Unbelievable, Bakta reached its 1,000th citation! A huge shout out and thank you to all Bakta users, bug reporters, those sharing ideas and suggesting features... ...just the entire incredibly supporting binfie community! Without you, Bakta wouldn't be the same. Thank you!

Dear community, Bakta needs your help! To further improve the functional annotation of "hypothetical" CDS, me and @gbouras13.bsky.social, we are looking for the worst Bakta-annotated bacterial genomes ;-) (1/2)

Longer descriptive thread: In the US, you can see that women born before 1979 have had >2 children per woman by the time they reached age 45. Also, women born before 1984 have had >2 children per woman by the time they reached age 40.

AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations”

Imagine the conservative outrage if asylum seekers were given a million dollars each? Why are we ok keeping our fellow humans in these camps and paying profit driven entities 8x that to enforce our evil?

System is broken if you can cheat someone out of 600k, still own the million dollar property, and only be fined 11k.

I’ve set up a mailing list to send out an email when I have an article come out, instead of than hoping that an algorithm will serve it to you. 
Subscribe here for free: camwilson.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Highlight of my career writing a couple of these for the icon herself www.instagram.com/reel/DOdwrqz...

X-Mapper 🦠🧬🧪 - a sequence aligner developed for microbes, now on Bioconda! 🚀 • 11–24× fewer suboptimal alignments (same for human genome) • 3–579× lower inconsistency • improves on ~30% of reads aligned to non-target species github.com/mathjeff/map... bioconda.github.io/recipes/x-ma... #microsky

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N

Pleased to say that our preprint benchmarking Nanopore data for MLST, cgMLST, cgSNP & AMR typing from bacterial isolates is out! TL;DR you can get almost perfect results from 50x depth using live SUP basecalling with a GPU in under 20 hours #microsky#IDsky 🦠🧬🖥️ /1 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super disappointed to read a new paper on HPAI this week which contained 50% hallucinated references. These references were used to support wildly inaccurate conclusions. Other than write to editors and hope something will be done, not much else one can do.

It's been a whirlwind 20 months, but I'm finally here. For those of you who haven't met me, I'm a microbial ecologist based out of the University of Melbourne. I apply microbial ecology principles to try and improve conservation outcomes for native Australian species.

✉️ Check your inboxes! All speaker notifications were sent out yesterday! It was a pleasure to review all the STELLAR abstracts we received. It’s going to be an absolutely incredible lineup of speakers at #MicroSeq2025! Registration is still open here 👇 trybooking.com/events/landing/1424679

University of Melbourne breached students’ privacy by using wifi network to monitor pro-Palestine protest www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Every tech update now is like: "Great news, the word processor you've relied on for twenty years has learned to juggle! Is it good at it? No! Does it help in any way? Of course not! Has it made it insufferable to use? Oh, absolutely."

#MicroSeq2025 is bringing back our ZEP virtual meeting space! Last year, ZEP was a super successful platform for lightning speakers to answer questions & engage in follow-up discussions. Get excited! Register here👇 trybooking.com/events/landing/1424679

We are delighted to announce our plenary speakers for #MicroSeq2025! Dr Rose Collis, Dr Jackie Mahar, Dr Peter Mee, and Dr Leah Roberts! We’ll be treated to four excellent talks across September 3-4. We can’t wait! Register below👇 trybooking.com/events/landing/1424679

Stoked to finally have a preprint out for Phold, our tool that uses protein structural information to enhance phage genome annotation #phagesky 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

it's so sneaky that OpenAI is trying to rebrand "hallucinations" as "deception", which implies that it's the model intentionally misleading the user and not that it's just a non-thinking machine that spits out bullshit

Keep an eye out! 👀 Later this week, we’ll be officially announcing our plenary speakers for #MicroSeq2025! Stay tuned~

I highly recommend volunteering to chair a session at #MicroSeq2025, especially if you've never done it before. Super low stakes, chill environment with lots of support from the committee. Great place to learn this pretty valuable skill!

@jamesheathers.bsky.social once did an interesting model to see what payline was required for researchers to spend more of their time on research than writing grants. From memory, it was around 11%. At 4%, you have to on average write 25 grants to get one funded.

