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Let's find leaders for ANU who act as if higher ed actually matters. www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/pe...

I just love this paper. If you are interested in germlines, go read it. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Right now I'm responding to grant comments, and one of the reviewers appears to have mostly relied on AI to generate their (sometimes hilariously off-base) critiques. I am not enjoying this.

BEAST X v10.5.0 finally released – you can't just do beta releases forever. github.com/beast-dev/be... Details and instructions for installing on the BEAST website: beast.community

Mesquite 4.0 released! A major update — many new features, small and large (phylogenomics, visualizations, workflow management, &c). Check out the trailer video: www.mesquiteproject.org. Come discuss in our new Google Group (groups.google.com/g/mesquite-project). @bembidion.bsky.social ‬🧪 #evolbio

www.wehi.edu.au/careers/make... WEHI is looking for new lab heads! New and experienced lab heads welcome. Check out the ad, consider applying and share. We’re a collaborative bunch, in Australia, with fabulous technology, great colleagues at a values-driven organisation. @wehi-research.bsky.social

look at how they're geared up to arrest unarmed civilians. Fucking absurd. And hats off to the people who backed them down.

We will send the open letter to ANU executive and Council today at 3pm. At 7.30am, we have 434 signatures. How high can we get before 3pm? Tell your colleagues, spread the word!

Is this related to why announcements for Linkage Projects & Laureate Fellowships are delayed? Maybe RMS couldn’t handle new grants being awarded when the other changes were being made? Why doesn’t the ARC tell anyone what’s going on? Simple transparency & expectations management would be nice.

Time to speak up again. Here’s our latest open letter against unnecessary and damaging cuts and redundancies: forms.gle/SmuBaMz6PPGT...

In 1987 I took Stephen Jay Gould’s “Science B16 course” that helped convince me to be major in Biology w/ a focus on Evolution. But it was my TA Wayne Madison showing us early versions of MacClade that really did the trick.

Mesquite 4 beta released! Many new features, esp. phylogenomic. Check out the trailer and longer video on the home page: www.mesquiteproject.org, and use the download link there to get a copy. Feedback welcome! Ask and discuss on our new Google Group (groups.google.com/g/mesquite-p...).

ANU colleagues, stand up and protect your workplace and each other. Let's stop the reputational and psycho-social damage being done by the disproportionately heavy-handed response of the executive. Please sign and share widely in your networks. #ourANU

If you're part of #ourANU, please read this open letter to the ANU executive, and consider signing it. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

ANU website is SUPER super helpful. Always good to have FAQs so we know what they want us to do... Everything's going great at #ourANU !

The cybernetics school is a very curious beast, formerly led by the now VC Bell. A protected species?

Hi, do you have examples in your field for 20th century scientists who said something crazy that has been ignored since, but YOU think that maybe, just maybe, there's something there that's worth re-visiting?

If you're wondering how things are going at #ourANU, it's not good. A lot of voluntary redundancy folks still waiting to hear if they are can go. College budgets slashed, layoffs imminent, but zero communication. So we rely on Reddit posts like this: www.reddit.com/r/Anu/commen...

If you're wondering how things are going at #ourANU, it's not good. A lot of voluntary redundancy folks still waiting to hear if they are can go. College budgets slashed, layoffs imminent, but zero communication. So we rely on Reddit posts like this: www.reddit.com/r/Anu/commen...

important historical perspective on the value of federal funding of basic research at universities: "These are the building blocks of America's extraordinary strength, created over the last 100 years, and they are now being dismantled in 100 days" 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qk4...

Still waiting for #ourANU to run a poll which allows all staff to vote whether or not they have confidence in the leadership. >800 union members voted, and >95% said they had no confidence. ANU leadership claim that wasn't representative. Prove it.

It is sad that even basic research needs to be defended with utility. For me, basic research is in the same category as art: civilized societies can't do without it, because we all want to know who we are and what our place in the natural world is -- questions that only science can answer.

