Terry really hit it out of the park with this post. I even posted it on the bulletin board outside my office. I'm making time today to rekindle my joy.

1) The funny thing about this, from a professor's standpoint, is in-person oral exams destroy ~100% of its functionality, and I already do that. Let's go down the list... companion.ai/einstein

Apart from much else, the naming of this tool defames the guy who said, "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think".

Some coverage on my university's website about our recent paper on evolutionary cancer therapy www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

"To build on a tool such as edgeR, which is 16+ years in the making and consists of a complex codebase with thousands of lines of code, would previously have required years of study and effort". In his blogpost @lpachter.bsky.social explains how he ported all of it from R and C to Python in a week.

If you’re interested in machine learning and mathematical modelling, we’re recruiting a PhD student to develop new methods for studying cancer evolution at @imperialimmuno.bsky.social www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

"Why do you care about US politics?" No reason. No reason at all.

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

I just returned the proof of our paper "Selective sweep probabilities in spatially expanding populations". Google's AI Overview is already reporting the main results (presumably scraped from the November 2023 preprint) as established fact.

"I want to be a good figurehead, lend dignity to the University ... I have networks both overseas and in the UK" - Peter Mandelson in October 2024 making his case to be Chancellor of @ox.ac.uk. Good thing no one voted for him.

Notwithstanding my previous post this is a fantastic opportunity

Although I strongly sympathise with US-based colleagues valiantly swimming against the tide, I'm afraid I can't in good conscience advise any non-US citizen to take up a PhD or postdoc in the US right now. Mind you, all the ECRs I've given guidance to lately needed no persuading on this point.

People accused him of being racist. He'd like to clarify that he is in fact dumb, lazy and irresponsible. As well as racist. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Missing from the coverage of redundancies at Edinburgh: this was done in such a haphazard, uncoordinated way, there are now core teams who have gone from 5 people to 1 with no change in workload or pressure and huge loss in knowledge of institutional process. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2576321...

A 🆕 episode of Genetics in Your World is live! @ecoevogal.bsky.social interviewed @srishtipatil.bsky.social & @robjohnnoble.bsky.social about their work testing a new approach to cancer treatment rooted in theory from evolutionary & conservation biology. Listen now: buff.ly/B2YyByg

I really enjoyed chatting with @srishtipatil.bsky.social about our “Preventing evolutionary rescue in cancer" paper for the @genetics-gsa.bsky.social "Genetics in Your World" podcast. Listen for free at shows.acast.com/genetics-in-...

In #GENETICS, @srishtipatil.bsky.social, @robjohnnoble.bsky.social, and colleagues present a theoretical framework to determine how to exploit the vulnerability of small tumours to stochastic extinction and the optimal time to switch treatments. buff.ly/HDhvCEN

This is SO merited for these great women scientists, one of whom (Isabelle Oliveri) was a close colleague, friend, and helped me fight political obstacles in my move to Montpellier in 2000. www.paris.fr/pages/biento...

Starmer said @zackpolanski.bsky.social's Greens are high on drugs and soft on Putin. Turns out they're high in the polls and hard to put down. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

'You may be aware of recent pauses to some programmes. For our curiosity-driven research [CDR] (...) headroom in funding will increase (...) and you can expect to see new opportunities opening later this year (...) Levels of funding for [CDR] will remain stable (...) are reflective of recent years'

I know LLMs aren't popular here but I must say ChatGPT is an excellent running coach. Running seems like a good use case because it's so quantitative. Given your current race times, goals, and training programme, the model can crunch the numbers and tell you where to tweak and what to prioritise.

Math question: I need to understand better how Markov chains converge to stochastic diff eqs (SDEs) in a continuum limit. Specifically, consider a sequence of Markov chains whose state space is {0, 1/N, 2/N, ..., 1}. From state k/N, can transition to either (k+1)/N or (k-1)/N, or stay at k/N.

