🔊 Job Opportunity: Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Bacterial Evolution. Looking to recruit a postdoc to join a UKRI FLF-funded project on antibiotic resistance evolution in the microbiome 🦠 3 years funding, deadline 26th Jan, please share! hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrec...

And Stanford is trying to squeeze $329,000 of restitution out of the students, some of whom are couch surfing and sleeping in cars, to bankroll their ✨building renovation✨ when Stanford’s facilities director has testified that the damage was UNDER $10K. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

My insurance premiums tripled.

The International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health will hold its annual meeting 28-31 July in Kiel, Germany. Abstract submission deadline 1 March isemph.org/page-18356

This is the problem with all the "Grok apologizes for CSAM" articles. Grok is a random text generator with no fixed beliefs. The actual story--which the media have yet to correctly report--is that Musk and the leaders of xAI are allowing this to happen.

lets rally for another #MathCoffeeSelfie thread!

Broader point here: there's no reason to assume that Trump and his sycophants have *any* broader plan. They'll "run" the country? With what occupying force? These people can't even run a Signal chat. Trump just thought this would be a cool thing to do, and no one stopped him.

Hands off Venezula protest in Boston today (3PM)

Discourse is very annoying right now because American oil companies don't actually want to deal with Venezuela, but the entire endeavor was obviously pitched to Trump as a colonial resource extraction play, so it IS a war for oil even if that doesn't make sense! Cults of personality aren't rational.

It's more than a little disconcerting that invading another country to steal its resources is now less controversial and more acceptable to my government and much of this country than me using the bathroom

Theory: Mainstem media freaked out about video games and social media because their kids were doing it and the parents were baffled by it. But LLM's are marketed to adults more than teens. So the media sees them as Important Engine of Innovation rather than Scourge of the Youth.

“As of this writing, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post has mentioned Grok's CSAM spree in coverage.” @albertburneko.bsky.social

LLM-driven chatbots are actually doing to people what they insisted video games would do to people and yet no "Dateline" special has happened.

#boston #venezuela #trump

Also #Worcester #Massachusetts www.answercoalition.org/venezuela

Terrible take. Literally every FIFA Peace Prize winner has done this.

Protest 3pm today, Boston Park Street Station. This was shared by MA Peace Action, an org I know and trust. There appears to be some pro-Maduro framing here, which I disagree with, but the urgent need to protest the illegal coup outweighs that by far imo.

You don't get to avoid justice for drug trafficking, unless you're a Trump supporter www.npr.org/2025/12/02/n...

This person went on a buying spree over the past 24 hours. Fresh wallet. Only existed since Dec 27th and has only bet on Venezuela-related markets. polymarket.com/@0x31a56e9E6...

“This is a seismic, long-awaited correction of the scientific record,” said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan… “It pulls the veil off decades of industry efforts to create a false narrative that glyphosate is safe…People have developed cancers, and people have died because of this scientific fraud.”

"I don’t know why my fellowship was terminated. I suspect that it has something to do with studying a species that doesn’t fit the binary of what we expect to see in nature, with completely different males and females." @carlzimmer.com profiles my wonderful coauthor @jjinsing.bsky.social Gift link.

Oh he incurred criticism from the Israeli government? The ones currently committing genocide?

Trump: everyone in the US died from drugs last week Reporter: [nods] Trump: so we must murder on the high seas Reporter: [nods] Trump: I caught Trix rabbit once Reporter: [nods] Trump: the cock on that bunny Reporter: [nods] Trump: bigger than you think Headline: Trump Policy Seeks To Save Lives

Well this turned out great

R.I.P. 2025 (2025 - 2025)

Suspending Doctors Without Borders is definitely a thing healthy countries do

And there are articles of impeachment waiting in the House as we speak — it's time to get our representatives on board! ✍️ SIGN to endorse the articles! ☎️ CALL your representative, and ask them to stand with science! 💲 DONATE and fuel the fight! standupforscience.net/impeach-rfkjr

My spiciest publication from 2025 is this article on religion in political science: academic.oup.com/psq/article-... Ours is a liberal Protestant discipline.

I told my story. It's behind a paywall, but here it is. www.sfchronicle.com/california/a...

A visual metaphor of AI’s role in Society

As Hannah Arendt put it: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." Undermining that distinction will be a lasting legacy of generative AI.

NEW DATA: in November, the unemployment rate rose to the highest level since September 2021. That’s Trump’s economy.

The revolutionary technology being sold to us is bots paraphrasing right-wing propaganda written by other bots loosely based on source material from wikipedia

Claude (Opus 4.5) has started citing Grokipedia in its results.

Really confused as to which side of the War on Christmas these people are on

DOGE was A LOT less likely to cancel contracts from companies that donated money to Republicans than companies that donated to Democrats.

merry Christmas one and all abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

/ EYE ALMOST DIDNT MAKE THIS MAP / EYE MEAN Y EVEN BOTHER / JUST SUM MOAR FOOLISH FLAKES 4 UR TUESDAY / THESE FOOLISH FLAKES WILL PROBS START AROUND 11 AM & LAST AS LIGHT INEFFECTUAL SNOWBLOBS ALL DAY LONG / FLOATING OFF AWAY FROM BOSTON SUMTIME AFTER 2 AM

BREAKING: WATCH the full 60 Minutes CECOT segment here. This was sent to me anonymously. It appears to be the segment CBS' Bari Weiss killed. www.muellershewrote.com/p/watch-the-...

ICE is obstructing criminal prosecution of sex crimes against children

I only know the mathematical modeling subfield of evolutionary biology, but my experience is that those in the field are open to diversity in sex & gender expression, because it actually is pervasive in nature!

Weird how The Free Press was able to publish all of these without comment from the Washigton University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

Since we’re on the topic of asking people for comment …

Now accepted in Genetics! academic.oup.com/genetics/adv... We ask why and when rescaling of forward simulations in population genetics is not accurate. There are some interesting results for people performing simulations with selection.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

“It’s not politics. That’s what the data say.” www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Late job posting: My department is hiring a tenure-track faculty member in microbiology! Please share with anyone interested in working at a PUI. We have a preference for someone who can teach Medical Microbiology, but other than that the focus is open-ended. Happy to answer qs.

Stunning new revelation: Epstein hung out almost exclusively with guys who had black boxes where their heads should be.

We should note that yesterday Senators Durbin and Duckworth issued formal criminal referrals for actions by members of the Trump regime. I think this needs to become far more common as we must attach criminality to their outrageous actions, and not let it get normalized as just boys being boys.