Every extra hour that ICE spends facing off with activists is an hour they can't spend kidnapping other people. Every extra minute ICE has to spend contingency planning around activists and neighbors, every extra officer ICE has to put on a kidnap squad, is a drain on their efficiency.

TANK vs TESLA "We've crushed fascism before and we'll crush it again" - ⁠WW2 veteran Ken, 98, in the tank

Today, FBI Director Kash Patel showed up to Congress with little understanding of his own administration's budget proposal, no clear plan on how to properly fund the FBI, and then lashed out when he was called on his lies. He said he wanted receipts — so here they are.

Frustrated that MCMCtree does not have complex substitution models? The IQ-tree team has now developed IQ2MC, an interface for seamless integration of IQ-tree's substitution models with MCMCtree's fast Bayesian pipeline for clock dating. Read the preprint here: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Straight from the autocratic / fascist playbook...

I got hit by some rather sudden and extreme financial hardship so if anyone is in need of remote wetlab contract research, strictly BSL1, do let me know. Currently scrambling for gigs. Plant, Bacterial, Archaeal Non-model Bioeng Custom Lab Hardware Turn Key Genetic Design Please repost for reach 💚

Nature reports that the National Science Foundation has stopped awarding new grants and allotting funds to existing ones. All of them. @colincarlson.bsky.social says that unless the freeze is lifted, it “is going to destroy people's labs.” 2/10 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

With a massive budget deficit, and in the middle of huge layoffs, good to see ANU investing in cleaning up some minor protest graffiti before most people get to work. #ourANU

On top of everything that is incredibly fucked, this is incredibly fucked too. It's not possible to do science if you are told not to interact with almost 20% of the global population.

It's publication day of my first book: The Tree of Life. The tree of life is a time machine that can take us back 4 billion years to meet our most distant ancestor. It is the magic that lets us tell the origin stories, beginning with this ancient relative, of everything from mushrooms to man.

I got lots of advice, some very specific. But one thing I heard again and again: America, you are running out of time. Here is what I learned: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Not really my announcement to make--I am but a lesser co-author--but IQ-TREE 3 has just been released! (Most credit to Minh Bui and @roblanfear.bsky.social and their labs) ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Sketch, capture and layout phylogenies www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧬🖥️🧪 github.com/husonlab/phy...

1/3 How long do you think it takes for highly pathogenic avian flu H5N1 sequences to be uploaded to GISAID after collection? How long should it be? In this commentary, we find a median delay of 228 days, with half the countries taking more than 6 months. rdcu.be/eeZGU @naturebiotech.bsky.social

Hi Rob! If you are reading Bluesky on the web, our P button will save any post from Bluesky as a website.

Extract any file on Linux!!! 🤩

I estimate that for me this is less than 5%of my time. But I’m not particularly good at getting grants, so…

Many people talk about the "Golden Age of Antibiotics", but I hadn't seen it visualized properly. Just how many types of antibiotics were discovered during that time? So, I visualized it myself!

I think this place has doubled in size since last I posted this. If you are into the nuts 'n bolts of phylogenetics/comparative methods, these are some great people to follow. As always, if you'd like to be added to the list, just let me know :) go.bsky.app/D7LsGUM

Excellent holiday reading, from an experience my wife had many years ago… thetinctorial.blogspot.com/2007/05/grea...

Very good point. And it reminds me of something slightly macabre that a mentor once told me: papers won’t come to visit you when you’re on your death-bed…

Delighted to organize the Next-Wave Symposium again this year! If you are an awesome postdoc in genomics---very broadly defined---come tell us about your amazing science!

The enshittification of email continues apace! My institutional emails are now dominated by: CAUTION: THE SENDER IS NOT A MEMBER OF YOUR DIRECT FAMILY and THIS EMAIL COULD HAVE IMPORTANT SECRETS AND STUFF

The Hadamard conjugation is awesome. See also: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

What's a reasonable price to sequence a 96 well plate of ~3.5MB bacterial genomes to high quality? Links to service providers (especially but not uniquely in Oz) welcome! Please repost.