Deeply ashamed of my country.

Happy that our work on the evolution of Yellowstone cyanobacteria is now published in @elife.bsky.social: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...! Did a lot of work in revision—many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for great suggestions! Also see the eLife digest for a summary: elifesciences.org/digests/9084...

the people who live on the computer dont understand what text is, and everything on the computer is text in a representational relation to a bunch of tiny switches

Van Parijs’ “responsible inexpertise” for academics’ participation in the public debate

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.

It was such a joy to celebrate Hanukkah with Mandy, Kathryn and their son, Gideon. As Jewish New Yorkers across our city prepare to light candles and mark the seventh night today, I wish you and your families a Hanukkah full of light and love. youtu.be/KIxAKyioXng

“One tentative take-home is that a combination of movement and stability might help” Never thought I’d see the day when Jeremy Fox supported the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis. dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/d...

An incredible ICTP initiative is our Postgraduate Diploma Programme. Rigorous one-year pre-PhD training for students from the Global South. I have personally seen this program transform the lives of those in the quant life sciences. Due Feb. 28 2026. Please share widely. www.ictp.it/news/2025/11...

As my time as a researcher at FSU Jena and @microverse.bsky.social in the group of Rosalind Allen comes to an end, I warmly thank all collaborators and colleagues for the excellent science and discussions! 🚨I am (yes, again...) on the job market, looking for higher positions -->

Dr. Brittany Mazny's paper on evolved formate assimilation needing a CO2-concentrating mechanism is now available in Current Biology with @blasarre.bsky.social, Alekhya Govindaraju, and Barry Stein. Free access until Jan 28 at: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mF0A3QW8S... www.cell.com/current-biol...

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations

Looking for advice: we’re trying to extract HMW DNA from PES filters, so no bead beating. Pretty low biomass. Troubleshooting phenol-chloroform extractions right now but would love any advice or protocols if people are willing to share!

Ended up adding some amaro Montenegro, might make another for Xmas

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

This is my latest piece, on the meaning of Artificial Intelligence. I rooted the discussion in the history of AI research, with Herbert Simon as the guiding light. Along the way I analyze many issues, such as the trade off between attention and capital. www.continuousvariation.com/p/what-we-ta...

It is imperative for STEM faculty (hi, it's me) to fight back against this absolutely abhorrent idea. I deeply value the scholarship and creative works of my colleagues. Demanding a teaching load away from their necessary work is hugely damaging to our nation's future and effective education

The Roman Empire’s Vast Road Network—186,000 Miles of It—Has Just Been Mapped in a New Digital Atlas

This entire grift relies on convincing people that they don't know how to do the things they have always known how to do, and ironically, if it works, we will, in a very short amount of time, forget how to do all the things we have always known how to do.

New version! Additional support for our original characterization of fluctuations around steady-state abundance (sojourn trajectories) + sojourn times reflect temporal dynamics to a greater extent than other common macroeco measures (residence and return times) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

*Tons* of students need to (and even more should need to) take stats classes. You're being ridiculous if you think eliminating the stats department is going to lead to significant cost savings. And you know who's best equipped to tell you that? Statisticians.

We Should Have Finished Reconstruction: A Brief History Of American Politics, 1865-2025

Thinking back to undergrad, mandatory physics courses were 100% disconnected from biology. This gap (IMO) impedes the quantitative training of bio students. So papers like Zim et al that connect microbial physiology to electric circuits have great pedagogical value journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

the reason its bad to run universities like businesses is that almost all businesses fail on any reasonable timeline of evaluation. hudson's bay made it the longest and even they only got to about half an oxford of longevity

“The intention was to punish elite universities, it was not to destroy the scientific capacity of the United States, but that’s what they’re doing.” This is clearly and flatly wrong, as evinced by every science-related policy decision and appointment, whether to do with universities or not.

Adding alt text to this because this is fucking amazing and everyone deserves to read it.

It's pretty telling which people are like "maybe the student had a point" and who immediately clocked it as a transparent attempt to get a trans grad student fired or worse. Maybe listen to your trans colleagues on this one my dude, and sit this one out.

U Oklahoma throwing a *grad student* under the bus because they dared to defend minimum academic standards. If that undergrad wanted praise for writing garbage they can always enroll at Liberty University.

📅Our speaker next week is Ágnes Móréh (HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, Hungary) presenting: ⭐Simultaneous invasion by two species: consequences for their success and for the resident community⭐ Zoom Link: iite.info/seminar/ Global times: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/f... See you there!

Teaching population biology and assigning Bohumil Hrabal's "All My Cats"

Thinking potatoes boulangère and Basque pumpkin cheesecake this Thanksging...

Recently finished Chen-Pang Yeang's "Transforming Noise". Incredible history of the science of "noise" that discusses the interplay between the development of techn and theory w/out shying away from equations. Highly recommend.

A climate deal without explicit language calling for a fossil fuel phaseout is like a ceasefire without explicit language calling for a suspension of hostilities. #COP30

One of the most unique aspects of ICTP is our Diploma Programme. Pre-PhD students from the Global South spend 1 year in Trieste to gain knowledge and skills necessary to pursue PhDs worldwide. The 2026-2027 call is now open w/ a February 28 deadline. Please circulate. www.ictp.it/news/2025/11...

⚠️ When “technology will save us” becomes a climate risk! A new paper from great colleagues takes a careful look at techno-optimism — the belief that technology will largely solve climate change — and what it means for real-world climate action. (1/4)👇 osf.io/preprints/ps...

"International School on Statistical Inference from Biological Data" February 2-13, 2026 @University of Havana DEADLINE: December 1st Share and apply! Priority to students from South/Central America + Caribbean indico.ictp.it/event/11113

Thrilled to share our new work uncovering how membrane transporters determine resource-size preferences in gut bacteria, and showing that deleting a single protein domain can shift a transporter’s preference from long to short fructans. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Glad bluesky is still working so we have somewhere to complain about cloudflare

This is a reminder that @asn-amnat.bsky.social publishes abstracts in both English and your native language, using your native alphabet. You can see and read those online. Here is a screenshot of a great example. Love seeing this in my favorite journal.

Next Monday, we welcome @cshambaugh.bsky.social from the University of Oregon in our ROTO Lecture Series who will talk about dialectical biology. Just register via the link and join the talk and discussion at 4pm (CET): rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #HPBio #PhilSci #HistSci

The public option for K-12 education should be the only option. No private primary or secondary schooling in the US, period.

Deeply ashamed that the leaders of my country are considering this policy.

Fun piece of history/philosophy of science. "Vienna Indeterminism", the relationship between causality and realism conditioned on one's concept of probability, examined for Boltzmann, Mach, and Exner. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Super excited that the bulk of my PhD work is now preprinted! Here we used whole-community competition, or coalescence, experiments to quantify selection acting on genetically diverged strains within larger communities. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Open call for proposals for ICTP's Physics Without Frontiers, which "works to teach, train, and inspire physics and mathematics university students worldwide, with focus on countries in the Global South, to help build the next generation of scientists." Due December 15 www.ictp.it/home/physics...

Good morning to all those people who wasted the last decade saying, "there's no point tackling climate change in the UK, because China." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

they shouldnt have bailed out silicon valley bank, that was a fuckup

In case anyone is wondering if Watson was really THAT bad, @lpachter.bsky.social compiled a list of quotes that are absolutely not for the faint of heart. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...

“When the axe came into the woods, the trees said, ‘Do not worry, the handle is one of us.’” - Turkish proverb