For those of you wanting to start a new project in the new year but afraid you're gonna suck, heed the words of the ancient texts:

Happy New Year, start it off smiling with this golden oldie

"Ask meta to summarize" / "ask grok to explain this to you." Thanks but I have a brain and I would sooner ask Bobcat Goldthwait, drunk, to explain Bose-Einstein condensates to me in Pontic Greek at 4x speed than look to shitty *AI* for comprehension or a summary

Here’s to 2026

The plot thickens... #Wolbachia wAnD, #Anopheles demeilloni and #Plasmodium; unhappy together? #MicroSky #IDSky #MicrobiomeSky #mosquitoes 💻🧬 verixiv.org/articles/2-4...

A last thought before taking off into your various breaks - Microbial Genomics is looking for editors! Scientific publishing is frustrating and so much money going to commercial publishers... be part of the change by supporting society publishing 😊 great opportunity to join a lovely community.

Last year, I was invited to give a seminar and put on a #LuxArt session by the student chapter of the American Society of Microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin . Students created some wonderful #LuxArt! 1/2

This is the approach CEOs want in normalizing use of AI to actually replace artists. "Oh it's just placeholder", tomorrow it will be "just a junior artist" and then "it's normal all art and writing is AI"

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

From paleoart to fine art, comics to medical animation, bioart to space imagery, explore the rich SciArt ecosystem on Bluesky with the SciArt Starter Pack. 150 artists, plus the entire popular SciArt Feed 🐡 to pin to your skyline. And no gen AI or NFTs. 🥳

It's actually incredible how much the average person despises AI and how divorced from reality these CEOs are about their role that they think they can just force it down everyone's throat irrespective

"there is little reason to doubt what the aim [of the massive investment in AI] is: to embed knowledge in machines—knowledge that previously belonged to the people working in these domains." 🧵

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

This is extraordinary. Prasad's memo was something else, but to have 12 former FDA commissioners get together so quickly and say what a threat it is...just wow. www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.... #medsky #vaccine #fda

New editor's spotlights to highlight some of the exciting work we see at #MGen, getting kicked off by @bjesseshapiro.bsky.social diving into the latest work from @sylvainbrisse.bsky.social et al 🔍 vaccine impacts on non-target species! #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky #IDSky #MedSky #evobio #clinmicro 💻🧬 🧪

My fantasy landscapes are my favourite thing to paint! These three ended up a series of sorts and hang in my foyer so I can escape into them often. I have a thing for foxes. They fascinate me! 😊 🦊☀️"Dark Moon Grove", "Woodlands", "Year of The Fox" linktr.ee/sunshyneart #art #mixedmedia #painting

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

Egret resting in a tree #Birds

If you're about to push these last manuscripts before wrapping up 2025, remider that our MGen Eukaryotic collection @microbiologysociety.org is open & growing; #Protists #Parasites #Fungi; friend or foe; all welcome 😊 #MicroSky #IDSky #Protistsonsky 🧬💻 www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/micr...

Finally, I know of at least one case where the letter writer, deep into an episode of AI-induced psychosis, asked the LLM why scientists were not responding. The machine suggested that perhaps the scientists were trying to steal his discovery. This will get someone killed sooner or later.

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#AMR #Klebsiella cause >100,000 neonatal deaths globally each year. Our new preprint shows more than half of #Klebsiella pneumoniae neonatal sepsis cases in African and South Asian are nosocomial, acquired through transmission in neonatal units. #WAAW doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The meta-analysis was led by @erkison.bsky.social, with 60 wonderful co-authors contributing data, ideas and interpretations, including @neleshg.bsky.social @[email protected] @ahmedmicrobes.bsky.social @evaheinz7.bsky.social @kelwyres.bsky.social and many others not on BlueSky

I love all functional/biological work, but methods development makes my inner perfectionist nerd so very happy! Congratulations Sarah Gallichan on the hard work and keeping up with my neverending 'oooh, interesting, what if...' 😅 #MicroSky #IDSky #MicrobiomeSky 🧬💻 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

In almost suspiciously perfect timing of the #ASTMH #TropMed25 starting; hot off the press Allan Zuza's first author paper taking a deep dive into genome dynamics of #Klebsiella long-term lingering lineages, congratulations Allan! 🎉 #MicroSky #IDSky 💻🧬 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

News from the mosquito-microbiome-ZIKV tripartite system; congratulations Cintia Cansado-Utrilla and Miguel Arturo Saldaña who spearheaded the data/experimental side, wonderful dataviz by Cintia& @laurabrettell.bsky.social. #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky animalmicrobiome.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

#Klebsiella keeping us all occupied again, some real detective work with the fantastic IPC and Micro teams at Alder Hey hospital; and congratulations Alice Fraser for her second PhD first-author, hot off the press @eurosurveillance.org ! #MicroSky #IDSky 💻🧬🧪🧫 www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2...

