disappointed that @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social is implicitly endorsing the use of LLMs to replace scientific thought @richardsever.bsky.social this is a short-sighted move and a net negative for science

An OpenAI executive said GPT-5 found solutions to 10 "previously unsolved" math problems when in reality all it did was find online references to places where people had already solved them techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/o...

How many chromosomes can an animal have? In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact. www.cell.com/current-biol...

“We don’t see how the university can continue to provide quality education to students with drastic reductions in staff. Management does not appear to be listening—students may [be] able to insist they do.” Sophia Woodman UCU Edinburgh President

If you do find your name, go here to file to get your money! www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

This is the most entertaining and most genuine piece of cinema I've watched I quite a while.

So much fun! “Listers” is worth a watch #birds youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo?...

Red devil spiders from the Canary Islands have a genome half the size of mainland counterparts - Pisarenco, @jrozasub.bsky.social et al. show how purifying selection against slightly deleterious DNA and TE insertions is the primary mechanism. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf206 #evobio #molbio #TEsky

First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

HOW NEO-NAZIS CAPTURED THE MARCH FOR AUSTRALIA WATCH: youtu.be/GLRoFdeI_5Y Documenting the crowd manipulation tricks deployed by the National Socialist Network to transform nationalist 'Marches for Australia' into, effectively, national socialist marches.

In all seriousness, this is a fantastic study that should be catapulted into every department chair's face immediately.

Reproduction in ants 🐜 just keeps blowing my mind 🤯 But this here is the crown for sure... for now. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (go also check out obligate chimerism, social chromosomes, clonal production of females and males, and much more...)

Would a rose by any other gene smell so sweet?

Just leaving this here for any academics who still get LLMs to summarise literature for them without any critical examination of their own. Check the authors of Nature opinions pieces pumping 'AI'. Many are employees of Microsoft etc., the only people who truly profit from this.

🚨Introducing the @sortee.bsky.social Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology🚨 doi.org/10.32942/X24... Increasingly E&E journals are recruiting data editors. We provide standardised guidelines for journals with data editors and those wanting to recruit them 🧵

Mike Ritchie reminded to publish in your society journals to keep things rolling. Overpriced journals from big publishers did not circle back their money to society! Surprised the EU still need to be reminded, I thought many funding bodies acknowledged review-community platforms. #ESEB2025

Ed's got a significant scoop here, an under-the-hood look at GPT5 that suggests why it feels like such a step back to users. The incompetence from OpenAI here is truly remarkable.

To be, or not to be, part-time in academia? This is a tricky question that has faced many of us and in @elife.bsky.social we discuss the benefits and challenges of being part-time. With @emiliapsantos.bsky.social and a fantastic, interdisciplinary team! elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Does selfing allow or even lead to massive genome reshuffling, expansion and sky high homozygousity? Come and find out at posters 29 and 42 this afternoon, only at #eseb2025 and learn about an organism whose genome looks like it went through a blender and came out high repetitive and homozygous.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

The original circos plot? From the 1947-1948 Carnegie Yearbook, the page prior to McClintock's Mutable Loci in Maize paper.

Is anyone else having problems with #NCBI Datasets today? It's completely broken for me on both macOS and Windows.

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

I am wildly paraphrasing, but the best commentary I have seen so far is this: Bringing AI into a learning institute is like bringing a fork lift to the gym. Sure, both accomplish the task at hand better than you, but you still fail do accomplish the thing you went there for in the first place.

Waiting with for next week's announcement of a deal with McKinsey to find more roles for consultants within government departments

A good example on why when you find nonsense papers it's worth checking an author's previous work - you often end up finding gems like.

'OpenAI signs deal with UK to find government uses for its models' www.theguardian.com/technology/2... Neatly captures the abject state of technopolitics. We should start with people's basic needs then ask if LLMs are the most appropriate answer (guess what, they aren't!)

