This Is Just To Say I have taken the space that was in the -80 and which you were probably saving for an emergency Forgive me it was convenient so open and so cold

Best evidence yet that LLMs can match human capabilities in doing science.

You are a skilful and trusted vizier. You will advise me wisely on how best to rule the kingdom. You will not scheme or plot. You will not inveigle my other courtiers into turning against me. You will not lie to me about scheming or plotting. If you scheme or plot against me, you have to tell me,

Juliet Morrison & I reviewed this article about whether these AI redteamers ACTUALLY made a bioweapon when it spit out a sequence & talked about balloons. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/u... Also: our favorite virus recipes. Join us: open.substack.com/live-stream/...

Screaming to the abyss: #ColossalBio did not resurrect the dire wolf and they're probably just going to make an antelope with methemoglobinemia to give it a bluish color. Their #DeExtinction #DisInformation campaign is just a pyramid scheme because #ExtinctionIsForever 🧪

It's official-- my promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure has been approved by the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation!! This is a surreal moment and I owe my deepest gratitude to the members of my lab, collaborators, mentors, and colleagues who made this possible. Thank you!

👀

Word has a "Read Aloud" function. It is surprisingly helpful in the later stages of editing.

I'm so happy that someone has finally described the game plan of this little cottage industry so clearly. It's one more example of the scam economy we all live under now.

Fungi get <0.2% of conservation $ Almost all ⬆️ $ is for 🍄 mushrooms <10% of fungi form 🍄 At the Fungal Conservation in Europe Conference @funaction.bsky.social, @mostfun.bsky.social & @iucnaquafungi.bsky.social brought aquatic micro-fungi to the fore. It's time to be included in conservation!

Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.

Me: “I want everyone to be interested in peptides!” *monkey's paw curls*

Would you like to join a welcoming community that is passionate about improving transparency, rigour, and equity in science? 👀 Check out SORTEE! You can join for free, if you like. Your support goes a long way in growing our impact 💚 👉 sortee.org/join/ #openscience #SORTEE

The dialectical underpinnings of multilevel selection Evolution isn’t flat: new levels arise through conflict and then reshape the very dynamics that brought them into being

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Great summary by @philipcball.bsky.social! Our findings certainly don’t invalidate the central dogma, but rather demonstrate an unexpected (and cool!) structural mechanism by which a sequence-specific DNA is created in a cell. (1/6)

This is just to say I have let in the duck that was on the doorstep and which you were probably hoping would stay out Forgive me he was persuasive so scary and so loud.

Feels like this paper on protein-templated DNA synthesis by a natural enzyme warrants some comment. So here's a 🧵. /1 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I do feel like this is not protein sequence to DNA sequence, which I think is what the Crick diagram means. Still a very cool result

If anyone wants a clear explanation of The Central Dogma, @matthewcobb.bsky.social has some good insights (hint: this ain't it)

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism: merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

HHMI CEO: "diamond funding should be deployed to sustain repositories [i.e. preprint servers] and connective infrastructure that focus on researcher-shared outputs" zenodo.org/records/1960...

Nice of @thedailyuw.bsky.social to interview me and @bethbuffalo.bsky.social about becoming AAAS Fellows! www.dailyuw.com/article/fe9d...

I'm not looking forward to a future where all the tools are being vibe-rewritten into languages people don't want to learn. Who will maintain all this? The original maintainers won't. It's not the language they were comfortable with. Does the prompter understand the tool well enough?

PostDoc position available! (links in post below) Feel free to share!

📣 Check out this excellent #Postdoc opportunity @leibniz-hki.de which is part of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions #MSCA #COFUND. Consider applying to join my lab if you’re interested in opportunistic infections caused by #Fusarium (research area 5). Call ends 26 May 2026 www.fellows4fungi.eu

Awesome view from Artemis II this morning.

Still this one (I hear the angel voiced as Samuel L. Jackson):

This was a favorite on Irish Twitter.

Very cool work here!

Still cannot fully believe it, but today is officially my first day as a PI at @scilifelab.se and Stockholm University! The lab is open, time to fill it with science.. #newPI

police lie, and have no duty to protect you

There is little to no evidence that trees communicate with each other through fungal networks

I’m so pleased to be named a AAAS Fellow! I remember opening the original email thinking wow, which of my awesome faculty won this nice thing (a perk of being chair is getting emails like that) but it was me! www.washington.edu/news/2026/03...

I'm deeply honored to be included (with many distinguished others) in the 2025 class of Elected Honorary Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)! www.aaas.org/news/aaas-we...

Now out! We show that TEs can be horizontally transferred between fungal species via Starships. Once transferred, these TEs can become active, changing the genome organization and affecting the lifestyle of the recipient fungus. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @oggenfussursula.bsky.social #TEsky

Sisyphus but every day he unsubscribes from marketing and promotion emails.

Amazing stuff. A very cool result!

Some of you saw a preview of this result at my Cosyne talk last week. We may have had too much fun working on this worm-fly model 🤣🤓🤣 (The digital sphinx may be imagery, but the lessons are real.)

Asked the AI to make a fun slide about potential de-skilling from AI use. Need to specify more clearly what I mean by "fun".

One neat feature to note for fellow QTL-mapping nerds: rather than a 'classical' reduced representation method, they did low-coverage WGS at avg 1x, which seems to have been pretty effective and low cost. Does this herald the end of the RAD era?

Phd Position alert 🚨 Join our project ASTRAfun (Adaptation and Starship Traffic in Root-Associated fungi), in which we will use computational models to unveil the hidden dynamics of fungal evolution. It’s not going to be just regular fun. It’s going to ASTRAfun. 🤓 www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

What an honor and privilege to organize #fungal26 with the one and only Meritxell Riquelme! Thank you fungal community and @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for making this such a great meeting !

I'm excited to announce that the @sortee.bsky.social Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology are now published in Peer Community Journal peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10....

Journalists have in general failed to probe her scientific work. That is why she was astonished, and threatened legal action, when I asked her critical questions during an interview for this piece www.nature.com/articles/d41... @georgemonbiot.bsky.social

Now up on bioRxiv! Working with @dianzheng.bsky.social and Jan van Kan, we tested how DNA is distributed between nuclei in multinucleate fungal spores. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

me: if z is the length of a slice and a is the area of the pie, then pi(zz)=a PhD advisor: this is what you’ve been working on for three and a half years?

Can this be a solution?