There’s a leak - and a conceptual artist - at the Max Planck 👌

new zealand government reaching new heights of stupidity next year our public dollars will go more to AI grants ($70 million) than all investigator-initiated basic science combined ($56 million in the Marsden fund)

New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...

www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06... @ashleydaltonmp.bsky.social #Longcovidkids

Biology Department xkcd.com/3140/

Must read, and not just for higher ed folks: anyone concerned about education and people’s ability to think rigorously and critically should read this manifesto.

Absolutely fantastic piece on the interfaces between climate risk and insurance in the Polycrisis newsletter today, by @70sbachchan.bsky.social and @katemac.bsky.social Not a doom loop, but “communities of fate” and the moral economy of the welfare state. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ins...

Australian universities are in a governance crisis. VC pay blowouts, scandals, mission drift — these aren’t random, they’re structural. This new working paper with @marijataflaga.bsky.social & Keith Dowding digs into why the system is broken, and how to fix it. doi.org/10.25911/MWW... A thread:

Ok this is mad "...an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I LOVE that you can see pur Cocos Keeling voyage eDNA data on this figure. It's that straight line going north-west from Western Australia/Perth!

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Omg nerd day made

I feel like there should be a "median rent in the area" based guidelines for conference registration fees. If your 3 day academic conference costs more than a median whole month's rent to live there, maybe something can be improved 🫠

Be like Fran www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Fantastic new paper by @reeserichardson.bsky.social et al. An enormous amount of work showing the extent of coordinated scientific fraud and involvement of some editors. The number of fraudulent publications grows at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary simulations across multiple chromosomes and full genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.07.669155v1

Happy to be able to finally share our NLR pangenome paper, out now in CHM. "Pangenomic context reveals the extent of intraspecific plant NLR evolution" www.cell.com/cell-host-mi... #plantscience #plantimmunity #pangenomes #science #nlr

tech in 2025 source: mastodon.social/@nclm/115021...

'And the need for grants long ago ceased to prioritize scientific questions, per se, supplanting them with a basic and insatiable institutional hunger for money as an end in itself (got to feed the beast!). This is both demoralizing and demotivating. ' 💔I feel this very much (and that's why I left)

This looks like an amazing tool www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"With [some AI bullshit] you can go from a rough idea to a structured draft — in just 3 minutes" We're so cooked.

1/3 New preprint led by Shanshan Wang, in collaboration with the Timmermans lab. Several groups have presented sc/snRNA-seq analyses of Arabidopsis leaves after bacterial infection before. Is there anything left to discover? Turns out: Yes. #plantscience www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

WTF? I was quoted in this story but I have never spoken to the reporter nor would I have said those things. Is everything just generated by LLMs these days? cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans...

A lot of you had questions so I wrote about what I think happened here! Behold: wiczipedia.substack.com/p/i-got-trap...

Anyone who's visited the UK knows that the empty shells of monasteries destroyed by Henry VIII still dot the landscape. I've been seeing images of all the U.S. higher ed institutions being financially destroyed now & can't help thinking of what their empty shells might look like a century from now.

(1) This is of course absolute catnip for me; (2) I am SO disappointed in Washington state, do better, people; (3) You really can see the White-Tailed Deer Hegemony in the Northeast; (4) Fascinating that milkweed states are not also monarch butterfly states; (5) The green anole/brown anole line!!

1. From the FDA to the NSF’s new priorities to Chan-Zuckerberg’s recent pivot, there’s a massive push — particularly on they political right — to hand off as much of the scientific process as possible to AI. It’s not about competing with China in AI. Not while gutting the US research ecosystem.

This is a good time to remember that Moas, Emus, and the other ratites diverged so long ago, they FLEW to different continents, and then lost the ability to fly and became giants independently. You can't just sprinkle a few variants to make one into the other. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

K-mer-based ML method for estimating distances of reads to genomes enables genome-wide phylogenetic placement doi.org/10.1101/2025... Phylogenetic placement of Ceratophyllum submersum based on a complete plastome sequence derived from nanopore long read sequencing data doi.org/10.1101/2023...

I'm super happy to share this preprint on ‘Distribution of capsule and O types in #Klebsiella pneumoniae causing neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: meta-analysis of genome-predicted serotype prevalence and potential vaccine coverage’ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We would love feedback on a new NCBI-BLAST service we are launching today: sky-blast.com Under the hood it's the same BLAST executable and databases provided by NCBI, with a replica of the NIH's interface - providing an alternative to the US gov service that's less congested, faster & more reliable

Rapid polygenic adaptation in a wild population of ash trees under a novel fungal epidemic | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🧵 THREAD: Why the Cato Institute’s new paper on “misinformation panic” is dangerously wrong, and why it completely misunderstands the real crisis we face. www.cato.org/policy-analy...

Yesterday, @carlbergstrom.com presented his course "Modern-day Oracles or BS Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world". Neat way to make students aware of the capacities and limitations of LLMs👇🎰 Recording: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZC0... Course: thebullshitmachines.com @unswbabs.bsky.social

#Evol2025 I’ll be talking about the self-hosted open-source software stack my lab uses for collaboration today @ 5:15 (Athena F). Come check out how we replace or complement tools from Google/Microsoft/Slack—and wrap up the conference with a (hopefully) different kind of talk. Come chat with us :)

Beautiful tribute to Joanne Chory on @scifri.bsky.social! www.sciencefriday.com/segments/be-...

born too late to get a two Western blot Nature paper, born too early to be a science TikTokker, born just in time to start a postdoc during a global pandemic and look for faculty positions during a historic hiring freeze

This is not about cleaning up after last year’s protests; this is about getting out ahead of what is coming.

still makes me so happy that I have poisoned Google Search against Prabhakar Raghavan

NCBI is down since at least 20 hours ago, time to revert to alternative means.

In Academia, I think folks get used to not standing out, not speaking up, and not making a target of ourselves because we know full well that admins, hiring committees, and fellow academics are extremely petty and retributive. The problem is...we're all targets, because everyone with a pulse is.

Good article on backing up all your data and documents www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/b...

This excellent Nature paper from 2015 discussed multiple ways that sex is not binary, and why the idea of two sexes is simplistic. Required reading right now - please share! www.nature.com/articles/518... 🧪👨‍🔬🧬🖥️

Spring 2025 arboretum open days announced! Currency Creek Arboretum open days for 2025 are now: Sat 29 & Sun 30 March 2025 Sat 11 & Sun 12 October 2025 Come along, see the world's most diverse collection of eucalypts, and learn all about them! Details here: www.dn.com.au/Currency_Cre...

live feed of science in the U.S.

GovWayBack. govwayback.com

🧪🧬🔬◼️ !!happy international day of [redacted] and [redacted] in science!! ◼️🔬🧬🧪

I found these what I believe to be lacewing larvae hatching from their eggs in my backyard. They were not more than 2 mm long. I think this is the sort of creature that would have inspired HR Giger.

A motivator for writing 'How to Save the Whole Blinkin' Planet' was seeing fossil fuel companies infiltrating #STEM education spaces and sci museums. Kids deserve edu free from fossil fuels companies using them for good PR while selling their futures up the river. commsdeclare.org/2025/02/05/p...