Will die on the hill that Word is great but most scientists are just too lazy to learn how to use it and like complaining 🙃

So when do authors preprint? Many do long before they submit to a journal (to get feedback to improve the work?); many submit around the same time (just want the work out?). Only a minority are submitting once the paper is under review [evidence against claims by some detractors]. 3/n

New version of our preprint on bioRxiv about bioRxiv up. Now that’s what I call a revision – 6 years after the first version! It has new data about our progress and highlights from a massive user survey. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Reading one of the first publications documenting circadian rhythms in humans and it’s essentially two professors torturing an assistant prof. so i guess not much has changed in academia in 130 years 🙃

“Cognitive psychology has shown that students grow intellectually through doing the work of drafting, revising, failing, trying again, grappling with confusion, and revising weak arguments. This is the work of learning how to learn” phys.org/news/2026-02...

This whole debate was solved by the InstantPot.

No future US administration can claim to support international law until they ratify its membership of the ICC and prosecute Trump and his assistants-in-barbarity:

I disagree with this because I think what makes human writing so great is the sense of individual personhood behind it, represented in its unique combination of flaws, accents, and emotion, that no LLM can ever create tabula rasa.

Does anyone have a clear guide to what constitutes a conflict of interest in grant reviewing in relatively small scientific fields?

I've seen several recent preprints using DIANN v1.9. DIANN is great and stable in several versions, except for v1.9. We tested at least 7 different versions in a publication 👉 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/... v1.9 will likely provide more IDs, but at the cost of precision.

Eye-opening article on Russia’s low-level war on Europe by recruiting ‘single-use agents’. Inside Russia’s Secret Campaign of Sabotage in Europe www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I was so impressed with this story about measles in the Atlantic -- the depth of reporting it would take to weave in all these details so fluidly. Turns out, it was a work of fiction. She researched the effects of measles, but lots of fiction writers do research. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-...

This is something the Nazis used to do to Jewish children in the camps. It happened to a man I knew when he was a child in Auschwitz. The camp guards thought it was funny as hell.

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - this looks super cool, but does it really relate to the origin of life?

Many Europeans believe that their countries and governments are better than the current Trump admin and violence exercised by ICE, but it only takes a little research to see that Europe is just better at hiding its sins against immigrants.

Any fun suggestions for a name for our newest lab member?

Very proud to present, together with @plantteaching.bsky.social, Agnes Uhereczky, @yoselin.bsky.social, Sofie Goormachtig and @mehta-lab.com, our @jxbotany.bsky.social community resource paper on building a diverse and inclusive plant science community 🌱. academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-... (🧵 1/2)

Super excited to have this online at @jxbotany.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jxb/... "Building a diverse and inclusive plant science community," a call-to-action. Thanks to @apaterlini.bsky.social @mehta-lab.com @yoselin.bsky.social @goormachtig.bsky.social & Agnes Uhereczky + funders!💚

Plants use cell-surface and intracellular receptors that collaborate to detect pathogens🦠. We discovered that a key #ubiquitin recognition event recruits both receptor types into an unexpected dual receptor complex that boost the translation of defence proteins and establishes robust #PlantImmunity👇🏾

Wow, this is a good one. TILScience on Margot Robbie recently wearing "The Elizabeth Taylor Necklace" on the red carpet, and how its history, presence, and presentation has been shaped by the imperial looting of India and white supremacist rebranding. youtube.com/shorts/KPv_v...

Every American needs to watch this:

@markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy on the drain and strain of publishging: "After plan S and gold open access, journals changed their business model... Now your marketing to the authors not the readers, incentivizing volume rather than quality" #horizondiamond2026 www.horizondiamond.nl

We invaded France and no one will sell us a croissant. It’s very hard on the men.

Time for LOV and disorder? 🕝🌱 Tanikawa et al have determined that N-terminal disordered regions near the LOV domains of F-box proteins LKP2 and ZTL are essential for shortening the circadian period in #Arabidopsis under different conditions doi.org/10.1093/pcp/... #PlantScience #PlantClockBiology

www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/f... Become our new colleague (and next door neighbor) and lead a chair/group/department of Biophysics at Wageningen University. Reach out to me for info and please spread!!!

This is part of where your APCs go when you publish in MDPI and Frontiers. They use that money to buy more influence. Until funders, WoS, take meaningful action, they will continue to use muzzle velocity to overcome criticisms.

