Great thread on the Ponzi scheme that is academic publishing. Public funds funnelled into obscene private profits using free labour of (publicly funded) Academics. AI slop contaminating the literature.

🔬 Hot #PhD topic: Single-molecule fluorescence and super-resolution microscopy! Use quantitative nanoscale imaging to map nuclear organization. Apply by Jan 7 to join Johannes Stein’s Lab @jmstein.bsky.social & #IMPRS-BAC #gradschool! 👉 www.molgen.mpg.de/5098010/stei...

Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad

Remind us @nytimes.com, who is it that is ruining the workplace? www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

We were very happy to welcome this amazing group of early-career researchers as part of the @Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin! Special thanks to @annaamonaco.bsky.social (Mundlos Lab) and @matthewkraushar.bsky.social for hosting the group and providing an in-depth tour of their labs!

Go join Ivano and Ale!!! Great people and great science 🧫✨

It’s Halloween 🎃 which means spooky skeleton time! ☠️ And what is spookier than making us entirely re-think our concept of cell type? Learn how each domain of bone is shaped by its own pressures, answering to its own ancestral ghosts 👻 tinyurl.com/mt8cwdvk

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

My new lab at the @molgen.mpg.de will be following up on some of the nuclear organization aspects of ecDNA so please do reach out if this is of interest :)

To all ERCs looking to dip their toes in data analysis: I cannot recommend this enough!

How your email finds me

I’d like to distract you from The Horrors™️ with what I’m pretty sure is a spotted sea hare (Aplysia dactylomela). I found this beauty and 6 of their friends while staring into tide pools like the goblin I am.

I usually write about what fascinates me, but this time it had to be about my concerns. This took a long time to write, I had a lot of thoughts, feelings, and literature to work through. There is still much more I’d like to say, but for now I leave you with this read. tinyurl.com/y6hx838y

Hey a thing I really don’t want to get lost here is that while Tylenol doesn’t cause autism, IT’S FINE TO BE AUTISTIC. Let’s not grant them the premise that autism should be eradicated in our way to correct the science, okay? Okay.

It's Wacky Hat Day

A bit late, but I finally got around to writing an accessible piece about @julianeg.bsky.social 's cover article from July. In case you needed something else to worry about in this day and age! 🦠 tinyurl.com/mrx5tfre #scicomm #devbio #transposons

I can’t believe I missed this! Yet another amazing work by Brent on deep regulatory homology in vertebrates and the fin-to-limb transition. An absolute must read 🐠🐟🐡

The secret to shrew brain shrinkage? 🤔 Not cell loss, but water loss! Our new paper shows that brain cells shrink by losing water, a wild feat of brain plasticity 🤯 Check the paper! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @labdavalos.bsky.social @batichica.bsky.social

Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum)🦎 can regrow limbs, tail, spinal cord, heart, and even parts of its brain. Axolotls are champions of regeneration and also shed light on limb patterning, wound healing, and developmental plasticity. Image from Prayag Murawala #ModelMonday #DevBio

The peppered moth is a textbook example of natural selection, its colours shifting with the soot-darkened trees of the Industrial Revolution. But the genetic secret behind its “dark” form took 150 years to uncover: a new “jumping gene” that rapidly took over the population. 🦋 tinyurl.com/4zrc4e93

#OnThisDay in 1858, a seminal journal article comprised of papers by Alfred Russel Wallace FRS and Charles Darwin FRS on the theory of evolution by natural selection was published by the Linnean Society, the first public announcement of the theory of evolution. bit.ly/3k8fq4u

The biggest trick the devil ever pulled is to call LLMs “artificial intelligence.”

The Max Planck Society is good at attracting international postdocs but struggles to retain them, survey finds go.nature.com/4fFENHi

A reminder you/your lab can support FlyBase at Cambridge through the following link. Every bit helps. Please share if you yourself can't donate. www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

🦇🦇🦇 darkgenomevo.wordpress.com/2025/07/29/t...

Pretty surreal to see my artwork on the cover of Nature Genetics! Big congrats to @julianeg.bsky.social, @stemundi.bsky.social and the others, and thank you Juliane for letting me help bring your research to life visually. www.nature.com/ng/volumes/5...