Delighted to have Anuraag as my new colleague at @citystgeorges.bsky.social

The killings in Minneapolis didn’t come out of nowhere. Funding, legal cover, weakened oversight, and dehumanising rhetoric ramping up over a year. This started on 20 Jan 2025 with Trump's executive orders on immigration. I lay it out in my latest post. christinapagel.substack.com/p/the-ice-st...

Our new collective effort highlights what happens when AI acts in populations rather than as isolated tool. TL;DR: a lot.

When normalised by population size, the death toll of US troops in Afghanistan is broadly similar to that of four other countries, including the UK... and Denmark. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaliti...

Expressions of interest: Director at MPI EvolBio (f/m/d) — We invite expressions of interest from distinguished scientists in evolutionary biology with a bold, long-term research vision that complements our Institute. More information: www.evolbio.mpg.de/3856225/Dire...

Even with everything else going on, this should still register as truly shocking, if not surprising. Bulldozing a UN building whose sole purpose is to distribute lifesaving food and medical aid. What kind of regime does this? (The question is rhetorical, I know the answer)

Happy to share our recent work quantifying ‘just-right’ APC inactivation in colorectal cancer initiation: doi.org/10.1158/0008... Excellent collaborative teamwork, led by the fantastic Meritxell Brunet Guasch.

Had a great time visting @edinunimaths.bsky.social in Edinburgh yesterday to give a talk and to chat science with my hosts @mdnicholson1.bsky.social, Helen Alexander, Tibor Antal, Linus Schumacher and others. Fun conversations and unseasonally nice weather.

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

UK academia’s presence on X is reaching a tipping point. @andytattersall.bsky.social for @lseimpactblog.bsky.social

Holy hell, what an obituary

In 2017 I created the ggmuller R pacakge to draw "Muller plots" combining phylogeny and frequency dynamics. The latest version 0.7.0 fixes deprecated dependencies and includes a few other minor improvements. CRAN: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... Vignette: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Sunny Crete for a great meeting about #cancer #ecology and #evolution

The deadline to submit your abstract(s) for the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer conference via www.evocancer.com has been extended to Monday 19th January at 09:00 GMT. The conference will take place on 21st-24th May in Hersonissos, Crete.

Just a week left to apply for a position in our Editorial Board!

Kinda depressing that fourteen of these twenty cinema "highlights" of 2026 are sequels, of which around half belong to franchises more than thirty years old. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... I'm amazed the studios can sustain interest in Star Wars episode 37, X Men 17, Spiderman 23, etc.

Got me some top quality presents by @matthewcobb.bsky.social and dodosocks.com/en

Today I was pondering why US right wingers and tech bros prefer fighting to other sports. I guess it's partly the spectacle but also they can keep swaggering when they lose as the outcome is relative to only one opponent. If they tried running or weightlifting their mediorcrity would be measurable.

No contest. Just read the first two sentences of the abstract. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hooper's rule says the age of a hedge correlates with the number of tree and shrub species it contains. I wonder if anyone's tested whether the same applies to kitchens and types of teaspoon, toolboxes and screwdrivers, or offices and ballpoint pens.

Wow this is a seriously serious supplementary figure from @cellpress.bsky.social today. Panels A through UU. I get that Cell likes to minimize the number of supplementary figures. But is this really what is happening here? www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Abstract submission is now open for the 2026 ISEEC Conference (21st-24th May in Crete). The theme is human-tech cooperation for the evolutionary management of cancer but we welcome submissions on all topics related to evolution, ecology and cancer. Submit abstracts by 10th Jan via www.evocancer.com

I'll be impressed when AI can tell me which naan is which

Greatly enjoyed @lonnibesancon.bsky.social's talk at @citystgeorges.bsky.social today on how he became a research-integrity sleuth doing difficult, massively important work with @elisabethbik.bsky.social and others to expose dodgy research. Advice for sleuths: "Be critical without being accusing."

I'll continue not submitting papers and turning down all offers to review for @royalsociety.org journals so long as the society fails to stand up for the scientific community and for the values it claims to believe in.

This is tragic. But I'm not sure I'd bet on law, either.

East Oxford pub The Cowley Owl is being relaunched as a French winebar. C'est vachement chouette.