Sejal
9.2K posts
"All eyes are on Canada": Israel seeking "significant change" in how Canada tackles antisemitism. toronto.citynews.ca/2026/03/17/isr…
This is really cool (and wild): Scientists simulated a complete living cell for the first time. Every molecule, every reaction, from DNA replication to cell division. The paper (Luthey-Schulten et al., Cell 2026, doi.org/10.1016/j.cell…), just out today, used JCVI-Syn3A — a synthetic minimal bacterium with fewer than 500 genes. A 3D+time simulation of the full 105-minute cell cycle: DNA replication, protein translation, metabolism, division. Every gene, protein, RNA, and chemical reaction tracked through physical space. It took years to build. Multiple GPUs. Six days of compute time per run. And this is the simplest possible cell. A human cell has ~20,000 genes. It lives in tissue. It interacts with neighbors. It differentiates. It responds to drugs in ways that depend on context we haven't fully measured. Mechanistic simulation of the minimal cell costs 6 GPU-days for 105 minutes of biology. You cannot scale that to human cells. The complexity isn't 40x harder. It's exponentially harder. This is why the field pivoted to data-driven models. You can't hand-encode the regulatory wiring of a human hepatocyte. But you can learn it — if you have the right perturbation data collected across enough diverse biological contexts. The two approaches aren't competing. Papers like this generate the ground truth that future ML models need for validation. But the path to a clinically useful virtual cell runs through foundation models, not through scaling up mechanistic simulation. Amazing work!
It is raining oil in Tehran this morning after major airstrikes on oil facilities in the South and West of the Iranian capital. @CNN @cnni
Opinion: Canada is putting Palestinian grad students in unfair immigration limbo theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…
On February 11, 2026 while speaking in Lok Sabha LoP Shri @RahulGandhi warned about India’s energy security being compromised. “The US will tell us who we can or cannot buy oil from - If it's Russia or Iran, the US will decide. But our Prime Minister will not decide." The proof is here to be seen - and the silence of the compromised Prime Minister is shameful.
To think that @AnitaAnandMP was once my student. Very depressing.
As a former professor of law, you remarkably fail to mention international law...not even in passing.
My statement on Iran-related hostilities in the Middle East:
First they steal your history. Then they erase it.
