Already more than 5,000 Australians have joined our campaign to release more funding for medical research in the 2026 Federal Budget. If you can spare 30 seconds of your time to join our campaign, you’ll help fund life-saving cures in Australia. www.moniqueryan.com.au/medical_rese...

Does anyone know of some good/reasonable short reads of how GenAI can be useful in undergraduate learning? I am *bit* of a skeptic yet wanted to provide students with various views.

Communications went from publishing 149 manuscripts in 2010 to 12,633 in 2025- that's over $160 million of science funding going to publication fees for one journal!

I got lost a while ago with Communication XYZ. Maybe the flood of journals means you have to read the actual paper. In this case just another add on for the $$$ extortion machine from science funding.

CEPLAS starts a number of new projects, and we are looking for 12 Postdocs ❗ CEPLAS projects are always highly collaborative, that means postdocs working with us will always closely interact with several CEPLAS research groups. Find all postdoc openings here: www.ceplas.eu/en/training-...

Saving a lot of time these days using AI to do the crossword for me - it's brilliant! 😀

“If AI consistently produced garbage, students could ignore it. If it consistently produced excellence, they could learn to use it appropriately. Instead, students have no way to predict which interaction will be reliable, which means every interaction requires an exhaustive verification process.”

Over the years I’ve been willing to put up with quite a lot in order to go to football matches, but the possibility of being randomly scooped up & sent to a concentration camp for months is a bit too much of an inconvenience.

Just $1B is more than you can ever spend. You can spend $1M *every week* and not run out, ever! If you have $100B, the *only* thing you can do with it is give it away. It's a colossally dumb argument that billionaires are somehow better at allocating money to causes, but they don't even do that!

DELAY: the work associated with protecting Australian research from foreign interference are causing hold ups and issues for grant applications. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/grant-d... “The requirements we now have to go through…are more extensive and time-consuming than we had imagined,”

My predictions are that grant delays have a much more severe impact on Australia's productivity than any real foreign interference enabled by any ARC grants.... maybe the delay was always the intended interference.

The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Racism@Uni study has been released and its findings are incredibly confronting… “racism is deeply embedded across Australian universities and has profound impacts on students and staff.” humanrights.gov.au/about-us/med...

Revealed: The true toll of female suicides in UK with domestic abuse at their core

🚨📢📄 Article in press in Genome Biology doi.org/10.1186/s130... We introduce panREPET, a reference-free pipeline to detect shared transposable element (TE) insertions across pangenomes and retrace their evolutionary dynamics #TEsky 🧵👇

And save >80% on the cost by pooling 6 or more plasmids into a single sample using our free SAVEMONEY algorithm! elifesciences.org/articles/88794 colab.research.google.com/github/Masaa...

Fine mapping and genomic analyses reveal a tandem kinase-pseudokinase candidate underlying OrDeb2-mediated resistance to Orobanche cumana in sunflower https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.12.705495v1

I'm super excited to share that this article was published today in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... All made possible by the fantastic group of donors, volunteers and scientists at The American Chestnut Foundation (tacf.org), HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and our collaborators.

My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

#DeepMutationalScanning (DMS) experiments are limited by gene size due to library complexity & costs. @christianlandry.bsky.social &co develop an efficient & cost-effective barcoded cloning strategy for plasmid-based DMS libraries that enables study of large genes @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4abhyUf

Check out our new op-ed! With @taniaduarte.bsky.social @markwong.bsky.social, @suoman.bsky.social, & @timdavies.org.uk. We argue that these collabs normalize close relationships w/Big-Tech, setting them up to be key actors in governance who provide tech solutions to important social ‘problems’.

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

Benthamiana rhapsody 🎶 🌱 How benthi is the go-to system for cracking the activation mechanism of an Arabidopsis TIR-NLR immune receptor— that’s the rhapsody. Congrats He Zhao and Selvaraj for this wonderful collaboration 👇🏼 doi.org/10.64898/202...

' Ronald Barnett describes the contemporary fascination with skills as a form of ‘bewitchment’ (others have put it more strongly elsewhere)....When individuals are defined in this way, they become more easily interchangeable in the labour market, increasing workers’ vulnerability.'

