One of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved in: Project Psyche! Read all about our ambitions and aims. It's ground breaking stuff, just mind blowing and even surreal (27 years ago we did single genes for lep phylogenetics)! @projectpsyche.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

And now Megan Outram changing things up a bit talking about chytrid infections on frogs! #strompath25

Privileged to have @yasukadota.bsky.social present at the Stromlo conference on the SCORE receptors … brilliant story. #strompath25

An absolute pleasure to have @thamlab.bsky.social introducing malaria to the plant pathogen community - plenty of cross over and complementarity! #strompath25

And next up we have @yichangsung.bsky.social from @gittacoaker.bsky.social lab talking about tandem kinases … #strompath25

And we’re off with Professor Cecile Segonzac opening Stromlo meeting! #strompath25

Name badges all ready for kick off at the Stromlo Plant Pathogen (and Pests!) conference in Canberra at @biologyanu.bsky.social #strompath2025

Been trying to read this book loaned to me by @cawatran.bsky.social for months but ironically too distracted to finish it 🤣

a puzzle in the morning.

This is outrageous. Yep pay her to leave, but why pay her to stay at more than double the rate of other professors?

Former #ANU Vice-Chancellor, Genevieve Bell, will receive remuneration of more than half a million a year for the next five years - despite taking 12 months off. For context, that's more than ANU hoped to 'save' annually by disestablishing the School of Music. 🫠 @nteunion.bsky.social

I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Nature research paper: Semantic design of functional de novo genes from a genomic language model go.nature.com/48uEnAn

It is a good year when all three senior colleagues (aka postdocs) in the lab obtain their own fellowship or leading a grant. Congratulations to the team!

> @samsteindc.bsky.social

Thanks for everything, DOGE. 🤡 @birdyword.bsky.social

“The ZAT14 family promotes cell death and regulates expansins to affect xylem formation and salt tolerance in Arabidopsis”. Now out in @theplantcell.bsky.social led by Ming Feng and colleagues. A 🌱 thread 👇 1/x academic.oup.com/plcell/advan...

I wonder if the bifurcation will be between very large scale, generalised paper search versus topic-focussed, actionable search where queries lead to experiments (e.g., www.futurehouse.org)? The middle ground which companies like @elicit.com and @scispace.bsky.social occupy might not be viable 🤷‍♂️

Cycling gives bigger boost to regional economies more so than Shane Jones DRILL DRILL DRILL (for what there is nothing there) tantrums WITHOUT harming the environments either (ironically boosting them)

Internal representations of external spaces www.skeptophilia.com/2025/11/ment...

Just in time for me to cite in something I've been using GlobDB for

A huge effort finally coming to fruition for B and their group. So excited to give this a whirl esp now that my cloning projects have ramped up substantially. Check this out 👇👇

📣 Applications are NOW OPEN for our International Undergraduate Summer School 2026 🗓️ 29 June - 22 August 2026 📍 John Innes Centre, NR4 7UH ⏰ Deadline: 16 January 2026 Find out more and apply: www.jic.ac.uk/training-car...

Burn baby burn. The roof is on fire.

It only took us several decades and dozens Nature/Nature Genetics papers but we finally got to the conclusion that plant and animal breeders (and Lewontin) arrived at from the start: twin studies suck!

You can donate to Eslam and her family here: www.gofundme.com/f/62znrd-hel...

Chen et al. present the v4 upgrade of the DIVERGE software for identifying amino acid residues critical to functional shifts between protein subfamilies, including DIVERGE-Chat, a conversational AI agent for code-free exploration. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf277 #evobio #molbio #compbio

Our son, Rohan, is doing something extraordinary for his 18th birthday, & @scidocmartin.bsky.social & I are so proud. He's partnered with Headspace to run 100km, raising money for this wonderful organisation! If you can share or donate, we'd be very grateful! www.mycause.com.au/page/385454/...

Klaus Schulze will always be the electronic music artist of my life. Grant writing, paper writing, spacing out for thinking, getting lost...

What an awesome graphic! 😍

A new fossil fungus discovered in Scotland shows evidence of plants and fungi sharing nutrients to survive on land. The fossil, more than 400 million years old, offers hints about the origin of one of the greatest partnerships in the history of life on Earth. www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

Ascender #fungifriends #mushrooms #pnw #forest #classicmono #macro #photography #eastcoastkin

Out First Release in @science.org this week: A large scale analysis of the epigenetics of transposable elements in Arabidopsis shows transgenerational stability www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #PlantScience

Methodology

This is why for a long time I've found the Prime Minister's Prizes for Science a rather insulting propaganda exercise www.abc.net.au/news/science... CSIRO funding as a percentage of GDP: 1982-83 = 0.17 2024-25 = 0.03 ... Scientific extinction event imminent?

Australian science policy wants trees but not seeds. Public funding of science is essential at low Technology Readiness Levels. We cannot have high TRLs to translate without working through the pipeline from fundamental science via speculative applied science. (Explainer by @granttremblay.com)

I don’t think that’s true, these publishers have HUGE overheads that pay processes that have nothing to do with journal production. And even the production cost could be reduced. Eg, if you don’t sell subscriptions or APCs, you don’t need sales dept! Must read: f1000research.com/articles/10-20

“Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time, which translates to loss of value, business interruption, & market devaluation on a systemic level"- Günther Thallinger @kmac & I dig insurance: www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ins...

"Postdoc in the job market"

NEW: Welcome to the Great AI Bubble. Yes, it’s here. And yes, it’s going to burst. It’s also got way more in common with the Epstein scandal than you really want to know. open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

Sequence-aware Prediction of Point Mutation-induced Effects on Protein-Protein Binding Affinity using Deep Learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.15.688659v1

University reputations and finances often hinge on their position in global ranking tables that prioritize narrow aspects of academic life. Elizabeth Gadd writes about three changes that would give institutions the freedom to explore fresh ways of working. #Academicsky 🧪

It's really not a surprise. I've spent the last 5 years explaining to researchers why samples collected over 2 consecutive EU projects and extracted using wildly different protocols are in no way comparable. Too many labs think omics-related research is "just sequencing innit".

Very cool exploration into the evolutionary constraints on plasmid size and copy number 🧪

Well it's #fridaypaperclub, so I have a very special one just for @odedrechavi.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Tomorrow registration closes for the #Phylogenomics and Evolutionary #Genomics workshop in the beautiful Czech Republic! The #faculty are world-class -- this isn't one to miss! Register today and learn both the fundamentals and advanced techniques in the field! evomics.org/apply-worksh...

Brasó-Vives et al. publish a new Perspective in GBE, highlighting underexplored dimensions of genomic variation that contribute to phenotypic diversity beyond the DNA sequence, contributing to our understanding of genome evolution. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf204 #genome #evolution

#straya Bin Chicken: targeted metagenomic coassembly for the efficient recovery of novel genomes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...