Any student who sees this: Please do not use ChatGPT to "check links"! Instead, wherever possible use the DOI URL. When there's no DOI, identify the canonical URL and remove any "?" and anything that follows. For example, doi.org/10.1126/scie... not www.science.org/content/arti....

Ironically, as @mart1oeil.eu showed, there are telltale signs that the piece was edited with ChatGPT: many links include "?utm_source=chatgpt.com" If even Science editorial team cannot afford good human editing, that's worrying

Prsumably, adjusting pay in relation to "the competitive landscape" means matching the right tail of the salary distribution for similar jobs, which is a recipe for runaway salary inflation. A saner approach would be to peg bosses' pay as a multiple of the company's median salary.

Once again, I think the real problem predates gen. AI. Much student writing already was slop, i.e. undertaken last-minute, to get it of the way, to be just good enough to get by, because for a long time writing and humanities instruction have not been valued. That's the harder problem to deal with.

If you like multi-level selection, you may enjoy (models of) ageing. @kokkonut.bsky.social and I show that the mortality patterns generated by dem. senescence are formally equivalent to a multi-level selection process! arxiv.org/abs/2607.00262 Confused? So were we! A short explainer thread below

Have ideas for your own, independent research program in Theoretical Biology? Then come and join us as a Group Leader at the @mpi-evolbio.bsky.social in Plön, Germany!

Of the many hypotheses in evolutionary biology, the sexy son hypothesis is, I believe, the only one whose name can be sung as alternative lyrics in the chorus of a song by Kings of Leon

Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts

In the past year, fellows of the @royalsociety.org have killed people (mostly children) at an average rate of 400 per fellow. The Society could lower the average to approximately zero by expelling just one exceptionally unqualified member.

Started the day by belatedly reading the excellent essay "Critically assessing atavism, an evolution-centered and deterministic hypothesis on cancer" by Bertrand Daignan-Fornier and @pradeu.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1002/bies... The latter is recruiting a postdoc: philinbiomed.cnrs.fr/jobs/postdoc...

What can spatial patterns tell us about tumor growth or dryland ecosystem resilience? Are there bridges and opportunities between these apparently distant disciplines? This wednesday June 17 we'll have the 3rd Session of Eco-Onco Exchange, with @joshuabull.bsky.social and Benoît Pichon !

Once again, Brighton and Hove’s brave and inclusive city has massively outnumbered an attempted fascist march on our streets. Love will win. Pics: forward view, backward view, team view, street view. #gohomeracists #Brighton

The older I get, the more pride I take in knowing nothing about celebrities. My 7yo: "Who's Talyor Swift's boyfriend?" Me: "An American footballer. Kevin something?" "Are they married?" "Dunno" "How'd they meet?" "No idea" (Turns out my wife knew the last one, the moral being it helps to be famous.)

"Complex systems can often be described using simple mathematical models that capture essential emergent behaviour. By contrast, complicated systems typically require models in which size scales with the amount of detail in the system." Nicely put.

Two pleas from a journal editor: 1. If you're mid-career or senior and are declining a review, please recommend a junior colleague. 2. If you're early-career and want to be asked to review papers, please ensure editors can readily discover your expertise, current affililation, and email address.

I'm going to travel back in time and tell myself how in 2026 there's a website run by a white nationalist supervillain, a website he uses to meddle in domestic affairs and foment racial violence, but all the governments of the world still use it for official posts like it's no big deal.

Any ideas how we encourage our remaining friends / organisations off X? If they haven't left yet, it's hard to know what else will encourage them. But, their complicity is what gives Musk the platform to do this sort of thing.

My @citystgeorges.bsky.social colleague Kyriaki Giorgakoudi is recruiting a Research Fellow to work on economic evaluation projects, oncology research, and infectious disease models. Applications welcomed from researchers across the quantitative spectrum. jobs.citystgeorges.ac.uk/en/sites/CX_...

Condemning riots isn't enough. We need policy action, including an immediate appraisal of X as a vehicle for coordinating far-right disorder. And we need political leadership, to challenge white nationalism as an idea, not to validate it daily and then complain when it turns violent.

Can only assume the The Royal Society, by its inaction, is condoning the actions in Belfast incited by Elon Musk (one of their fellows). Why will the UK's premier Scientific Institution not stand up for itself and for its values?

