Academics don't like being told that they live in an Ivory Tower, but I have to say, only people who have spent practically their whole life within the security of tenured employment could come up with such a cruel solution. There are more equitable ways to solve the low success rate problem.

Lazy use of AI by half-ass researchers is putting digital asbestos everywhere, which will be a huge pain in the ass to clean up. Just do your damn job as a scholar or let someone else with more integrity and competence have your position. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"genAI can be used to create podcasts from a paper to teach st-" Let me stop you right there. Before you feed somebody's paper to a slop machine, invite that somebody to talk to your students about their paper. We're right here. We academics won't shut up about our work, man. 🧪

My first PhD student‘s, Kavan Gor, paper on 5-color single-molecule imaging of co-transcriptional RNA folding is out in @science.org Advances! He finds how RNA modification enzymes, antisense oligonucleotides and ribosomal proteins re-route nascent RNA folding. See more details in EMBL post below!

As a kid, watching Walker, Texas Ranger taught me that many problems in life can be solved by a well-timed roundhouse kick, a lesson that has served me well in academia

Timely reminder that a few years ago we named the Norris1 lncRNA, which remains quite enigmatic, but, fittingly for Chuck, is expressed primarily in the testis pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Pilar is an amazing person and great scientist! It's a lot of fun to work with her! Well deserved PhD! Congratulations! 🥳

One of the many, many things genAI destroys is human collaboration. It actively creates loners, guys spinning off into the deep end with literally no one around them to go "hey what the fuck are you talking about" or "hey this sounds like the thing I've been working on" or "check out this book"

The DGfB Molecular Biophysics meeting in Hünfeld is always such a great experience! 🔬⚗️ A lot of opportunities to talk & brainstorm with others in a friendly and relaxed environment. 🧠🌩️ This time, I was recognized with the poster prize, which was a nice cherry on top! 🍒

Congratulations to Lukas @pekarekl.bsky.social for winning the poster prize at the DGfB Molecular Biophysics meeting in Hünfeld last week 🏆 - it was a fantastic meeting with lots of interesting talks & great to catch up with colleagues and sad that we missed out on many of our Israeli colleagues.

Do you ever watch a bird making a nest and they move one twig from one side to the other and then back and you’re like haha how silly and inefficient what is that accomplishing But then I am working on my slide deck and suddenly it me

Condensates are powerful ways to break symmetry and cells do remarkable things with them. Here we show that in a multinucleate fungus, a condensate regulates translation of a cyclin and a formin in distinct locations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New research group at the CRTD @tudresden.bsky.social !🎉🔬 Supported by the ERC Starting Grant, Dr. Anna Czarkwiani @aniaczark.bsky.social is launching a new group to study the sense of gravity and #regeneration in the inner ear in axolotl. Read more ➡️ tud.link/buva24 #CMCBnews

"you need to learn how to use gAI or you'll get left behind!" counterpoint! the absolute fastest way to render yourself unemployable is to build your skillset around a tool that does your thinking for you, that everyone has access to, and that one company can change or take away at any time

I was asked this week who are my ecologist heroes I said no one. Academia does not need heroes It needs collaborative, systematic, and non-hierarchical working

Doctors say that vaccines protect children from dangerous diseases. A nepo baby who barbecues dogs and snorts cocaine off toilet seats says that vaccines make children vulnerable to 5G radiation. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

When I was growing up, many songs played over the airwaves in Puerto Rico were in English. I did not understand most of the words. I have to be frank, for many I still don’t. But, I enjoyed them and don’t remember complaining about it. I think that is the case for most of the World.

AI writes papers, AI reviews, AI replies to decision letter, AI makes decision, AI reads papers, AI writes papers...

Trust me, the woman of academia are not at all surprised by the number of academic men orbiting Epstein.

yeah, just out of interest, how many people choose the pen on the right for real work or art? See a lot of them in professional workplaces, do you?

👇👇

🚨Last chance to apply for two PhD projects in my lab, applying structural biology and single molecule biophysics to investigate gene expression in RNA viruses: www.findaphd.com/phds/?Keywor...

