Oh ChatGPT..... I'm asking if someone cheated, not if the information is wrong.

Could it BE more obvious? Hegseth Strikes Two Black and Two Female Officers From Promotion List www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/u...

18% success rate in open competitions. How can we make this worse? Oh, I know, competitions only once a year.

C. elegans. They wiggle forward. They wiggle backwards. And occasionally they...stand up and wiggle? Learn more about this hitchhiking-like behavior, nictation, in not just C. elegans, but many species of nematodes in this #BMcBiology Review link.springer.com/article/10.1... #WormSky #AcademicSky

Really cool paper from Marie-Anne Felix's lab. Genetic variation in set-24 controls the duration of epigenetic inheritance. www.cell.com/current-biol...

404 Media is doing some of the most important journalism in the country right now bsky.app/profile/404m...

“Cutbacks to federal research could put a certain pressure on granting agencies, since there will be less money in the research ecosystem overall” Until Canada stops being last in G7 research spending in terms of %GDP, it’s all govt talk and no action. #Canada 🧪 universityaffairs.ca/news/federal...

there was also a Stanford study that found that a surge in AI slop by lazy people actually created significantly more work for others who had to decipher and correct it this "I'm being efficient" (but not really) vibes well with the American obsession with artifice and appearing productive

New paper alert! Outstanding work by PhD candidate Nathan Roberge, great collab with the Ellison and Maxwell labs. #Pseudomonas #phage DMS3 encodes Aqs1, an inhibitor of #T4P assembly ATPase PilB, but how it binds and leads to loss of function was unknown. @mcmasteriidr.bsky.social

Following along with the lawsuits against DOGE. So, a 21-year-old dropout, paid 120K to terminate federal grants for which he has no subject-matter expertise, on the grounds of DEI, understands DEI as "decisions not based on merit". Right...... www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX5_...

To all my friends reading their e-mail this morning, may I introduce the term "Malicious compliance"? Malicious compliance is the act of deliberately following instructions or rules exactly as written, while knowing that doing so will produce negative, counterproductive, or inefficient results

As promised, if there is enough interest, I will organize the meeting. If you are interested, fill out your info here (please share): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Truly bizarre story from @retractionwatch.com. retractionwatch.com/2026/03/03/c...

New job posting just dropped! Full info here: csmb-scbm.ca/lecturer-imm... #Research #CanadaJobs

Not restricted to Canadians!

Alright, now that CIHR is done, who is in for the Great Canadian virtual worm meeting? (Early August maybe?)

We have started a project trying to predic the interactions/structures of all yeast protein pairs using an AlphaFold pooling approach. We are making the current dataset open and we welcome collaborations. www.evocellnet.com/2026/03/mapp...

The UAB Heersink School of Medicine is seeking to recruit up to 16 new research-intensive faculty as part of a major strategic investment in neurosciences. Faculty will be housed in a brand new research facility at the heart of campus, which is scheduled for completion this summer.

In honour of CIHR Project grant day... YAY 13%! Please paraphrase your favourite reviewer comments. I will go first. "Your grant is on A, but B is more interesting."

Mark Carney needs to re-think his support of the US strike.

Free public event in Guelph, Ontario. Come hang out with me and (one of) my favourite math/infectious disease modellers -David Earn and talk about measles. Why is it back? Why is it bad? Why is it so much more deadly than other respiratory viruses? Quiz! Beer! Geeky fun will be had.

When academia's stars mistreat people, they're "punished" with relief from teaching, mentoring, and service responsibilities. This frees them to spend more time on the more valued work of research. And dumps less valued responsibilities onto colleagues, making it harder for them to become stars.

Cool....

Great article on plummeting R01 success rates in the US under Trump. I just want to highlight this for my Canadian friends who are getting ready for 13% success rates. www.science.org/content/arti....

NEWS: The gold medal–winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team has declined an invitation to attend Trump’s State of the Union. This comes after Trump was heard telling the men’s team he’d begrudgingly invite the women’s champions or risk impeachment.

