I have the day off so I plan to just read a bunch of fiction instead of science.

Very important paper and resource. Bryophyte genomes expanded by one order of magnitude. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Between this & zero traffic deaths in Helsinki last year.... The simple truth that's somehow utterly unintelligible to capitalism & those in its thrall is that doing the right thing by the vulnerable (be they houseless, pedestrians, or anything else) makes the world BETTER FOR EVERYONE.

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” It costs a lot less to house people.

Ending my summer with an Eagles game 🦅

Tipsy bats and perfect pasta: Ig Nobels celebrate ‘improbable’ research

Siblings - I don't want that toy but I *ALSO* don't want you to have it

Welcome Mikhail. He has finally succumbed to my bullying, erm I mean collegial suggestions. He is the editor for BMC Surgery, BMC Nephrology, and the recently launched BMC Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery. He'll figure out BlueSky eventually with my continued bullying, I mean coaching. #MedSky

Cool. Cool cool cool. #nutmegsky #AcademicSky

"Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff and students" - imagining a lot of staff there pretty upset about, but also it says much about OpenAI's education strategy that it's targeted Oxford as its first institutional capture in the UK www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

Airlines merged from 12 major carriers in 1980 to 4 today. Four giants control 80% of meat processing. A handful of companies control the pharmaceutical industry. The evidence of corporate concentration is everywhere. It means more power for them and less freedom for you.

New preprint alert! The uterus expands ~500-fold in pregnancy, yet we know little about how pressures are sensed. Led by @yunxiao-dr.bsky.social, we show PIEZOs are required for contractions and birth in mice, with dual roles of PIEZO1 in muscle and PIEZO2 in neurons www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The American public will not get the benefits of a competitive marketplace if firms seek not to compete with one another, but instead seek the permission of the government to merge and not compete at all. The problems of this are particularly bad in, though not limited to, broadcast media

So now these firms, rather than competing against one another, are competing for the favor of the political appointees who can bless or block their mergers that allow them to get monopolistic rents in the market, raising prices for their customers (advertisers, who in turn raise their costs to us)

Something about the Kimmel (and Colbert) firing that more people need to be paying attention to: this would not be happening if we did not have extensive media consolidation, and because the *failure* to independently regulate that consolidation has undermined free market competition Let me explain

“I was fired for holding the line on scientific integrity. The stakes are not theoretical — we have already seen the largest [US] measles outbreak in more than 30 years, which claimed the lives of two children.” go.nature.com/46rhA7s

From Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free" I first read it in November and I'm rereading it now. It crushing feeling the exact same things as this academic did. It's the same process.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

Absolutely love Mary Roach! Can't wait to read this one! #BookSky

📢Call for papers: Genome editing📢 #BMCBiology Submission Deadline: 15 June 2026 Guest Editors: Karim Benabdellah El Khlanji, GENyO Stanislaus Antony Ceasar, Rajagiri College of Social Sciences Yonglun Luo, Aarhus University Details: www.biomedcentral.com/collections/... 🧬✂️🧬✂️🧬✂️

Pipsqueak wants to remind you of the importance of vaccines! Go get your flu shot and COVID booster and don't forget to reward yourself with a little treat. Her personal fave is cheese.

I want to add: college is not vocational school. If employers want their employees trained, they can train them. My job is to teach them literary appreciation and criticism.

I'd like to know why this seems to all fall on college/professors? What about parents? Make your kids do chores. Make your teens get jobs. My opinion is that college is for subject-matter expertise. Not all your life skills. #AcademicSky fortune.com/2025/09/15/p...

Scientific societies, journals, editors and researchers are pushing back against mean-spirited peer reviews go.nature.com/4mXJjn6

Just a reminder for #PeerReviewWeek that if you teach, find a way to incorporate the importance of peer review into any and all your courses. #AcademicSky

Thank you to everyone who serves as a peer reviewer. It is truly an invaluable service. #AcademicSky #PeerReviewWeek

Register now for a webinar discussion by Enago Academy for #PeerReviewWeek, on 17 September, with * Daniel Ucko @danielucko.bsky.social @apsphysics.bsky.social * Patrick Starke - ImageTwinAI * Elliot Lumb @research-signals.bsky.social * Mary Miskin - EnagoAcademy * and me enago.com/our-events/a...

