🐧 Breaking news: #Penguins in Patagonia decide to ditch fish for a career in #toxicology, apparently detecting #PFAS chemicals by waddling around dramatically. 🤦‍♂️ Meanwhile, the article itself is so exclusive that it's hiding behind a 403 Forbidden error—as if anyone was dying to read about birds with lab coats. 🧪
https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/news/penguin-toxicologists-find-pfas-chemicals-remote-patagonia #403Forbidden #BreakingNews #HackerNews #ngated
Penguin ‘Toxicologists’ Find PFAS Chemicals in Remote Patagonia

Penguins can serve as living monitors of their environment by using small, chemical-detecting leg bands, according to a study from UC Davis and SUNY-Buffalo.

UC Davis
Penguin ‘Toxicologists’ Find PFAS Chemicals in Remote Patagonia

Penguins can serve as living monitors of their environment by using small, chemical-detecting leg bands, according to a study from UC Davis and SUNY-Buffalo.

UC Davis
Very high maternal exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) during pregnancy is strongly correlated with a significantly increased risk of asthma in children.
#Epidemiology #Environmental #Pediatrics #Toxicology #PFAS #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/04/epid04092601.html
Link observed between very high PFAS exposure and asthma in children

We saw a clear link between very high PFAS exposure and a higher incidence of asthma

new paper: "ToxTempAssistant: using large language models to standardise cell-based toxicological test method descriptions" https://doi.org/10.1080/2833373X.2026.2638036

"This study quantifies the tool’s baseline performance under controlled conditions. ToxTempAssistant uses grounded, per-question prompting with mandatory source attribution. Evaluation paired a positive control (..) with a negative control (..) across three LLM models (gpt-4.1-nano, gpt-4o-mini, o3-mini)."

#llm #toxicology

📢 Call for Papers: Advanced 3D Tissue Models for Improving Translational Pharmacology and Toxicology

⏳ Submission Deadline: 30 November 2026

🔗 Submit your work: https://spj.science.org/journal/csbj/si/advanced-3d-tissue-models

#CallForPapers #DrugDiscovery #Toxicology #3DTissueModels #Organoids #PrecisionMedicine #Bioengineering #Pharmacology

Are red currants safe for dogs? Someone wants to put such a plant in my backyard as part of a study on hummingbirds.

A quick web search finds several sites claiming they're highly toxic and several claiming they're perfectly safe. Which ones are slop? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dammit, Jim, I'm a computer scientist, not a veterinarian!

#DogsOfMastodon #toxicology #gardening #slopocalypse

"ToxMCP is a suite of guardrailed, auditable agentic workflows for computational toxicology delivered through the Model Context Protocol (MCP)" https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.06.703989

And GitHub: https://github.com/ToxMCP/toxmcp

#toxicology

ToxMCP: Guardrailed, Auditable Agentic Workflows for Computational Toxicology via the Model Context Protocol

Computational toxicology increasingly relies on evidence, high-throughput screening, predictive (Q)SAR, adverse outcome pathways (AOPs), physiologically based kinetic (PBK/PBPK) models, and exposure databases to support integrated approaches to testing and assessment (IATA). Yet the practical workflow remains fragmented across heterogeneous tools, data formats, and licensing regimes. Large language models (LLMs) can lower the interface barrier, but free-text interaction alone is insufficient for regulatory-grade science: it is difficult to audit, difficult to reproduce, and prone to overconfident errors. Here we introduce ToxMCP, a collection of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers designed as a guardrailed, federated integration layer for reproducible computational toxicology. ToxMCP wraps toxicology-relevant capabilities, including chemical identity and regulatory context (EPA CompTox), rapid ADMET profiling (ADMETlab 3.0), mechanistic pathway retrieval and structuring (AOP knowledge services), quantitative read-across workflows (OECD QSAR Toolbox), and mechanistic PBPK simulation (Open Systems Pharmacology Suite), as typed tools with explicit inputs/outputs, provenance bundles, and policy hooks (e.g., applicability domain checks, critical-action confirmation, and role-based access control). We demonstrate how natural-language risk questions can be compiled into auditable tool invocations, returning mechanistic metrics such as tissue AUC/Cmax, sensitivity curves, and conservative points of departure. We further outline an evaluation protocol for measuring computational reproducibility, task throughput, and scientific utility across multi-tool toxicology tasks. ToxMCP reframes ‘LLMs for toxicology’ from conversational summarizers into accountable orchestrators of established scientific kernels, enabling faster iteration while preserving the evidentiary structure expected in regulatory and academic settings. ![Figure][1]</img> ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Dutch Research Council, https://ror.org/04jsz6e67, NWA.1292.19.272 [1]: pending:yes

bioRxiv
Cell Painting is a scalable, image-based cellular profiling method that utilizes fluorescent dyes and artificial intelligence to measure thousands of molecular and structural changes in human cells following chemical exposure.
#Toxicology #Pharmacology #CellBiology #ComputationalBiology #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/03/phar03312601.html
Scalable cell imaging method could help make drug safety testing faster, cheaper

Researchers show that Cell Painting, an image-based cell profiling method, can reveal details of how drug candidates and other chemicals may harm cell

Inhaling common disinfectant chemicals known as quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs) is profoundly more toxic than oral ingestion, causing severe lung injury at exposure levels frequently found in humans.
#Environmental #Toxicology #Biochemistry #Pharmacology #PublicHealth #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/03/env03302601.html
Common Disinfectant Chemicals Far More Toxic When Inhaled

Breathing in common disinfectant chemicals known as quaternary ammonium compounds, or QACs, may be far more harmful than swallowing them

Can ‘mini brains’ replace lab animals? Organoids are changing how scientists study disease | The-14

Lab-grown organoids offer a humane alternative to animal testing, helping scientists study diseases more accurately and advance personalized medicine research.

The-14 Pictures