This is wonderful! It all resonates, but the badly calibrated first-taught course particularly so. I had the smartest student I the class in tears during my first midterm 😱. But I recalibrated, and learned, and survived!

The next decades will be defined by complete political shift away from mediocre white facist men towards sustainable economies that address climate change for real. If not we are all fucked.

The Carnegie Foundation named Nobel-winner Omar Yaghi just last month as among its 2026 Class of Great Immigrants, "recognizing 25 distinguished naturalized citizens whose contributions have strengthened America". Now he's off to China. carnegie.org/great-immigr...

Beyond infinite sites: Generalized ABBA-BABA statistic for deeper phylogenies https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.06.736715v1

People. @ksamuk.bsky.social and others have made this argument before. There’s good software to do this right. Here’s the argument again: Invariant sites matter! They’re not in your standard vcf and many programs pretend they are anyway. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

“When workers become overreliant on AI, there’s a risk of significant skills collapse, which could eventually undermine individual learning patterns and derail business goals.” #ai #academicsky #edusky

Gambling is plane bad. Imagine would you could do with $31 billion a year? Or how bad gambling is for families and domestic violence? Ban it all together.

“There is no doubt that oil, gas and coal companies already bear a disproportionate share of the blame yet have a financial incentive to further disrupt the climate. These perverse incentives will continue unless their generous government subsidies are replaced with windfall taxes.” #ClimateCrisis

Two publications (Nat Plant & Microbiome) by Mireadili Kuerban from Martijn Bezemer group in IBL on how neighbours shape plant life via root microbiome #NatComs with @sofiaifgomes.bsky.social in @natplants.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... & in Microbiome link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Australian University Governance Excellence NOT.

Open science before it had a name: An interview with molecular biologist Steven Henikoff (who is not on social media) @fredhutch.org @basicsci.fredhutch.org @hhmi-science.bsky.social @natprot.nature.com www.springernature.com/gp/researche...

I talked about this at PEQG a few weeks ago. In addition to github.com/RILAB/argprep (preps your genome assemblies for SINGER), argtest github.com/RILAB/argtest does some QC to clean up an ARG estimated with SINGER.

"Fungal cognition expands the conceptual landscape of the mind, reinforcing a graded, pluralistic understanding of intelligence." Yes! I've only skimmed it so far, but this paper, by the peerless polymath ‪Kristina Šekrst‬, looks excellent & salutary. It's open access too! @epiphenomenal.bsky.social

The journey through a PhD is not a straight line. Along the way, we face uncertainty when experiments don’t go as planned. In the latest @ecrlife.bsky.social blog Jennifer Loudon Moxen shares her story embracing such uncertainty. buff.ly/zzQVb0C

The vibrant colours and delicate details of New Zealand's fungi and slime moulds are documented in these images, taken from Jay Lichter's new book The Secret Life of Fungi

In Labor's mind 'patriotism' is handing over billions in public funds, defence & foreign policy to the US. And being 'progressive' is gutting funding for people with a disability and veterans healthcare to pay for it. If this is 'Labor Left' god knows what Labor right is up to.

We are recruiting a lab manager for my group in Oxford. This is a lovely team doing great things, and you could be an important part of it! See here: www.path.ox.ac.uk/vacancy/lab-... Please spread the word!

A terrific talk by @philipcball.bsky.social on The Space of Possible Minds

It will be us as in humanities human live on earth or death by AI.

Everybody in the "climate space" (which means everyone on earth...) needs to understand these mind-blowing figures. Google's "total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025." In ONE year. The AI corporate arms race is eating the world.

Important news! The new ISMPMI website is live! Visit the site to get society news, watch posted videos, listen to our podcasts, become or manage your membership and more. ismpmi.org

‼️Job altert🚨📢 please spread the word: We're looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join our new department "Phytopathology and Plant Protection" at @unihalle.bsky.social. www.verwaltung.uni-halle.de/DEZERN3/AUSS...

A bit more than a week to apply! W 3 Professorship for Plant Biotechnology. Freiburg, Germany. Great university, great faculty, awesome colleagues. Apply, if you want to be my successor. uni-freiburg.de/en/job/00005...

It was an absolute pleasure to write a News&Views for @andersshansen.bsky.social lab's newest paper in NSMB. Here, the authors provide absolute quantification of chromatin loops genome-wide: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In the first year of his presidency, Trump made more money than in the rest of his life combined. A total of $2.2 billion from the presidency. Meanwhile, most Americans worked hard to just break even. This is the cost of corruption. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/u...