No, but taxing the rich could

The recordings of the 6-hour webinar on Bacterial Strain Taxonomy for Genomic Surveillance are now available through the @ecdc.europa.eu ECDC Learning portal: learning.ecdc.europa.eu/course/view.... - cgMLST, SNPs, K-mer based strain nomenclatures applications and more!

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

I keep saying: this AI hype isn‘t merely coincidental to the rise of fascism, they go hand in hand

The linked course is an incredibly well-written, clear explanation of how LLMs work and outlines really thoughtfully what the can, and can't, do. Recommended read for absolutely everyone out there. #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky 💻🧬

So why do I let AI in my house? Don’t I care about the environmental consequences? What about the theft of intellectual property? Don’t I understand that these are bullshit machines? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. It’s what I do all day long.

I just made an account and voted for this biology laboratory made of LEGO to "promote biological research and inspire more people into the world of biology". They need 10K votes. Reposting and/or voting below would be helpful. 🤗 beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

BMA wishes all our UK supporters a powerful Black History Month! 🇬🇧 This year’s theme, “Standing Firm in Power and Pride” is everything 💥 Read our new #MGen article on how we’re helping Black microbiologists thrive through #BlackinMicro Week: doi.org/10.1099/mgen...#MGen#BlackinMicro

To celebrate and support the great @blackinmicro.bsky.social initiative and what joining could mean for you, please take a look through the commentary in Microbial Genomics @microbiologysociety.org hot off the press today! #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky 💻🧬🧪🦠 www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

After a short website glitch, the applications are now open again - three #PhD opportunities; featuring (in no particular order) #Klebsiella, #protists, #biofilms, #microscopy, #bioinformatics, #mosquitoes, #midges and #microbiomes, see below! #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky #ProtistsOnSky #evobio 💻🧬🧪🦠🦟🔬

AFN has a story today. This is the first that I heard someone died. So many villages devastated. It will take years to recover because it's so expensive to build in these rural villages. www.adn.com/alaska-news/...?

“Your job is not to turn in completed assignments; it's to learn how to think.” Ted Chiang‘s succinct summary of the issue with using AI in education. I’m not a sports guy but the athlete metaphor he uses in this interview is pretty spot on.

Come work with us, we're a friendly bunch 😊 #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky #ProtistsOnSky #IDSky #Fungi #evobio 💻🧬

The crowd in Tbilisi, Georgia right now. Instead of taking part in the sham local elections, Georgians are filling the streets in large numbers for Day 311 of uninterrupted, nationwide #GeorgiaProtests.

#PhD alerts! @unistrathclyde.bsky.social @uofglasgow.bsky.social What do #amoebae and #biofilms mean for environmental and hospital survival of different Klebs? @liam-rooney.bsky.social & @fionahenriquez.bsky.social 🦠 🔬 🧬 💻 #MicroSky #IDSky #Klebsiella www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate... (1/3)

#PhD alerts! @unistrathclyde.bsky.social @uofglasgow.bsky.social What do #amoebae and #biofilms mean for environmental and hospital survival of different Klebs? @liam-rooney.bsky.social & @fionahenriquez.bsky.social 🦠 🔬 🧬 💻 #MicroSky #IDSky #Klebsiella www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate... (1/3)

Happy to share that the paper describing Autocycler is now 100% up: doi.org/10.1093/bioi... (1/3)

Come for the Klebs resistance data, stay for the DataViz! Massive congratulations to @karatsang.bsky.social on juggling such a huge meta-analysis; Ciprofloxacin resistance in Klebsiella pneumoniae: phenotype, genotype, global resistance patterns #MicroSky 💻🧬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today is a great day to register for #BiM2025 #BlackInMicro Week. Get ready to join our online celebration: linktr.ee/BlackInMicro#BiM2025#BlackInMicroor see link in bio)

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

our paper on the population genomics of An. funestus, one of the major (yet less studied) human malaria vectors in Africa, is now out in @science.org 🦟 read @mariloumercedes.bsky.social's original preprint thread to find out more! bsky.app/profile/mari...