Ingenious academic trolling of the AI zombies

I was one of these!

🐠 New pre-print from the lab! 🐠 Neural microexons fine-tune protein function - but how do they impact arousal states and underlying neuronal signaling pathways? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Check out our latest pre-print by @tahneema.bsky.social et al, @upf.edu @crg.eu. 🧵👇 1/9

If we make it through this dark period with democracy intact, it may be because the administration's incompetence was greater than its depravity.

The NIH/NHLBI sponsored Neurodevelopment Disorders and Sleep Workshop is now open for registrations. Co-chaired by Jared Saletin and myself. Please share. This event is open to the public #sleep #development www.nhlbi.nih.gov/events/2025/...

Seth Rogen’s remarks about destruction of US science cut from Breakthrough Prize video www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general...

Good. If Harvard can’t stand up to bullying from Trump, who can? www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

Congrats to @columbiauniversity.bsky.social scientists Gary Struhl & Iva Greenwald for winning the @gairdnerawards.bsky.social Award for their research yielding critical insights on how cells communicate with their neighbors during development. Read: zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/columbia-gai...

What I find amazing is that we have to wrestle text to make it perfect, accurate and fit in five pages for a 10% chance of it getting funded, and then some people can say "imagine the wolves in game of thrones lol" and they get ten billion buckaroos no strings attached

Well this is terrifying: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/s...

People might think that whatever destruction is done to science in the US, we can undo in 4 years with a Democratic president and Congress. The problem is that many areas require specialized knowledge and skills built up over years, and once that's lost, it's hard to get back.

‘“The people who are attacking higher education are talking nonstop,” said Holden Thorp, a chemist and former university administrator who runs the Science family of journals. “And the people leading higher education are not saying very much.”’

🚨This week, many Columbia scientists lost grants that funded over half their annual income. Others will no longer be able to do research that helps treat thousands of sick patients across the US. "It hurts," they told me. My story for @nature.com 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I hate you, daylight savings time. I hate you SO MUCH. you are an affront to the natural order and circadian rhythms everywhere.

I got your waste, fraud, and abuse right here

Standing up for science with lab members in DC yesterday.

Horrible that PhD offers are being rescinded due to budget fears. My friend Wendy Roth is quoted about her unenviable role in having to tell U Penn students the bad news. The cruelty is the point. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/u...

Pubmed is down for me in the UK. (12-1PM) PMC Central still works.

American scientists need to get politically organized urgently to combat this! We are sleepwalking into a nightmare!

Our new review article with @michelcayouette.bsky.social is out on temporal patterning and glial reprogramming in adult CNS, and its implications for treating degenerative diseases. All work from our lab discussed here was funded by NIH. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kfup3Q9h2...

Our paper on zebrafish phenotypes in Alzheimer’s risk genes finally is now in its final form at Elife!

Really successful mini-conference for Sleep and Circadian Rhythms Hub (Bristol Neuroscience). Lots of good talks and mingling 😊. Stay tuned for v2 next year, with @aliceisnotfren1.bsky.social we are determined to do it again! Thanks @jasonrihel.bsky.social for a wonderful keynote talk 🐟 💤

The NIH’s guidance on Sex as a Biological Variable has stamped at the top a rather Orwellian disclaimer: “historical document published prior to Jan 20, 2025: orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-as-biolo...

This is the way. Republicans can't pass either a budget or a debt limit increase on their own. Ending this nonsense immediately is the price of cooperation. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/u...

Contact numbers for my fellow Marylanders and Baltimoreans: Senator Chris van Hollen 202-224-4654 Senator Angela Alsobrooks 202-224-4524 Representative Kweisi Mfume: 202-225-474 (MD 7) Representative Johnny Olszewski Jr: 202-225-3061 (MD 2) Representative Sarah Elfreth: 202-225-4016 (MD 3)

In the interest of fairness, to match this insane cut to indirect costs, I demand that all Teslas be priced at the cost of the metal, the engine parts, and the tires. All the costs for factory electricity, maintenance workers, people who handle the company budgets, etc will not be part of the price.

Cool! Can’t wait to check this out.

If you are a scientist, watching the nonsense discussed at the RFK jr hearing will make you throw up in your mouth a little bit. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01...

Without Mel Brooks hiring Lynch to make THE ELEPHANT MAN — on the strength of ERASERHEAD alone — he is very likely just a guy who made a weird film at AFI. That whole filmography you love doesn’t happen. We all need sponsors and mentors and patrons. We need people who believe in us.

What was wrong with the old “upload a document that is X pages long” for UKRI grants? Now we have little text boxes and a word count. How do Inget my figures in there? All these drop down menus and text boxes for applications these days— as if we are submitting these grants on our phones.

A cool new paper from my colleague Adrian Isaacs just dropped at Nature Comms. Zebrafish make a guest appearance: Francois Kroll in my lab used Cas13 to target an ALS toxic mRNA form of C9orf72 in a zebrafish model. It rescued the mutant motor phenotype! Figure S4 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Oof.

Forget Barbenheimer or Glicked. I’m going to do A Complete Unferatu

📢 7th European Zebrafish Principal Investigators Meeting 📅 2-5 April 2025 🌍 Paris Brain Institute - ICM #zebrafish @filodelbene @ParisBrainInst Now extend deadline for abstract submission and registration. January 6th! www.europeanzebrafishpimeeting.com

Wow, killifish almost became a toy in the 1960s! The video is wild. boingboing.net/2024/12/16/h...

Most circadian/sleep science points to keeping US standard time year round and not switch times twice a year. But politicians seem to always get the wrong end of the stick. Are we going to eliminate this bad practice but in the wrong way?

I don’t get it— the impact factor is about how a journal is cited; what does the peer review model of the journal matter? If the papers are crap, they won’t be cited very much! www.science.org/content/arti...

Sign of the times, no more bluebird on the biorxiv engagement tab..

Get into my ear holes!

I'll read The Critique of Pure Reason before I watch a 2-minute video of someone talking into their phone camera

I have to agree with this. I’ve never understood this attitude from some colleagues that the editors and journal teams should be trod upon.

Addgene will no longer be using X, formerly Twitter. Instead, we'll be posting our 'microblogging' content here on Bluesky. blog.addgene.org/addgene-is-s...

Wow, reviewing a paper that uses citations from 1998 for “zebrafish optogenetics” and 2010 for “Crispr”! Are these chatGPT hallucinations? Never seen anything like it.

New lab preprint! Very excited to share this work, led by Ruoxu Wang. We study how stem cell fate is controlled post-transcriptionally and find a new regulator of translation initiation: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’m sorry, but no paper that claims the mantle of science should have the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” in the first sentence of the abstract. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Some thoughts for the academic recommendation letter season; a poem from the December 2023 issue of Poetry Magazine, by Keith Leonard. #poetry

As a yearly joke, for Spotify’s Wrapped, I try something odd. This year, I listened to the shortest mainstream song I could think of— the Beatles “Her Majesty”, clocking in at 26 seconds— 10,000+ times in a row. Wrapped says I listened to that song 0 times 😭. Fine print: a song counts after 30 sec

Starting Jan 1, 2024, I am taking over as co-Editor-in-Chief (from Amita Sehgal) of Current Opinion in Neurobiology , one of my favorite go-to journals for excellent brief reviews on hot topics in neuroscience. Along with Eunjoon Kim. If you have ideas of topics for issues - write us! 🧪 🧠🟦