Attention ECRs: Deadline for self nominations to present in the next Rising Stars of IS-MPMI @ismpmi.bsky.social webinar is TODAY! PhD students and postdocs — don't miss your chance to share your research with the global MPMI community! Apply now: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

You can find this study in Nature Communications www.nature.com/articles/s41... #PlantScience

We have some ideas of how the variation arises and it was fun to dig into one of the most dynamic/fastest evolving regions of the caddisfly proteome. Thanks to a group of fantastic collaborators/co-authors! Here, again, is the link to the paper if you want to take a read: doi.org/10.1093/molb...

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

Ford has rehired hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI backfired and has cost the company billions of dollars. AI adoption is blamed for Ford being the most recalled automaker in the U.S. with 51 recalls covering over 11 million vehicles in the first half of 2026 alone.

Microbes that have the greatest genomic potential for secondary metabolism tend to be multicellular. Here, we show that signatures of ancestral BGC expansions within 3 bacterial phyla and 2 fungal lineages coincide with origins of complex multicellularity [1/12] 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bioprinting living fungal mycelial networks onto wearable electronics enables the creation of “Mycoelectronics” that can sense heat and repair themselves when damaged—a technology with possible environmental and healthcare applications. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/4ngo50ZhEl1

“the academic community is enormously heterogeneous and it’s almost impossible to keep everyone happy” Never a truer word said in this analysis of downstream consequences of openness by @jacoates.bsky.social ripplingideas.org/2026/06/26/t...

1/8 What if the genomic features we associate with fungal pathogens were also used by mutualists? We assembled 41 scale lichen genomes across 11 Peltigera species with 30 chromosome scale and 5 T2T revealing an unexpected genomic toolkit behind lichen symbiosis. doi.org/10.64898/202... #lichen

If you'd like an idea of what happens, who's impacted & how when AUSTRALIA has heatwaves The fossil fuel industry, financial industry & government is enabling & entrenching these deadly climate impacts

The academic hiring system is simply not designed for candidates like me. It privileges a kind of performative intellectualism—the ability to stand at a whiteboard and extemporize about science as if you were some kind of 19th-century naturalist 😂 😂 😂 open.substack.com/pub/inprepar...

🟧 Orange is the new green?? 🟧 New sensitive orange calcium indicator (🟠OCaMP) now out in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Highlights ⚡ Detects single action potentials in vivo 🔬 Optimized for 1030 nm imaging 📸 Highly photostable, minimal photoswitching 🌈 Multiplex with green biosensors

"Honestly, I don't know where to fucking start" 📸: @number10cat.bsky.social

Today is #ShowYourStripes day! The warming stripes, created by @edhawkins.org, show how the place where you live has changed over time. Find yours at showyourstripes.info. Download them, share them, and use them to start a conversation today!

France could record its hottest day ever in the coming days, exceeding the 30°C mark nationwide for the first time on record. A truly historic heatwave is on the way.

As is the annual tradition, we hope many of you will take the opportunity to use the Climate Stripes this week to start important conversations about the risks from, and solutions to, climate change. Officially, #ShowYourStripes for 2026 is on Sat 20th June. www.ShowYourStripes.info

#SMBE2026 Open Symposium 10a: Population genetics and genomics 🗓️ Thu Jul 2, 10:30am 🔗 smbe2026.org/programme Talks by: @charleston.bsky.social Xuejing Wang Qiaz Hua Sherif Negm Kathryn Hodgins Cedric Tan @adaigle.bsky.social @taprs.bsky.social

RIP Mark Rothko. You would have loved how the hydrogen peroxide bleach is only turning the Reflecting Pool blue around the perimeter

On the one-year anniversary of EMPIRE OF AI, I am so, so excited to announce The AI Resist List, a new project that documents examples of resistance to the AI empires around the world 😍 airesistlist.org

get ready for an extremely hot year - and droughts - thanks for your attention #australia

Super happy we are doing it again our joint Nanopore Sequencing Workshop or jamboree 2026 The Centre for Crop and Disease Management, in partnership with ANU, is hosting a 3-day intensive Nanopore Sequencing Workshop from 17–19 November 2026 at Curtin University. www.ccdm.com.au/nanopore-seq...