The Tattooed Professor

While AI Data Centres Boom, Public Research Hits a Wall For the last five years, the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS) has functioned like a steady “electricity grid” for science: a somewhat predictable way to access national supercomp...

nathangarland.substack.com/p/while-ai-d...

My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

Strategy to generate a DMS plasmid library for Your Favorite Gene (YFG) using short, degenerate libraries. 1. Segmentation of YFG into sub-fragments, each fragment corresponding to a DNA region to be synthesized. The same approach can be applied to promoter and terminator regions, if desired. 2. Example of a pool of degenerate oligonucleotides (oPool) derived from one YFG fragment associated with DNA barcodes. Each oPool contains: (i) ~40 bp of homology upstream of the YFG fragment of interest, (ii) the YFG fragment sequence with a single NNK codon, (iii) BsaI cloning sites, (iv) a DNA barcode composed of codon-position specific regions and six degenerate nucleotides (N), and (v) a conserved i7 primer binding site (PBS_i7) present in all oPools and used for rapid and efficient sequencing library preparation. Current oligonucleotide synthesis technologies allow for a total of nine degenerate positions per fragment: three are used for the degenerate codon (NNK), and six for the barcode. A complete list of all oPool sequences and their detailed composition is provided in S1 Table. 3. Protocol for constructing YFG DMS plasmid library from oPools using two cloning steps that maintain the physical barcode-mutation association. The libraries of oPools are cloned into the plasmid template by Gibson cloning. Following this step, for each fragment, a necessary short-read sequencing using PBS_i5 (included in the 5′ sequencing primer) and PBS_i7 is performed to associate each barcode with its corresponding mutation and to assess both barcode diversity per mutation and mutation coverage for the whole fragment. The ultimate step consists in Golden Gate cloning of the missing 3′ gene fragment between the degenerate fragment and the barcode. An additional short-read sequencing step of the barcodes can be performed to make sure that coverage and diversity have been maintained. Figure created in BioRender.

#DeepMutationalScanning (DMS) experiments are limited by gene size due to library complexity & costs. @christianlandry.bsky.social &co develop an efficient & cost-effective barcoded cloning strategy for plasmid-based DMS libraries that enables study of large genes @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4abhyUf

Check out our new op-ed! With @taniaduarte.bsky.social @markwong.bsky.social, @suoman.bsky.social, & @timdavies.org.uk.

We argue that these collabs normalize close relationships w/Big-Tech, setting them up to be key actors in governance who provide tech solutions to important social ‘problems’.

Davis Summer Population Genomics Program Want to learn population genetics? Please fill out this form to indicate your potential interest in a 2-week intensive online summer population genetics course taught by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and Graham...

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

Benthamiana rhapsody 🎶 🌱

How benthi is the go-to system for cracking the activation mechanism of an Arabidopsis TIR-NLR immune receptor— that’s the rhapsody.

Congrats He Zhao and Selvaraj for this wonderful collaboration 👇🏼 doi.org/10.64898/202...

How did skills take over higher education? One short history - HEPI Over the weekend HEPI published blogs on the freezing of student loan thresholds, and the Westminster Hall debates on duty of care. This blog was kindly authored by Dr. Josh Patel, Senior Education an...

' Ronald Barnett describes the contemporary fascination with skills as a form of ‘bewitchment’ (others have put it more strongly elsewhere)....When individuals are defined in this way, they become more easily interchangeable in the labour market, increasing workers’ vulnerability.'

The Biology of Genomes Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses -- a private, non-profit institution with research programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, bioinformatics.

Reminder that the abstract deadline for the Biology of Genomes meeting at CSHL is on Feb 13! We have a fantastic lineup of keynote speakers (Janet Kelso and Jonathan Pritchard) and session chairs. Submit your best science to this exciting and engaged meeting!
meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

This idea that one can discern a technology is fascist and then still conclude "we need to collect data" is nonsense! www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

Absolutely nails it! 👇 #GenAI #AIEthics #RejectAI

Minns invokes special powers for NSW police to restrict protests during Israeli president’s visit Thirteen state and federal NSW MPs appeal to police to allow planned march protesting against the visit

Get fucked Chris.

Sure, keep the protests and Herzog a couple of kays from each other at all times, but to completely shut down any protest, that members of his own backbench will attend, utter plonker

Sydney CBD + Eastern suburbs shut down for 5 days for the Israeli President’s arrival.

Meanwhile our democratic right to protest is an “unnecessary burden” according to Chris Minns.

This government will accommodate a mass murder but not the rights of the people who live here.

Homeless Oregon youth got $1,000 a month for two years. Most found housing after • Oregon Capital Chronicle Oregon is the second of its kind in the nation to implement the direct cash transfer program after New York City.

"By the end of the two-year period, 94% of participants reported they were housed."