SPOILER: Bordetella sticks to #cilia Bacteria deliver a microtubule-binding protein into mammalian cells to promote colonization | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The worst figures on campus arguing that campuses had become overrun with wokeness were all best buddies with Epstein. Quelle surprise. www.salon.com/2026/02/19/j...

New Faculty Positions opening up at Wilfrid Laurier University! Integrative Organismal Zoologist: careers.wlu.ca/job/Waterloo... Microbial Systems: careers.wlu.ca/job/Waterloo... Computational Ecology/Modelling Biologist: careers.wlu.ca/job/Waterloo... Biochemistry: careers.wlu.ca/job/Waterloo...

Credit cards cancelled, Google accounts closed: ICC judges on life under Trump sanctions

“they should be careful not to deprioritize the kind of curiosity-driven, investigator-led research that has a strong track record in advancing humanity’s knowledge, producing the types of innovation that prosperity and well-being depend on.” 🧪 #Research www.nature.com/articles/d41...

SDB is sad to announce the passing of Gail R. Martin (1944-2026) after a short illness in San Francisco. Martin served as SDB President in 2007 and was the recipient the Conklin Medal in 2002 and the @FASEBorg Excellence in Science Award in 2011. bit.ly/4aIfu5d

The Bart Lab at UC Berkeley is looking for a postdoc. Please share!

Nematode eggshells: A new anatomical and terminological framework This paper revisits decades of confusion in nematode eggshell anatomy, corrects errors in the literature, and proposes a practical hexalaminar framework with clearer terminology. 🧪 doi.org/10.1051/para...

Found an additional graphic that gets even more of these quotes together. I've kept "I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees" pinned above my desk since I first started studying evolutionary biology as an undergraduate. So relatable to get extremely frustrated with your study system.

"Remember that product you use every day at work? We removed the most useful features & replaced them with a chatbot you didn't ask for that's wrong a bunch & we've made it unavoidable. We also did this for your search engine, your graphic design app, & for even more inexplicable reasons Adobe PDF"

What if I call it "The Great Canadian Worm Meeting"?

Happy International Day for Women and Girls in Science! @mcmasteriidr.bsky.social @mcmasternexus.bsky.social @mcmasteruniversity.bsky.social

I think many of us are still boycotting travel to the US but REALLY missing the worm meetings and the worm community, is anyone interested in participating/helping to organize some virtual conferences on the cheap ?

If Bad Bunny can cover the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, hemispheric consciousness, as well as contemporary life and politics in under 14 minutes, you can do your 15- or 20-minute conference presentation with time to spare.

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Wilfrid Laurier University is hiring a Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Biochemistry beginning July 1, 2026. Applications will be accepted until March 9, 2026 | 11:59pm. For more info: careers.wlu.ca/job/Waterloo... @chemjobber.bsky.social

Just another shoutout for Deepshi's paper, hot off the presses at #GENETICS! Just *look* at that beautiful epistasis data... 😍 May all of our future results be so clear to interpret 🤗

I would watch this.

SEN. OSSOFF: “.. why are roving gangs of masked men — who look like they couldn’t pass the Army physical exam — dressed up like pretend Delta Force operators, on our streets, demanding papers, dragging people from their cars, and shooting people to death?” @acyn.bsky.social

Do you: 1) Live near/in Buffalo? 2) Like to organize stuff? 3) Hate what the government is doing to science? If you answered yes, help me organize the Stand Up for Science rally on March 7th! I need reps from UB, Buff State, Canisius, D’Youville to spread the word. I need general support. DM me!

#womeninSTEM ‘A no thank you to the person who assumed I was the coffee lady’ - Rachel Los delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/a...

Have I ever mentioned how surreal it is to be an Editor-in-Chief of a journal called Vaccine right now? www.science.org/content/arti... It’s pretty wild, at least by typical academic journal editorial office standards.

If you have an interest in mixing computation and experiments to understand microbial evolution (for example antibiotic resistance) and you think you might be a good fit for a postdoc in my lab, reach out. If it seems it might be a fit I’m happy to help you frame it as AI for Biology per this call

100% -- I can't even begin to calculate the lost productivity for those thousands of researchers applying over and over again in a desperate bid to keep their labs afloat