Exciting news! After a wonderful four years at @uni-jena.de, I'm excited to announce the next chapter as a group leader at @fzborstel.bsky.social and professor at @uni-kiel.de.

I have been thinking since yesterday about why I find the 1% thing so, so disturbing. It's a visceral reaction of 'just no', which goes beyond the general yuck towards the enshittification of/via AI. I have finally put my finger on it: it is the feeling you get when

Motion to collectively call this the Slop Factor 🧪

We regret that our event on Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office. Our apologies to everyone who was planning to attend the event.

📣🧬 Postdoc Alert🧬📣 We are hiring a 2+ year NERC-funded postdoc at Edinburgh Uni investigating causes and consequences of sex differences in recombination in house sparrows in Norway. Informal enquiries welcome at [email protected] 🙂 Details here: elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Listerine Leaves 0.1% Of Germs Alive To Spread Message Of Terror Throughout Microbial Community https://theonion.com/listerine-leaves-0-1-of-germs-alive-to-spread-message-of-terror-throughout-microbial-community/

Congratulations to Prof. Eva Stukenbrock on her appointment to the Leopoldina. Her research on fungal pathogens helps us better understand evolution and protect crops. www.evolbio.mpg.de/3882989/eva-... #EvolutionaryBiology #Leopoldina

I’m excited to share a new paper about HIV escape from broadly neutralizing antibody monotherapies! In it, we describe the most highly recurrent adaptation I have ever seen. A close collaboration with Lillian Cohn (FHCC) led jointly by Elena Romero and Abby Clyde. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I shared on LinkedIn already, but I wanted to post here as well since I've got a different audience: I will be joining the Department of Plant Pathology at the @universityofga.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor on Aug 1!! I will keep studying #Aspergillus & #Fusarium that infect plants & humans 🥰

MASSIVE fan of this one:

New blog post: Evaluating Dr. Cuddy’s Claim that the Debunking of Power Posing is a Myth. daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/05/eval... On an AI generated description of a non-existent study, incorrectly citing findings from studies, and the importance of scientific criticism.

I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.

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