It confounds me that we as academic institutions decry the loss of assessment tools and learning due to the rise of LLMs, whilst at the same time look at how we can incorporate it into every facet of our work

🚨Abstract submission & registration for #MicroSeq2025 is OPEN! 🚨Get in quick! The first 50 registrations are FREE for PhD students and ECRs who are current ASM members, thanks to @aussocmic.bsky.social. Head to our website to register now 👇 www.microseqconference.com/registration...

If HECS persists (booo) going forward, changing the salary threshold for when you have to start repaying it is useless if the indexation still occurs. If you can't afford to repay it then it shouldn't be indexed! 'Earn less than 60k a year? Well let's add 2k to your debt then, good luck next year!'

Burnout is clinically understood as a combo of 6 factors—work overload, lack of control, insufficient rewards, breakdown in community, absence of fairness, & value conflicts—and only a fraction of it is under your control. Burnout is a systemic problem, so be kind to yourself and hard on the system.

📣Calling Australian/NZ ECRs and PhD Students 📣 Abstract submission and registration for MicroSeq2025 opens July 21! Abstracts for both medium-length and lightning talks will be welcome.

everyone talks about ai “assistants” like it’s some whipsmart loyal sidekick, but they’re actually this guy: a scheming, sycophant vizier who whispers delusions in your ear and is actually working for another master

MAYBE DON’T EMAIL ME AT THE WEEKEND, THEN.

Gosh, good thing our supposedly left-wing government didn’t create a special position in public life expressly for this person as part of its big push for ‘social cohesion’. That would have been pretty daft.

The Australian government didn't pause ads on X during the Grok incident this week and the PM's office dismissed questions on whether he should still be posting there while also launching the plan to combat antisemitism this week. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

I stopped posting on there in October last year. And I haven't really missed being on there. I have about 1/5 of the followers I did there but don't really notice the difference. When I see who is still posting over there it just seems like they're addicted to the high follower dopamine rush

On SUPERMAN, for @the-ringer.bsky.social

Would you say it’s even enough to warrant pluralizing “genetics”

Wait until they learn about commercial poultry genetics...

I've been trying to articulate the 'modern' research biology 🧬🧪 process loop that I use/aspire to, where large-scale data is leveraged in it's own right while also driving experimental design. The idea is to minimise risk, cost and time at experimental stages while maximising outputs and yield.

🦋Hello BlueSky!🦋 Let's get right into it. MicroSeq is back September 3-4, 2025! Stay tuned for more details on registration and abstract submission coming soon here and at www.microseqconference.com. 🌟Save the date!🌟 #MicroSeq2025

Exclusive: NDIA chief intervened to throw advocate off scheme www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/health/...

Such a fun meeting every year, and so supportive of young researchers because it's run by ECRs. If you're an honours, masters, phd or post doc in AUSNZ, strong recommendation that you submit and abstract!

Meredith has always been a G, but it's still exceptionally weird and very refreshing hearing from a tech exec who can see through all of this AI bullshit for what it is at its foundation: a backdoor surveillance tool.

This was on high rotation growing up

The 2022-23 tax stats just dropped. And there we have it: 91 millionaires who paid ZERO tax

Memo to #abc730: Mike Pezzullo was sacked from the APS for breaching its Code of Conduct FOURTEEN TIMES. He left in disgrace. He was officially stripped of his Order of Australia. Why is he now being given access to your prestigious platform?

Since everything is awful, please enjoy this bear who disassembled my squirrel-proof bird feeder this morning, emptied the full tube of seeds into her (?) mouth, then came back a little later, as if going back for a 2nd plate from the all-you-can eat Bottomless Brunch Buffet.S/he sweetly ambled off.

Thanks for the reminder @janemunday.bsky.social. Every summer, I repost this article DROWNING DOES NOT LOOK LIKE DROWNING. To date, I know of FOUR kids who were saved after someone who'd clicked on the link learnt how to spot actual drowning. Take time to read and pass on. slate.com/technology/2...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

And subscribe and hit us with the 5-star reviews! We're trying to build our way up to something out here, folks.

RFK Jr. spouted dangerous vaccine falsehoods on national TV. As a parent and infectious diseases doctor, I couldn't stay silent. Here's what the data actually shows. 🧵