@ContamClub So the students were supposed to make smears of sterile water, to check their technique. This one 1. did something weird with the streak technique and 2. got a really nice contaminant slightly outside her own drawing? Anybody knows where the sun like […] [Original post on mas.to]

"Ornithologist in residence at a queer church built in 879" is one of the proudest lines on my CV

Reminder that I am the ornithologist-in-residence at the 8th(?) oldest church in England (which has a largely queer congregation) despite being atheist. How cool is that? It's super cool. My next residency is THIS WEEKEND! Come for a parish bird walk!

The @ruhr-uni-bochum.de has a news piece (in German) about my professorship and the research I will be doing in the coming years: https://news.rub.de/leute/2025-10-14-neu-ernannt-christopher-kyba-traeumt-von-einem-satelliten

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today. Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch. A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out […]

Virtual private networks have become standard tools for many journalists, as the services promise to enhance privacy, security, and freedom. Jacob Roach tried to find a #vpn that really works. (via @WIRED) https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-vpn/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/1825/sep/24/transport.uk I love that info on the top: THIS ARTICLE IS MORE THAN 200 YEARS OLD :) #Railway200 #railway #trains #media

Persönliches Highlight: Mit den „Streitkräfte und Strategien“-Hosts in einem Raum und dann auch noch vor interessierten Zuhörer:innen im NDR Pop-Up-Studio in Hamburg-Bergedorf. Herzlichen Dank für die Einladung! @kuestnerk.bsky.social

I did it! I did a blog post! This one's about migrating my website source code from GitHub to #codeberg https://ericrscott.com/posts/2025-09-20-migrating-to-codeberg/

"Overall, the message from this survey is positive– #evolutionary #biologists are readily employable outside of #academia, generally well-prepared for those jobs, and report high levels of satisfaction in their non-academic #careers" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.19.671061v1

Just dropped: #microbinfie Pathoplexus Part 1! Join Lee & guest Clint (and me) as we deep-dive with Emma Hodcroft, Theo Sanderson & Arthur Shem Kasambula about Pathoplexus […]

This isn't my sub-field of astronomy, but someone needs to give this conference 1000 internet bonus points for the best, most geographically relevant acronym, plus their logo is ADORABLE https://uwaterloo.ca/astrophysics-centre/geese-on-2025 GEESE-ON […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Springer now demand that your pre-acceptance version of a paper on the arXiv comes with a disclaimer: “This preprint has not undergone peer review (when applicable) or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this article is published in insert journal title] […]

🥳 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/sep/04/calling-your-boss-a-dickhead-is-not-a-sackable-offence-tribunal-rules?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky&CMP=bsky_gu

I am excited to announce that we are one step closer to the Bremen musicians thing (which I only learned about from many members of the European Fediverse sending me the wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Musicians_of_Bremen). This young […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

„Ist das euer Ernst?“ Eine ukrainische Friedensnobelpreisträgerin muss immer wieder Menschen im Ausland davon überzeugen, dass die Ukraine Frieden will. Was @avalaina.bsky.social hier eindrucksvoll beschreibt, ist eine Tragödie und zeigt, wie schief unser Diskurs ist.

Since #eseb2027 will be a hub meeting, which should reduce travel distances overall and thus be more environmentally friendly, I thought I’d get into the spirit early. My (not particularly impressive) train journey back home from #eseb2025 starts with a TGV from Barcelona Sants to Valence, France.

Wacholder: unannotated yeast ORFs (19k of them!) tend to be short and lowly expressed, yet 1/3rd can be localised by microscopy. Do they have a function under selection? Check for reading frame conservation between species -> two classes of ORFs, corresponding well to annotations. Only 11 […]

nice thing about summer holidays is getting the whole HPC to myself.

