If you or someone you know is looking for a post-doctoral position working on mycobacterial envelope biology, please get in touch. I am recruiting here at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

What an astonishing achievement. And in such a short time.

📢 New preprint on bioRxiv! We introduce V4-EXT, a revised 16S rRNA V4 primer set that dramatically improves detection of Patescibacteria and other undersampled lineages ✅ 938 samples ✅ More novel ASVs Primer choice matters 👀 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @ppjevac.bsky.social #HuifengHu

This week! 👇👇👇 Thursday, Dec. 4 at 3pm EST. All welcome! bioethicslaunch.eventbrite.ca

UBC seeks a CRC Tier 2 Chair in cognitive resilience for dementia prevention within Psychiatry and DMCBH supporting research teaching and inclusive leadership. www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/job/assistan...

Interesting investigation into a dodgy Elsevier journal -- with the additional nugget that the CEO of Elsevier's parent company made more than €15 million in total compensation last year. english.elpais.com/science-tech...

Think of the stock market - smart investors buy a “basket” of shares in multiple companies as you can’t really predict which companies will succeed long term. Governments don’t get this anywhere in the West - despite the basket approach being demonstrable better than picking “winners”. #FundBroadly

One of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes: “All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated, and well supported in logic and argument than others.” More timely today than ever, don't you think? 💙 #WritingCommunity #WriteSky #BookSky

I will believe in the end of identity politics when steel and lumber (28,000 jobs and 105,000 jobs respectively) stop getting bailouts, while higher education (310,000 jobs) collapses in front of our eyes because it's full of ivory tower elites

🧬🛡️How are new immune mechanisms created? We show how Lamassu antiphage system, originated from a DNA-repair complex and evolved into a compact and modular immune machine, wt Dinshaw Patel lab in @pnas.org. 👏 @matthieu-haudiquet.bsky.social, Arpita Chakravarti & all authors! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Remember: The recipe for economic growth isn’t tax cuts for the rich. It’s investment in our people — in health care, infrastructure and education — to build a strong middle class. You don't grow the economy through trickle-down nonsense.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

The central problem of all grant reviews is the numerical scoring and the absolute refusal of reviewers to use the range of scores. If I built a machine to measure ‘quality’ and the range of measurements was between 88 and 94 out of 100 from terrible to astounding, it would be an awful machine.

🚨We're hiring! A tenure track position at McGill University in the area of #bioethics and / or philosophy of science, with a special focus on the ethics of medical technologies. Please share widely. #philsky #ethics #philsci philjobs.org/job/show/30402

Aye

Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.

An archaeal genetic code with all TAG codons as pyrrolysine www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1... #jcampubs

But cutting $1.2 billion from student aid.

Calling all TT-hunting neuroscientists! The Dept of Anatomy & Neurobio at UTHSC in Memphis is hiring two faculty members! Asst and/or Assoc level! Come be my colleague in a fantastic department & great city! 🧡💚 fa-ewlq-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

I was just thinking about this again yesterday What if We Can’t Rely on PubMed? absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/02/14/w...

The consequences of misinformation are real and often tragic #vaccines #measles www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Canada’s research and scientific spending is declining relative to other nations, Council of Canadian Academies report says, by @ivansemeniuk.bsky.social www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/scien... via @theglobeandmail.com

🚨Job claxon 🚨 University College Cork is looking to appoint a lecturer in Medical Microbiology into a permanent, non-clinical post A great opportunity in a microbiology powerhouse For details go to my.corehr.com/pls/uccrecru... and enter reference number 092153

Methodology

🚨Out in PNAS🚨 Examining news on 7 platforms: 1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news 2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning 3)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The managerial class yearns for phrenology

No Evidence the Gut Microbiome Causes Autism neurosciencenews.com/asd-microbio...

Yes, you still need to get your flu vaccine. Now. www.cidrap.umn.edu/influenza-va...

Come be my colleague at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. We're hiring an assistant professor in Ocean Biogeochemical Modeling. 🌊

#facultychemjobs #chemchat #chemsky 🧪⚗️ #chemjobscanada #chemjobs

it also helps to expunge the track changes history. Personal experience.

In which I lay out the ways other countries handle the interface between universities and defence research and invite everyone to a workshop in Ottawa on the subject in December.

Apparently an engineering issue with Springer Nature platform is inflating citations for their online journal articles through circular citation links. They were informed by the preprint authors months ago, but nothing's happened so far. 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2511.01675

The Drain of Scientific Publishing details very clearly how for-profit publishers making >30% profit margins have corrupted any solution the research community has attempted. Let's cut ourselves free. Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS Oligopoly: bit.ly/OligSciPub 12/12

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things: (1) Are the claims interesting/important? (2) Does the evidence support the claims? Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

Raise a glass for Rosalind Franklin tonight and honor her memory and scientific contributions

This is a total outrage and has crippled SARS-CoV-2 variant tracking and evolutionary analysis. Updating a file and giving access to Nextstrain & Cov-Spectrum does not require extensive resources, so the official justification is a lie. There has to be an ulterior motive here.

Has anyone started a company called openai 2 yet using their theory of intellectual property

And just when you thought things were settling down, the enigmatic Asgard archaea have another surprise in store! Cell cycle/life cycle stage-specific internal compartments with almost no eukaryote-derived clues as to how they might function. Beautiful tomography and microscopy - congrats all 🤩

The Canadian Justice system loses $20 billion year. The Canadian military loses $34 billion a year. Canadian Health Care loses $372 billion a year. Imagine if Carneys liberals talked about services like it does the Post Office.

If you're looking for a faculty position at the intersection of ecology and computing (both broadly defined), please apply to this joint search between the CEE Department and the College of Computing at MIT: cee.mit.edu/people/share...

Some of the cooler things I think are going on in higher education these days.

"One could hardly design a more fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories than social media." "The algorithms ... which operate on the principle that rage is engaging, have turned into radicalization machines." www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1... by @dorianlynskey.bsky.social

When ChatGPT was asked to rate 40,000 résumés, it ranked the older male candidates as better quality than the younger female applicants.

Shattered. But the #BlueJays are one hell of a team. Thanks for a hell of a ride, gentlemen. #WorldSeries #Game7 #BlueJays #Toronto

364 days a year “don’t take candy from strangers “. today “take as much candy as possible from strangers “ 🤣

Radboud researchers René Aquarius @deadneanderthals.bsky.social and Kim Wever were about to embark on a literature review project when they noticed several odd things that made them stop in their tracks, then change the course of their study entirely.

There are lots of professional data repositories to share your data (see www.re3data.org) - if you want to share the code as well you can push to github and archive it on zenodo with a DOI.

When he's finally gone, there is going to be this flood of books and tell all interviews from Republicans about how hard it was to be a Republican in Washington during this time and I am going to be galatically furious about it.