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

🚨Attention prospective PhD students🚨 Are you interested in molecular mechanisms, RNA viruses, structural biology or biophysics? 🧬🦠🧪 We have THREE fully-funded PhD projects available for October 2026 entry: www.findaphd.com/phds/?Keywor... Please share/repost, and get in touch if you're interested

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤 If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 10/10

My first invitation to a predatory journal contribution <3 What an honour!

So happy and proud that my great supervisor and mentor Marcus Jahnel is one of those 13 scientists! Congratulations! 🥳

The academic publishing system is so rotten, it must be completely dismantled. Not partially, and not improved. Dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up. When I tell non-academic friends how it all works they stare at me in disbelief. Not only that it exists, but that we still allow it to.

Always shocking to see these kinds of data collected together. "[publishers made]US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024" - That's $12 billion diverted away from actual research or materially supporting the community - these are disgusting numbers.

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

Excited to share my first PhD student’s @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social! Tracking 5 dyes simultaneously Kavan Gor @embl.org tracks nascent #RNA folding during #ribosome assembly to correlate structural with functional information on single RNA molecules! Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I´m hiring! Please share 🪴 🧪 🌈

🧵Remember the preprint claiming SARS-CoV-2 has a "synthetic fingerprint"? It said a restriction map was "extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.” I took its claims seriously. The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis collapses. My new preprint explains why. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

What's in yer basement?

3 more days to apply for a PhD position within our training program on biomolecular condensates 👇👇. 12 positions within our a focus from physics and theory to experimental biophysics to biology and medicine/disease.

Dear funding agencies, I know we all want to discover the wonder drug that will cure the horrible diseases, but to do that, we need to invest in basic, unsexy, foundational research on how the systems work. Funding can’t all be drug development. Sincerely, Looking for basic research grants.

AI in biology: "I read about some new computational method...get excited because it’s exactly what I need...I try the method...Most of the time things don’t work...I have seen this play out so many times my default assumption is nothing is going to work" blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

AI-generated papers AI-generated peer-review reports AI-generated images AI-grant writing Algorithms to spot promising science I'm very worried, we should all be very worried

here are some helpful steps for academics who are considering creating genAI images to use for lab branding: 1. don't

How do flexible regions of histone chaperones team up to handle histones? Together with Fred Winston’s lab @harvardmed.bsky.social, we reveal new insights in our study just out in Mol Cell. Hats off to James Warner and Vanda Lux @iocbprague.bsky.social for their key contributions! dlvr.it/TNB145

Rainer and I did our last experiment together in the Kraushar Lab @molgen.mpg.de on Sunday - like many such days since our postdocs. Rainer will soon lead a team in the Emmanuelle Charpentier Dept @MPUSP - stay tuned for more!

Amazing!!! 🧪 The 2025 Ig Nobel prize goes to scientists from the @mpipks.bsky.social for discovering a bullet proof version to make the classic pasta alla cacio e pepe! Including a deep understanding of the pasta sauce in terms of phase separation physics 😃 Congrats @gbart.bsky.social et al! Links👇

Love RNA biology? Join us to explore the piRNA pathway with structural and genetic approaches (see 👇👇). PhD student/postdoc position co-supervised by Clemens Plaschka & myself. DM or email us if you’d like to know more! @vbcscitraining.bsky.social @imbavienna.bsky.social @impvienna.bsky.social

This is indeed a unique opportunity for @ec.europa.eu. But to ensure that „excellence thrives where it is enabled, protected & shared“ the % of funded proposals needs to stay the same (or actually increase). Otherwise it’s just a waste of talent.

"Hostility, exclusion and academic bullying should be formally recognised as research integrity issues because they directly impact who gets to succeed and whose voices are silenced." By @maddipow.bsky.social

Health misinformation and disinformation are the biggest and most under prioritized threats to public health in the 21st century. They are eroding decades of progress in the control and spread of diseases in real time. If we do not address this like the existential threat it is, we risk everything!

My Friday night hot take is that replication studies are largely a waste of time & $ If a result is worth following up on, it's better to address from a different angle & see if it holds water. Strong ideas withstand this Conversely, there R infinite ways a replication can fail that teach you zip

"...if we deploy LLM assistants in decision-making roles... they will implicitly favor LLM-based AI agents and LLM-assisted humans over ordinary humans" Translation: Use the product, or the product will discriminate against you. Great