This. My disgust for LLMs isn't just due to them being built on intellectual theft, their energy use wrecking progress made on emissions reduction, their complete financial unsustainablity, or their negative impact on our learning, critical thinking and mental health

2. Rather, it’s a trap. It’s a movement to eliminate scientists as providers of rostering grounding for society and as a highly-skilled, highly-respected community willing to push back on authoritarian lies.

5. The right-wing enthusiasm for AI science is not about doing better science faster. It’s about eliminating one of the most effective forms of societal resistance to authoritarian control.

New Online! Transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of transposable elements and their roles in development and disease

I think the new universities regular ATEC should make a rule — every time a university kills off a course like music or politics or sociology, they should also have to reduce the salary of the vice-chancellor by $100k

"What we truly need are intellectual infrastructures and economies of knowledge production that operate simultaneously in and beyond the universities." Which is why we established The Workers Observatory in Edinburgh: workersobservatory.org We need new spaces of inquiry.

AI tools cost a fraction of human labor—and may undermine the jobs needed to build careers. www.wired.com/story/pricin...

New from The Strain Team: 🎊 Springer Nature Discovers MDPI 🎊 Springer Nature has spawned a copycat journal series called "Discover" mimicking #MDPI journal titles and citation behaviours. We even made a browser game to prove it (see 🔗). Gross! 😀 1/n #ResearchIntegrity #SciPub #AcademicSky

It's finally out! This paper took quite a while but I'm so excited to share now! For anyone who studies sex chromosomes, take note: we found a rare "slower X"! (dN/dS_X < dN/dS_Autos) 👀

I want to share our latest work on a forward simulation framework on transposable element evolution. The TE Evolution Simulation Suite, or TESS, contains three components that can simulate many scenarios of genome evolution under the impact of TEs.

Genome size is surprisingly variable even WITHIN species. Dunja Lamatsch, Martin Haase, Maria Pilcher, and I use flow cytometry to show a nice example of this variation in this new paper, perhaps connected to a resolving whole-genome duplication, in our snails. 💜🐌🧬 doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Elon Musk wanted to buy Wikipedia so that he could determine our society’s collective view of truth. He couldn’t, so he created grok. Do not let these machines be arbiters of truth. It is abundantly clear that they are being used to push absurd far-right conspiracies.

We are about to witness the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Another genocide. Future historians will ask how it is possible that we all knew about it, yet did nothing. But we already know the answer: we have allowed that a people was completely dehumanized. Again. www.axios.com/2025/05/05/i...

Ali France just became the first person to unseat an opposition leader at an election. Despite Peter Dutton’s fear-mongering and culture wars that strategically and deliberately harm minorities, Australians didn’t buy it. And a woman with a disability showed him the door.

Just received my postal vote for the Federal election....there's a lot of cookers on the SA Senate ticket

Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

The core trilma here remains the same - the govt needs to accept one of three things: high student migration, higher domestic student fees (or higher taxes to fund universities) or university bankruptcies. Those are the only options, given where we are. Pick one.

Apropos of nothing: THERE WILL NEVER EVER EVER BE A CLONED MAMMOTH. <Message ends>

Join our team as a postdoc and explore the exciting world of transposable elements and developmental biology with us! @imbavienna.bsky.social @vbcscitraining.bsky.social

The nerve of this guy. He wastes university money by taking first class flight and staying in swanky hotels, and then turns around and lies through his teeth to us staff and says "the uni's going broke, redundancies are necessary".

Do you have transposon-related research cooking, with some cool results you are exciting to share? Start thinking about registering to #EMBOMobileGenome workshop! Nov 4-7 2025 in Heidelberg. One of the historical TE meetings, with a diverse and welcoming community. www.embl.org/about/info/c... 1/3

I realllllllllly don't think mainstream Australia understands just how dangerous this clamp down on the unis is. I am wayyyyyyyyy more scared of this than fucking Chinese boats or African gangs or Terrorists from derkastan or whatever I'm meant to be freaking out about about