In a new preprint led by Ves Manojlovic, we develop an agent-based model and an ABC-SMC inference workflow to infer tumour growth parameters from methylation arrays, focussing on sites whose states fluctuate on clinically relevant timescales. We applied this workflow to 10 colorectal tumours. 1/2

Fridolin Gross and @pradeu.bsky.social are advertising a two-year postdoc in conceptual, theoretical, or philosophical approaches to cancer at ImmunoConcept (CNRS & University of Bordeaux, France). Closing 30th July. Sounds amazing! philinbiomed.cnrs.fr/jobs/postdoc...

AI can reduce friction in academic work. But if the most powerful tools become increasingly expensive, the same technology may also help existing advantages compound. baronca.substack.com/p/the-subscr...

The criticism of Trump, Kennedy, and Bhattacharya that was so subversive that the ADA had to eject the Editor-in-Chief of their flagship journal from their annual meeting for sharing it? Prior today it had fewer than 1000 views. Do your thing.

Just a reminder that @ucl.ac.uk is celebrating 200 years of Mathematics at UCL with a public day on 11 June! There will be loads of interesting free talks, including by Prof Hannah Fry and me! Book your ticket now for free! :-) www.ucl.ac.uk/mathematical...

Crikey!

Ok, this is cool... Treemble: A graphical tool to generate Newick strings from phylogenetic tree images🧪 academic.oup.com/bioinformati... Treemble is a native desktop application for macOS and Windows and is freely available, with documentation, at treemble.org.

Some great European PhD, postdoc and faculty positions in mathematical and theoretical biology listed on the ESMTB website: www.esmtb.org/forum-job

Ultimately, no domain of knowledge or professional practice that's upheld more or less strictly by gatekeeping is going to survive for very long. You either have the juice or you don't.

PhD opportunity at UCL! Computational modelling of tumours, in medical physics. www.ucl.ac.uk/engineering/...

Very excited about this special issue! Our goal is to bring together empirical and theoretical work across a wide range of “unusual” systems of aging. Sounds like a good fit? Consider submitting to our SI 🤩 Unsure? Feel free to contact us. And please spread the word!

Call for Papers: Cancer in an evolutionary framework: across species and within individuals 📆 31st August 2026 academic.oup.com/jeb/pages/ca...

And one more in Discover Oncology, edited by @ceel-damaghilab.bsky.social ! link.springer.com/collections/...

Four current special issues and calls for papers related to cancer evolution/ecology and mathematical oncology (details also in the alt text for you to copy and search)

Having just finished @adamjkucharski.bsky.social's "Proof", I found myself at last week's conference referencing the book wrt the ladder of causation; why RCTs aren't always best; communicating uncertainty; and what constitutes proof. Ended up telling everyone just to buy and read it themselves.

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

What a wonderful Cretan ISEEC Conference that was! Four days bouncing around ideas about evolution, ecology, cancer, translational tech, the future of AI, and much more. See you again in two years!

Lacking time for yesterday's post-conference excursion (which also sounded fantastic) I spent the afternoon at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, which is packed with phenomenal, ridiculously ancient artworks, many inspired by the natural world. A great end to a great few days of science and fun.

First up this morning: ISEEC President @athenaaktipis.bsky.social on cancer-like phenomena in AI. Her substack is athenaaktipis.substack.com

Some great talks today on the first full day of #iseec2026 #CancerEvolution, many of them from my Moffitt colleagues talking about cancer ecology and evolution during treatment

Excited to be speaking with Julie later today for our @2scientists.org podcast!

Julie Dragon announces a fourth type of transmissible cancer at ISEEC 2026! Brown bullhead transmissible melanoma. Two lineages so far identified in the northeast US. Seems to be more widespread and >100 years old. Paper under review.

Now at ISEEC 2026 Jona Kayser is presenting his group's research using "Reinforcement Failing" to guide the discovery of emergent physical dynamics in adaptive tumor therapy www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

ISEEC keynote speaker Viktor Müller discusses his research on the threats of evolvsble AI and lessons from evolution in cancer

Great to have @srishtipatil.bsky.social presenting her new research on early-onset tumours, here at ISEEC 2026. Tomorrow I'll be talking about her previous work with me

Restoration Oncology as a translation of Restoration Ecology - Janay Fox speaking now at ISEEC 2026. Implies redefining therapeutic success as control, not necessarily cure

Jill Gallaher's plenary kicks off day two of the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer in Crete. Lovely venue for it

The 3rd edition of the London Mathematical Biology Conference will take place 3rd–4th September at Imperial. Abstract submission is open till 5th July: londonmathbio.github.io

It's not necessarily the end of mathematics, but it's hard to see how the all the social structures that support the subject will be able to avoid major disruption over the next few years.

OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...