Ricky Gervais has a new special out and I watched 10 minutes and it’s exactly the same tired lazy shit as usual

Me in my 20s: people have a lot of motives and there's nuance to everything Me in my 40s: oh a lot of people are just evil actually

Australian Influenza update: It became clear during November that a unusual second wave of influenza is underway in Australia, driven by the new "clade K" (H3N2 clade 2a.3a.1, subclade K). Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia are currently the hardest-hit. #Influenza #Australia 🧵

Annual watch of the greatest Christmas movie of all time. Never to be defeated. Normally December 1st so we're a few days late this year!

An incredible resource and an inspiring story behind it 💪 @emmabeansworth.bsky.social your tenacity and commitment is amazing

Okay, it's the start of the academic year and there have been further funny (and some frustrating) mix ups ... just a gentle reminder that there are two of us - try to make sure you have the right one ...

If you missed my talk but still want some tips for writing good code for scientists, my slides are here: daxkellie.quarto.pub/a-guide-to-w... All the links and references are there too in case you want to see more! 😀🧪🌏 #ESA2025 #rstats #quartopub

A lot of human medical things funded, no animal health studies funded - please human health researchers stick to the millions in NHMRC and MRRF available to you that the rest of us can't apply for!

DECRA success rate is the lowest in 14 years, since 2012 (1st year the scheme ran). What a pathetic system we have for supporting new ideas, new people… DE26: 13.1% 25: 17.9 24: 19.6 23: 15.0 22: 19.7 21: 17.1 20: 16.0 19: 17.2 18: 16.3 17: 16.7 16: 16.4 15: 14.3 14: 13.6 13: 15.6 12: 12.8

ARC says they’ll announce DECRA and LIEF outcomes tomorrow (Tuesday 25th Nov). In recent times these announcements have been around 11am Canberra time. With 2 schemes on the same day, I assume they’ll announce one of them later in the day (probably DECRA first).

Very excited to be in Adelaide to attend #ABACBS2025 . Australia is a powerhouse of microbial genomics, and indeed of bioinformatics, so am very much looking forward to meeting everyone, old friends and new, and speaking tomorrow!

Study after study shows that using LLMs is bad for cognition, bad for learning, bad for understanding, bad for mental health. So why are our schools and universities still relentlessly pushing them?

How many submarines that we're never going to get does this equal? Thoughts with all research staff doing amazing work that are undervalued by a government with no competition and no ambition

It soothes my bitter heart to know that no matter how much money Elon Musk has, he will never, ever be funny t.co/QhuKU9HCxA

every company in 2025

Finally got my hands on a rare find: Sonja Buckley’s autobiography. She was instrumental in the development of tissue culture techniques for virus isolation & study, which required CONSIDERABLE skill pre-gloves, BSCs, & mechanical pipettes - & was the first person to isolate Lassa virus.

The organising committee are delighted to invite you to submit an abstract for the ASM VIC Meeting, taking place at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from 15–18 June 2026. www.theasmmeeting.org.au/abstract-sub...

New pre-print: Plasmid dependent phage effectively eliminate AMR bacteria and block plasmid transmission in the chicken gut microbiome Fun collaboration with Tao He lab (JAAS) and @brockhurstlab.bsky.social lab (Manchester) #phagesky#microsky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

the fact that a company doesnt wanna drop the dopest of video game in which you're a FREED SLAVE killing KKK WHITE SUPREMACISTS because theyre worried about the FUCKING BACKLASH tells you all you need to know about the current state of america

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.