Plus, MDPI/Frontiers spend big money to convince governments they're not just legit, but leaders. Frontiers just sponsored WEF Davos, MDPI signed a deal with German national science agency. 🇩🇪+MDPI: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/germany... Davos: sciencehouse.frontiersin.org/event/945d08... 2/3

Immigration is a fake problem. We have politicians on the one hand who want to use immigrants as scapegoats for our real ones and politicians on the other who are too cowardly to stand against them and tell the truth. That is the entire situation. Until that changes, people will continue to die.

Working in the uni where Mercator did his work, I wonder how much of Trump’s obsession with Greenland is due to people constantly showing him this distorted view of the world?

Our model of wheat circadian clock based on our finding that orthlogues of ELF3 (Arabidopsis evening complex gene) peak at dawn in the cereals. TOC1 repression of ELF3 explains the different behaviours of Arabidopsis & wheat circadian clocks doi.org/10.1098/rsif... #plantresearch 🧪

Someone living in New York said to me a few months ago that Europeans don’t really understand how violent America is. I think we’re beginning to catch on now.

“People”. Some of us simply don’t submit original research to Nature journals at all ;)

During Fiona Hill's testimony to Congress on Oct 14, 2019, she described how Trump and Putin discussed exchanging Ukraine for Venezuela. The quid pro quo was if Trump refuses to help Ukraine fight off a Russian invasion, Putin would not help Venezuela (a Russian ally) resist a US takeover.

[It's that fundamental question of peer review is supposed to achieve that divides people and of course was the basis for the whole Web of Science indexing problem eLife had when they shifted approach. 4/n

So the statement "When you see Development on the CV of an applicant, you know it's high-quality, trustworthy work" represents a different view from, say, eLife. Because when you see "eLife" on a CV, you know you have to read the peer reviews to see if it is high-quality, trustworthy work... 3/n

"revision requests can expand beyond what is feasible...we've been told reviews are unnecessarily harsh... reviews can seem formidable but usually represent constructive critiques" Interesting reflections and introspection from editors of Development 1/n journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Some good things happened in 2025. Some highlights! 1. Huntington's disease has a treatment. 🧪2. FDA approval of antiviral drug Lenacapavir to prevent HIV 3. Brazil reduces deforestation by 32% 4. Columbia declares that the Amazon is off limits 5. India increases its tiger & lion population

Uh oh

It's fascinating how quickly every effort to "disrupt" the university sector collapses. Maybe the university – one of the oldest spontaneous orders anywhere, an institution much older than the corporation and the nation-state – has something going for it that outsiders don't appreciate?

lol re.: ERC Plus

We forget just how amazingly grim life used to be in 19th-century Europe. Kids aged 7 starting to work before dawn, working late into the night. Just unimaginable. (From Das Kapital, as relayed by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies)

📣Interested in doing your PhD in Plant Sciences 🌱, Microbial Sciences 🦠 or Computational Biology 👩‍💻? @ceplas.bsky.social offers 10 fully funded PhD 🎓fellowships. Pls repost and forward to interested candidates holding BSc degree.

Confused by all the histones that are cropping up in organisms that are decidedly NOT eukaryotes? check out our review - fantastic work by team NucEvo in the #Lugerlab The Expanding Histone Universe: Histone-Based DNA Organization in Noneukaryotic Organisms - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Preprints citing supplementary files that are not uploaded, preprints with missing methods sections, preprints with retracted links to raw data and code. Such papers aren’t complete manuscripts, they are just advertisements that reflect a contempt for the community and undermine open science. (2/2)

Time for a rant. I help screen papers for @biorxiv-plants.bsky.social and I’m getting sick of seeing big names using the server as an advertisement platform rather than a place to share their science. What does this mean? (1/2)

💡 EPSO welcomes the provisional agreement reached by the Trilogue on the legislative proposal for regulation of New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) in plants. EPSO offers to contribute on a scientific basis. 🌱 #PlantScience #Biodiversity #Food2030EU #Bioeconomy #LifeSciences 👉 bit.ly/48Mds37

#TansleyInsight: The discovery of #twilight length sensing in plants and its implications for models of plant #photoperiodism Lau et al. 👇 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #LatestIssue #PlantScience @uhriglab.bsky.social @mehta-lab.com

Led by Professor Jane Langdale @biology.ox.ac.uk, the C4 Rice Project builds on decades of interdisciplinary research working to ensure global food security. Discover the incredible story of the multi-decade battle to make better rice ⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3RY0vxzFpg

If you have only one thing to read today... "Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience." www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...