More positively, though - the best advice for peer review is to write the review you'd want to receive. Kind, thoughtful, helpful, based on the science that was done (not what you wish had been done), and constructive rather than angry, ill-tempered, tearing down of someone's work #PeerReviewWeek

Timing is everything! Very grateful that my pants split this morning going into yoga class and not in the middle of it 🫣

Reminding myself and anyone else on here that might need this: Get off your phone and read that damn book you keep saying you're gonna read only to brain rot on your phone instead.

My 50-pound pittie loves being a window cat

To any of my fellow science educators, you have to give @skypeascientist.bsky.social a try. They match your class up with a practicing scientist. It has been an awesome experience for my kids. Seriously, sign up for one. You won’t regret it. #teach180 #edusky

In which I beg archaeologists to sign up for the fall semester of Skype a Scientist, because we're getting buried in requests for your area of expertise. Sign up here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

An interesting resource for science education - a journal publishing essays by scientists, peer reviewed by children. kids.frontiersin.org (I quite enjoyed reading this too. -Bronwen@protocols) There is even French version! www.jeunesfrancophonesetlascience.fr

The only cowards are those who hide behind 'free speech' to spread hate.

tl;dr. I think fake articles in fake journals are a different (and much lesser) problem than fraud in real articles in real journals. The former is growing a lot because of new technology. No technology is needed for the latter, and I know of no strong evidence it's growing.

Hmm. I think there are separate--but perhaps a little overlapping--things going on here that are being somewhat conflated...

Super easy to get yours right now and likely fully covered by your insurance at your local pharmacy. I scheduled mine same day at CVS.

Just got my annual flu and COVID vaccines 💉💉 Typically, I get them the first week of Oct but Sept 19 is the second Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting and who knows what will happen to their access after that...

I am here to say vaccines are awesome because guess what Denmark is close to completely eliminating the two most dangerous HPV strains (serotype 16 and 18) and with the cervical cancer.I think that is bloody AMAZING!!!! bit.ly/4pbHxjT

Women scientists to be showcased on the Eiffel Tower soon www.cnrs.fr/en/update/wo... 🧪🔭

Remember, if you encounter what seems like an implausible survey finding, ask: 1. Were survey respondents selected randomly or was this an opt-in poll? 2. Could the results, especially for young adults, be driven by bogus respondents? Keep this post in mind: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/... 🧪

🐜 Ant queens breaking rules Scientists found Iberian harvester ants that clone males of another species to keep colonies running. These queens make hybrid workers by borrowing and copying DNA. 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/d415... #SciComm #Evolution #Ants 🧪

75 minutes of detailing my car only for it to still only be mediocrely clean 🙃

Universal orthologs infer deep phylogenies and improve genome quality assessments. #Orthologs #Phylogenies #GenomeQualityAssessment #Bioinformatics #BMCbiology 🧬 🖥️ bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

iVAE: an interpretable representation learning framework enhances clustering performance for single-cell data. #SingleCell #scRNAseq #Clustering #Bioinformatics #BMCBiology 🧬 🖥️ bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

🚨 New WP! 📄 "Publish or Procreate: The Effect of Motherhood on Research Performance" (w/ @valentinatartari.bsky.social 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 We investigate how parenthood affects scientific productivity and impact — and find that the impact is far from equal for mothers and fathers.

Our big institutions are failing badly, but everyday Americans who loathe the Trump regime's lies and fascism are staging a quiet revolution behind closed doors...in the secrecy of a jury room What jury nullification can teach us about resisting Trump. My new column www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

Received an email about verifying my email or I will be jeopardangering my account...

Vaccine-driven evolution can erode the benefits of vaccination 💉 This study in #BMCBiology explores the complexity of virulence, showing parasite modulation of host responses influences disease severity. bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... #MicroSky