And at least in California, once the financial aid packages from these spectacular small colleges come in, you’ll see they often line up exactly with that cost of attending a UC (with class sizes an order of magnitude larger).

"there's a new serif in town"

"are you enjoying duo mobile" does a hamburger enjoy being made of quarks. does a fish enjoy linear time. does the mountain enjoy the first taste of a cup of hot chocolate when you get back to the ski lodge. your question means nothing to me. i couldn't enjoy duo mobile even if i tried

This. There is no longer any excuse for vaporware. …but this dovetails in an interesting way with the idea a grant has to be half completed in order to get funded.

Apologies to xkcd...

@jbyoder.org - I’m losing track of how many times I’ve posted a link to this blog post in a review. A national landmark! www.molecularecologist.com/2024/08/13/f...

Random thought, but what's the process the people designing the spaces that will be purposefully caught on fire for turkey or christmas tree PSAs use? Is it "this is the average American home" or is there room for "I saw this gadawful pillow at Target, let's burn this fucker"?

published in 2018 and meanwhile seven years old(!), but still a highlight: wiggling 𝘝𝘪𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘰 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘦 competence pilus catching DNA for uptake/transformation. found during the repair of our archive. written by @racheldiner.bsky.social . #MicroSky

people are actually very susceptible to just-so stories about human origins because listening to bullshit helped us survive on the savanna

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on. (Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

Every tech company eventually either reinvents the bus or reinvents phrenology

My lab at Indiana University is searching for a *postdoc* and *technician* to contribute to our work studying the evolution of social behavior using fruit flies as a model system. Details below, feel free to email me with any questions! More info on our research: saltzlab.com

parents, be sure to check your kids’ candy this halloween. I just found a novel phage defense system inside this snickers

“Bonferonni correction”, an invaluable method in #statistics, refers to the act of repeatedly correcting misspellings of the word Bonferroni at multiple places in a draft manuscript. #science #academia

Not great, but, alas, his seems so appropriate for 2025.

Despite decades of effort, scientists have still not discovered a foolproof way to evaluate colleagues’ work that doesn’t involve reading the paper

Reposting this just in case anyone who is interested missed it. We’ll be reviewing applications on Nov 1st, so there is still time to apply for this position this week! Great position for people who want to do both research and teach at a high level with undergraduates!

"New Far Side comics" was definitely not on my bingo card for this week. They're not bad! www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/

Administrators: look at how your “peer institutions” are reacting. You wouldn’t want to sign it and mark yourself as needing special favor and so a tier below, would you?

Glucose capping of 5'-mRNAs in E. coli 😱, presumably is installed during transcriptional initiation #MicroSky #RNASky www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Pls share: Hofstra University is looking for a Tenure-Track Microbiologists! ----- We are seeking a microbiologist with a research focus on a non-pathogenic bacterial model system. hofstra.peopleadmin.com/postings/6542

it's wild that R, the ubiquitous statistical computing language, was co-created by a Māori prof (Ross Ihaka) — and yet the vast majority of scientists who use R don't know this is like inventing the toaster. possibly the largest impact of a single member of an indigenous community on modern science

My mother calls these conjugate nouns: I have folklore, you have superstition, they have witchcraft.

Interested in a tenure track position teaching and doing research with undergrads at a PUI? We are looking for a broadly-defined microbiologist who can teach Med Micro and Immunology. Apply at universityofscrantonjobs.com/postings/8308. Pls share widely to feeds (& on twitter if you still tweet)! 🦠

2/ In 2001, Borsook said tech "libertarianism" reflected an adolescent mindset, with a craving for unchecked independence & resistance to constraint. She warned that tech libertarians wanted an anti-human world that worked more like a computer. From "Cyberselfish," a book based on her 90s writing:

If the NIH appropriations are generous, many applications are submitted to take advantage of the available funds. If NIH appropriations are constrained, many applications are submitted to compete for the limited funds. 11/17

🎶 Staaaaar House Is a very very fine house, With no cats in the yard, Because cats belong indoors, But there’s no cats in there either, Since my wife is allergic, And we have bunnies,, And I’m not really sure how this song goes…🎶

As national medical, scientific, public health and patient organizations, we call for the resignation of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ensure the health of the American people. Read our statement: asm.org/press-releas...

I would read an academic murder book in which the murder was solved by reading the syllabus

I am delighted to announce that the UW Department of Biochemistry has opened searches for TWO tenure-track positions. Descriptions and links in the following two posts.

What is everyone's favourite review on anti-phage/defence systems? Ideally as an introduction to the concept/key systems for undergraduate level without expertise in phage biology #MicroSky #PhageSky

Faculty opening in Cornell Chemistry at the Assistant Professor level in the area of chemical biology, broadly defined! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30338 #chemjobs

Rare bird fails to move Overton window

A simple design framework that will massively improve your slides and your public speaking clauswilke.substack.com/p/slides-tha...

Friends, the mathematics department @hmc.edu is looking to hire a new tenure-track operations researcher who would feel at home in our department. Please spread the word: math.hmc.edu/tenure-track...

Elio Schaechter was one of my heroes. His 1958 paper with Ole Maaløe and Niels Kjeldgaard (fondly known as “SMK”) is a North Star for so much work in my group. A wonderful scientist, great communicator, and a very kind person. May his memory be a blessing.

If you ever find yourself needing evidence for ‘Plasmids are just as common in microbes without resistance genes,’ we’ve got you covered! Check our new paper, out today: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Yup. clauswilke.substack.com/p/phd-level-...

LLMs wouldn’t pass a grad school comprehensive exam (It’s the confident bullshit in the face of experts that would fail it)

tip for trolling live imaging scientists: watch their little cell movie and then tell them "the book version was better"

Hadi Yasmine (with @schraderlab.bsky.social): BR body condensates degrade mRNA during exponential phase and store mRNAs during stationary/stress in #Caulobacter; this storage is advantageous as it promotes a faster transition to exponential growth #phages2025 🦠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Also interested in this!

I think the use of chatbots for stuff like this is intended to train people to use it to avoid everything that’s painful or hard. It can write the obituary, the breakup text, the complaint letter. It’s meant to separate humans from their difficult feelings. Seems bad.

Okay some wisdom here would be most welcome. ICE continues to run rampant through our community and many of our students are at risk simply because of their identity. Other than providing flexibility to faculty in how they run their courses, what institutional policies or practices can we adopt?

Doing a PhD where you abandon a project after less than a year is probably perfect preparation for industry.