A million pilot programs show the same thing: when people are given enough money to afford housing, homelessness ends.

Other supports matter, but housing comes first. Not policing. Not moralizing. Homes.

I was asked to review two back-to-back papers in Cell twice. Once initially and once for re-review... they were each 150 pages long including rebuttal. This means 300 pages to evaluate critically and for free. Simply impossible.

🌱 IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award 🍄

Congrats to Ningkang Sun 🇨🇳
🏆 Asia awardee

Supported by The New Phytologist Foundation @newphyt.bsky.social

This award supports her attendance at #ICOM2026, where she will give an oral presentation

#Mycorrhiza

🌱 IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award 🍄

Congrats to Beatrice M. Bock USA
🏆 North America awardee

Supported by The New Phytologist Foundation @newphyt.bsky.social
This award supports her participation with oral presentation at #ICOM2026

#Mycorrhiza

🌱IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award🍄

🎉Congrats to Maycon Cristiano Barbosa 🇧🇷
🏆 Latin America awardee

Award supported by the New Phytologist Foundation
@newphyt.bsky.social

This award supports his participation with an oral presentation at #ICOM2026

#Mycorrhiza

🌱 IMS Early Career Researcher Travel Award 🍄

Congrats to Amara Santiesteban-Serrano 🇪🇸
🏆 Europe awardee

Supported by the New Phytologist Foundation @newphyt.
This award supports her participation with oral presentation at #ICOM2026

#Mycorrhiza
@csic.es

Figure. 2 Top: Universal (Laplacean) determinism posits a single, unbranching timeline, with no real possibilities. Middle: The standard way to conceptualise indeterminism (“determinism-plus-randomness”) sees the future as a series of forking paths, where alternate possibilities in a sense are pre-existing or pre-statable, and which branch is taken is determined by the intrusion of randomness at specific moments into an otherwise deterministic evolution. Bottom: An alternative way to conceptualise indeterminism (“pervasive indefiniteness”) which sees the future as radically open; with the near-future tightly constrained by current states, but the far-future highly under-determined beyond some time horizon. The present is then defined as the time during which events occur, resolving the open possibilities into actual happenings, which then become the fixed past (Smolin & Verde, 2021; Mitchell, 2023). In this view, in the present “indeterminacy gets resolved as particles catch each other mid-jitter and interact to form some new state, the components of which start jittering all over again” (Mitchell, 2023:163)

Now out in Synthese! 😊 "Reframing the free will debate: the universe is not deterministic", with Henry Potter and George Ellis rdcu.be/e2hIh

Striking paper from researchers at Anthropic using a randomised control trial to look at the effects of AI use on skills acquisition.

TL:DR ‘We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.’
www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

AI is not a peer, so it can’t do peer review If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines, says Akhil Bhardwaj

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

AI hallucinations in science manuscripts are a nuisance. Paranormal citations, or paracites, will be a nightmare.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (w/ @sina.bio & @lauraluebbert.com).

Is the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection of any use? Abstract. There have been many recent discussions of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, with an emphasis on its mathematical accuracy. It is arg

"There is still life in the old dog."

Brian Charlesworth on Fisher's Fundamental Theorem in @journal-evo.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1093/evol...

How PFAS harm our health — and why they're everywhere - Horizons What do non-stick pans, firefighting foam and many of our couches, carpets and cosmetics have in common? They’re all made with PFAS. The so-called forever chemicals helped spur innovation, but they’re...

PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals," helped spur innovation. But they're also insidious to human health. https://to.pbs.org/4qRXD2m

#HPS #AcademicSky 🧪

The full moon over a city.

Full moon time with endless possibilities.

Fig. 1. The extended plant immune system. Schematic overview integrating key elements of classical plant immunity with microbiome-mediated protection, as discussed in this review. PTI, pattern-triggered immunity; ETI, effector-triggered immunity; SAR, systemic acquired resistance; ISR, induced systemic resistance; PGPR, plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria.

NEW H. H. Flor Distinguished Review: "The Extended Plant Immune System," by Corné M. J. Pieterse. Read the open access review in MPMI: https://doi.org/10.1094/MPMI-10-25-0144-HH

Tomorrow 3 Feb 2026 (17 CET), the Wheat Initiative Pathogens EWG hosts a webinar by
@cesaree-mg.bsky.social (John Innes Centre) on improving wheat stem rust models under climate change. 🌾
www.wheatinitiative.org/new-events/f...

Tiberius parameters for fungi incertae sedis will soon be available on Github.

"AI swarms are … equipped to exploit this by engineering a synthetic consensus …" Schroeder et al.

In a new #SciencePolicyForum, researchers discuss the risks of malicious “#AI swarms,” which enable a new class of large-scale, coordinated disinformation campaigns that pose significant risks to democracy. https://scim.ag/49FIhrM