky.social

1456 Followers 2304 Following

Biochemistry, chemical biology & instrumentation at Chemical & Engineering News. I'm just a reporter, standing in front of 2026, asking for some epistemological clarifications. Signal: Laurel_Oldach.07

Two micrographs side by side, labeled "Apoferritin images with and without XLPP [crossed laser phase plate]." On the left, an image labeled "laser off" shows a high-background image of single round particles, labeled with 1.02 micron definition. On the right, an image labeled "laser on" with a phase shift of 78 degrees shows much sharper definition of similar round particles, and is labeled 0.45 micron definition. (The point is: the image on the right has way higher contrast.)

Headline "Sleuths say Thermo Fisher doctored data to sell antibodies," subhead "Apparent manipulation of validation images in reagent catalog concern researchers," byline Laurel Oldach, image of a pipette loading an SDS-PAGE gel for a western blot

Annotated map of Europe, Africa and Asia. The Strait of Hormuz is shown, with arrows pointing overland to Morocco, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and China - major markets for the global sulfur trade that has been disrupted.

Headline, subhead and image of the linked article: "Advances in imaging tools offer spatial biology for the AI age. Spatial-biology tools are collecting more comprehensive data, and companies that want to model cells in silico are hoovering it up." With my byline and a hero image showing brightly colored dots. (If you click through, there's a better alt-text for the image!)

Fake screenshot from The Onion of a story headlined "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Agonists." The article reads, "Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of obesity drugs in this country. First it was GLP-1. Fine. Then they came out with tirzepatide, a GLP-1/GIP agonist. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because then came retatrutide. That's GLP-1, GIP and glucagon. But you know what happened next? I'll tell you what happened. The bastards kept going. Now they've got quintatide: GLP-1, GIP, glucagon, amylin and calcitonin. Five agonists. FIVE. Now we're all standing around counting receptor pathways on our fingers like idiots. Well, fuck it. We're doing five agonists."

Table screen-capped from an annual financial statement. Annotated with a box higlighting revenue in millions of euros for influenza vaccines sold in Europe (52), the US (54) and other countries (108).

Since hepatitis B vaccination at birth was introduced in the US, hepatitis B cases among infants have dropped 69%, according to a presentation from CDC scientist Adam Langer. Some data presented in the meeting also suggested no increased risk of adverse events when the hepatitis B vaccine is given at birth, although Kulldorff disputed that claim after visibly doing napkin math at the conference room table during the meeting.

Screenshot from a Wired story reads : “ But there was one group Church was cool on having their genomes sequenced: newborns. “It’s kind of too late for really early onset [diseases], and it’s way too early for late onset.” The latter conditions, he noted, have very few cures. “It’s kind of a recipe for anxiety more than anything else.””

Screenshot of a Bing search (don't at me, it's my work computer) asking "how many ApoE alleles are there?" with a big Copilot-generated answer: THREE. The response lists apoE2, apoE3 and apoE4, which are indeed the *most common* human alleles, but absolutely not the only ones. (The response also links to a wikipedia article that lists two other alleles!)

HHS secretary RFK Jr appears before a senate committee, in a suit, with a 16oz beverage at his elbow

The men’s room was tiled and washable, and it wouldn’t cost too much to turn it into a clean room. It was the only restroom on the third floor, though. “We proposed this to the dean, and Frances was pretty persuasive. She almost got the dean to go along with this,” he says, but some of the male chemists who worked on the third floor did not like the idea of walking down a flight of stairs to use the restroom, so it never happened. Blanch notes that at this time, the women’s restroom was on the first floor, so Frances had to walk down two flights of stairs when she wanted to use it.

(4) This report about the new NSF director does not build confidence in his leadership, in case you needed another reason to doubt it. Someone stepped in and removed the entire "Controversies" section from his Wikipedia article, which is the part that describes a lawsuit filed against him in 2021 for gender discrimination. The IP address that did the revisions resolves to. . .the NSF.

Flat illustration of a blue-gloved hand holding a visual urine test strip (the kind with a lot of small swatches that change color) over a urine collection jar.

a duck made of glass glowing green under UV illumination

AI searchbot writes a description of cysteine ubiquitination... that ends with ubiquitination of a lysine. Trust me that this is annoying if you're a biochemist just looking for a reference.