Reminder that the abstract deadline for the Biology of Genomes meeting at CSHL is on Feb 13! We have a fantastic lineup of keynote speakers (Janet Kelso and Jonathan Pritchard) and session chairs. Submit your best science to this exciting and engaged meeting! meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

This idea that one can discern a technology is fascist and then still conclude "we need to collect data" is nonsense! www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

Absolutely nails it! 👇 #GenAI #AIEthics #RejectAI

Get fucked Chris. Sure, keep the protests and Herzog a couple of kays from each other at all times, but to completely shut down any protest, that members of his own backbench will attend, utter plonker

Sydney CBD + Eastern suburbs shut down for 5 days for the Israeli President’s arrival. Meanwhile our democratic right to protest is an “unnecessary burden” according to Chris Minns. This government will accommodate a mass murder but not the rights of the people who live here.

"By the end of the two-year period, 94% of participants reported they were housed." A million pilot programs show the same thing: when people are given enough money to afford housing, homelessness ends. Other supports matter, but housing comes first. Not policing. Not moralizing. Homes.

I was asked to review two back-to-back papers in Cell twice. Once initially and once for re-review... they were each 150 pages long including rebuttal. This means 300 pages to evaluate critically and for free. Simply impossible.

🌱 IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award 🍄 Congrats to Ningkang Sun 🇨🇳 🏆 Asia awardee Supported by The New Phytologist Foundation @newphyt.bsky.social This award supports her attendance at #ICOM2026, where she will give an oral presentation #Mycorrhiza

🌱 IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award 🍄 Congrats to Beatrice M. Bock USA 🏆 North America awardee Supported by The New Phytologist Foundation @newphyt.bsky.social This award supports her participation with oral presentation at #ICOM2026 #Mycorrhiza

🌱IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award🍄 🎉Congrats to Maycon Cristiano Barbosa 🇧🇷 🏆 Latin America awardee Award supported by the New Phytologist Foundation @newphyt.bsky.social This award supports his participation with an oral presentation at #ICOM2026 #Mycorrhiza

🌱 IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award 🍄 Congrats to Amara Santiesteban-Serrano 🇪🇸 🏆 Europe awardee Supported by the New Phytologist Foundation @newphyt. This award supports her participation with oral presentation at #ICOM2026 #Mycorrhiza @csic.es

Now out in Synthese! 😊 "Reframing the free will debate: the universe is not deterministic", with Henry Potter and George Ellis rdcu.be/e2hIh

Striking paper from researchers at Anthropic using a randomised control trial to look at the effects of AI use on skills acquisition. TL:DR ‘We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.’ www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

AI hallucinations in science manuscripts are a nuisance. Paranormal citations, or paracites, will be a nightmare. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (w/ @sina.bio & @lauraluebbert.com).

"There is still life in the old dog." Brian Charlesworth on Fisher's Fundamental Theorem in @journal-evo.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/evol...

PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals," helped spur innovation. But they're also insidious to human health. https://to.pbs.org/4qRXD2m

#HPS #AcademicSky 🧪

Full moon time with endless possibilities.

NEW H. H. Flor Distinguished Review: "The Extended Plant Immune System," by Corné M. J. Pieterse. Read the open access review in MPMI: https://doi.org/10.1094/MPMI-10-25-0144-HH

Tomorrow 3 Feb 2026 (17 CET), the Wheat Initiative Pathogens EWG hosts a webinar by @cesaree-mg.bsky.social (John Innes Centre) on improving wheat stem rust models under climate change. 🌾 www.wheatinitiative.org/new-events/f...

Tiberius parameters for fungi incertae sedis will soon be available on Github.

In a new #SciencePolicyForum, researchers discuss the risks of malicious “#AI swarms,” which enable a new class of large-scale, coordinated disinformation campaigns that pose significant risks to democracy. https://scim.ag/49FIhrM

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Please share! PhD position (4 years) available in my group @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social. We look for candidates with solid aptitude in computer science to cross disciplines and use cutting edge imaging to understand host infection by destructive plant pathogens. uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

Please share! My group at @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social is offering a post-doctoral position (4 years). We look for a structural biologist with experience in Cryo-EM/Cryo-ET to investigate the mechanisms of host invasion by pathogenic fungi. Deadline February 28th! uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...