The symposium on mechanisms of adaptation to changing conditions in microorganisms (S34) is taking place today and I’m presenting a poster. If you’d like to learn about the role hypermutation and environmental fluctuations play in rescuing a cold-adapted marine bacterium from heat death, feel […]

I’ll never miss a talk on (Ophio)cordyceps. Great start to day 4 at #eseb2025 by Charissa de Bekker

ALRIGHT. PHEW. That took longer than I thought. But mstdn.science is running v4.4.3. If you want to have a look at what that means for you have a look at https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/07/mastodon-4.4/ For me, there is a new option to include a terms of service. Yaaaaay, just what I always […]

The small populations symposium at #ESEB2025 is attracting a large crowd (🥁)

I'm going to steal this great explanation of ascertainment bias: if some dolphins push people towards shore, and some push them out to sea, we’ll never hear the stories of the 2nd, because the people drowned. Beaulieu #eseb2025

@eseb Distinguished Fellow Talk Dieter Ebert 🇨🇭, has been an ESEB member since his PhD and played a key role in the society all of his career. #eseb2025

Large conference things: Standing in line for 20 minutes to get into a symposium that got few abstract submissions and was thus assigned a small room. Good for the speakers, less so for the attendees? #eseb2025

Am Freitag treffen in Alaska ein Präsident und ein Diktator aufeinander. Trump ist gewählter Präsident der USA (mit autokratischem Mindset), Putin ist Russlands Machthaber. Dass Putin von vielen Medien weiterhin als „Präsident“ bezeichnet wird, ist ein Problem. Thread. 1/10

It looks like I will probably be able to offer a funded PhD position in #RemoteSensing using nighttime lights this fall. If you are interested yourself, or if you know someone who might be interested, please direct them to contact me. #academicjobs

THIS ESSAY IS SO GOOD. I don't know that I've ever read an essay so thoroughly saturated with sarcasm and yet devastatingly accurately shredding someone's stupid ideas. This is the kind of essay our world needs right now […]

Among the many drinking fountains in Basel, around 30 are adorned by the statue of a basilisk, the heraldic beast of the city. Despite growing up in Basel and living here on and off for over 20 years, I had never seen all of them. So as a summer running project […] [Original post on mstdn.science]

Motherfucking wind farms…

“Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week.” City engineer credits lower speed limits and smart design. I agree. #Helsinki #VisionZero

Obwohl die meisten Stellungnahmen zur neuen, verschärften Verordnung zur Überwachung des Post- und Fernmeldewesens (#VÜPF) vernichtend ausfielen, ist noch von Seiten des Bundesrats bisher kein Absehen von den Plänen zu erkennen. Die @digiges hat deshalb als eine der Massnahmen eine Petition […]

Mittwoch! Passend zur Sommerszeit: eine kleine Geschichte der Sonnenbrille. Wir sprechen nicht nur über ihre Anfänge, sondern vor allem über die Bedeutung, die sie im Laufe ihrer Geschichte erhalten hat. https://www.geschichte.fm/archiv/gag512/

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Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland’s coast is a breakthrough for tidal energy. @AssociatedPress reports: https://flip.it/Mp-eGq #energy #climatechange #science #scotland #ocean

Hi all. It's been a while since I've asked, but I'm here again asking for you to support your local fediverse instance. I know many instance operators struggle to make ends meet each month, and there does seem to be a downward trend on donations across the board. If you love this place and are […]

> On November 28th, 2012, Randall Munroe published an xkcd comic that was a calendar in which the size of each date was proportional to how often each date is referenced by its ordinal name (…) "In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date […]

We are delighted to share that the ETH Zürich Library has become a supporter of PCI!🎉

You can now follow Casey Newton, and his essential newsletter at the intersection of technology and culture, right here in the fediverse, on @feed@platformer.news

# Wednesday, it's Captain!

Bored? Try my bioinformatics quiz https://forms.gle/qykZnNFaeJknXk5f6

Don’t know if there’s an occasion (not sure you need one), but a few public transport busses in Basel have googly eyes now #publictransit #öv #basel

The existence of baby spinach suggests the existence of sporty spinach, ginger spinach, scary spinach and posh spinach.

My friend is in charge of the team that wrote the climate change adaptation plan for Switzerland and this is one of the things they expected. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/28/swiss-glacier-collapse-village-switzerland-blatten

“The bird—a young Cooper’s hawk, to be exact—[…] was using the crosswalk—more specifically, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk—to ambush prey.” 🤯 by @katherinejwu #birds #Science #theatlantic Gift link […]

I enjoyed writing my first blog post last weekend, so I thought I'd write another one. This one is about a #bash script that became a #python script and is now a package. All because I was too lazy to label plates and tubes in the lab by hand. The post is mostly about the history and motivation […]