🏳️‍🌈 Resilience in Times of Change: Join #mdcBerlin’s LGBTQI+ community for the 4th Pride Symposium on July 18 at #mdcBIMSB. Talks, panel discussion, bake sale, and a Pride After Hour – amplifying queer voices in science. Info and registration: 👉 www.mdc-berlin.de/news/news/me...#mdcBerlin’s👈

We are excited to officially welcome a new group leader at the MPI-IE in #Freiburg. 🎉 Dr Juliane Glaser 🥳 – she studies epigenetic mechanisms of embryonic development, with a focus on transposable elements. 👉 Interview: www.ie-freiburg.mpg.de/6043545/2025... Welcome, @julianeg.bsky.social!

Mustering the courage to share my latest scicomm endeavour: I channelled my love for writing into a blog where I can hopefully bring the marvels of evolutionary biology and non-coding DNA to all Science lovers! darkgenomevo.wordpress.com/2025/06/22/i...

Much as I would not dare to predict the consequences of this war, I do think we can summarize it thusly so far: A smart and evil man manipulated a stupid and evil man into a war against a fanatical and evil regime.

Talking at @pintofscience.de was really scary and really fun. Thank you everyone for the sold out event ✨ #pint25

❗Don’t miss: Dr. Anna Alessandra Monaco, postdoc in the lab of Stefan Mundlos, will give a talk at the Pint of Science Festival about her research project entitled “Junk that shapes us: the Dark Genome's role in Evolution.” 👉 pintofscience.de @annaamonaco.bsky.social @stemundi.bsky.social

You *can't* call yourself a good scientist and write off complexity that is a natural part of the system by declaring it an aberration or abnormality. You can not toss it out of your understanding of the system. Western science has historically been really bad about doing this. It cannot continue.

Our BAT paper is accepted in Nature Ecology & Evolution! Single cell, gene regulation, TADs and key TFs that shape the bat wing. Genomics goes Evodevo 😍

Dear Berliners, I warmly invite you to join us in this conversation around our responsibilities as digital citizens in the era of (mis)information. Come share strategies for smarter media consumption! lu.ma/zsb00xbm?loc...

Catch yours truly at Zum starken August talking about how the dark genome went from junk to multicellular roadmap! Ticket sales launched today: pintofscience.de/events/berlin #pint25

That’s me in the corner That’s me at the desk Top Waiting for R to update

Highly entertaining and informative live posting of the dire wolf manuscript read-through. 10/10 ⭐️

This is such nonsense. This company "claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves." We already have a method for preventing extinction. It's called conservation, and it works.

Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility. There’s much to do everywhere so that trans and non-binary people can live without fear. Our single point of reflection is this: what’s your organisation doing to support trans+ people?

Check out these feather buds on the chicken embryo's wing! Our latest study @plosbiology.org reveals that temporary inhibition of sonic hedgehog signalling transforms feathers into simple, protofeather-like structures—similar to those of their dinosaur ancestors🔬🦖🧪 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

In light of the current attack on DEI initiatives and values, it was an honour to be part of this. I hope it will be the first of many events with increasingly diverse panelists. And maybe in the future I will look less like a ghostly apparition 🌝

plain text pasting should be the default and shortcut (ctrl+v) format, i am tired of being silent on this

Got stuck in a meeting and missed it by a few minutes 😞 but we still stand by our US colleagues and stand up for science!

Out now @naturecomms.bsky.social with extra analyses & data: how distinct gene regulatory dynamics specify vertebrate skeletal cells from three embryonic lineages, how this makes them 'distinct cell types' and what it implies for their evolutionary trajectories > rdcu.be/ecbM2 👏👏 to all co-authors!

It’s official 🎉 I am excited to share that I will start my lab this spring at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology and Epigenetics @mpi-ie.bsky.social in beautiful Freiburg 🤩🗻☀️ I am looking forward to new collaborations and working with the fantastic community in Freiburg & its surroundings!

Yes.