The Tattooed Professor

“The ZAT14 family promotes cell death and regulates expansins to affect xylem formation and salt tolerance in Arabidopsis”. Now out in @theplantcell.bsky.social led by Ming Feng and colleagues. A 🌱 thread 👇 1/x
academic.oup.com/plcell/advan...

FutureHouse FutureHouse is a philanthropically-funded moonshot focused on building an AI Scientist. Our 10-year mission is to build semi-autonomous AIs for scientific research, to accelerate the pace of discovery...

I wonder if the bifurcation will be between very large scale, generalised paper search versus topic-focussed, actionable search where queries lead to experiments (e.g., www.futurehouse.org)? The middle ground which companies like @elicit.com and @scispace.bsky.social occupy might not be viable 🤷‍♂️

Cycling gives bigger boost to regional economies more so than Shane Jones DRILL DRILL DRILL (for what there is nothing there) tantrums

WITHOUT harming the environments either (ironically boosting them)

Mental maps critical thinking blog skeptic analytics skepticism science rational education alternative medicine conspiracy theories debunk misinformation skepto

Internal representations of external spaces www.skeptophilia.com/2025/11/ment...

Just in time for me to cite in something I've been using GlobDB for

A huge effort finally coming to fruition for B and their group. So excited to give this a whirl esp now that my cloning projects have ramped up substantially. Check this out 👇👇

📣 Applications are NOW OPEN for our International Undergraduate Summer School 2026

🗓️ 29 June - 22 August 2026
📍 John Innes Centre, NR4 7UH

⏰ Deadline: 16 January 2026

Find out more and apply: www.jic.ac.uk/training-car...

Burn baby burn. The roof is on fire.

It only took us several decades and dozens Nature/Nature Genetics papers but we finally got to the conclusion that plant and animal breeders (and Lewontin) arrived at from the start: twin studies suck!

All good. I hope it helps.

Here you go.

You can donate to Eslam and her family here: www.gofundme.com/f/62znrd-hel...

MBE | DIVERGE v4: A Platform for Large-Scale Analysis of Functional Divergence Across Multi-Gene Families

Chen et al. present the v4 upgrade of the DIVERGE software for identifying amino acid residues critical to functional shifts between protein subfamilies, including DIVERGE-Chat, a conversational AI agent for code-free exploration.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf277

#evobio #molbio #compbio

Click here and donate to Mind Australia for Rohan's 100km run to raise funds for headspace Box Hill Mind Australia supports more than 13,000 people experiencing mental health and wellbeing challenges every year. We have been providing this individualised,

Our son, Rohan, is doing something extraordinary for his 18th birthday, & @scidocmartin.bsky.social & I are so proud.

He's partnered with Headspace to run 100km, raising money for this wonderful organisation!

If you can share or donate, we'd be very grateful!

www.mycause.com.au/page/385454/...

Klaus Schulze will always be the electronic music artist of my life. Grant writing, paper writing, spacing out for thinking, getting lost...

What an awesome graphic! 😍

Ancient fossil reveals how plants and fungi first developed on land | Natural History Museum A new fossil fungus discovered in Scotland shows evidence of plants and fungi sharing nutrients to survive on land.

A new fossil fungus discovered in Scotland shows evidence of plants and fungi sharing nutrients to survive on land.

The fossil, more than 400 million years old, offers hints about the origin of one of the greatest partnerships in the history of life on Earth.

www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

A close black and white photo of a tiny, yet very long slender white mushroom with a cone-shaped cap. It's rising tall above the dark forest floor. But "tall" is a relative term when you're surrounded by firs and cedars.

Ascender
#fungifriends #mushrooms #pnw #forest #classicmono #macro #photography #eastcoastkin

Transposable elements are vectors of recurrent transgenerational epigenetic inheritance DNA methylation loss at transposable elements (TEs) can affect neighboring genes and be epigenetically inherited in plants, yet the determinants and significance of this additional system of inheritan...

Out First Release in @science.org this week:

A large scale analysis of the epigenetics of transposable elements in Arabidopsis shows transgenerational stability

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#PlantScience

Methodology

The CSIRO cuts are just the tip of the iceberg for Australia's science funding Australia is known as a country of innovators, but with a combination of brain drain, continuous cuts, and a loss of critical science projects, is Australia losing its edge?

This is why for a long time I've found the Prime Minister's Prizes for Science a rather insulting propaganda exercise

www.abc.net.au/news/science...

CSIRO funding as a percentage of GDP:

1982-83 = 0.17

2024-25 = 0.03

...

Scientific extinction event imminent?

Screenshot from Guardian Australia live news showing white background with black text with quotes from the former Science Minister, Ed Husic.

Australian science policy wants trees but not seeds.

Public funding of science is essential at low Technology Readiness Levels.

We cannot have high TRLs to translate without working through the pipeline from fundamental science via speculative applied science.

(Explainer by @granttremblay.com)

F1000Research Article: Current market rates for scholarly publishing services. Read the latest article version by Alexander Grossmann, Björn Brembs, at F1000Research.

I don’t think that’s true, these publishers have HUGE overheads that pay processes that have nothing to do with journal production. And even the production cost could be reduced. Eg, if you don’t sell subscriptions or APCs, you don’t need sales dept!
Must read: f1000research.com/articles/10-20

“Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time, which translates to loss of value, business interruption, & market devaluation on a systemic level"- Günther Thallinger
@kmac & I dig insurance: www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ins...

A headline: Scientists have discovered a 'third state' between life and death

"Postdoc in the job market"

The Great AI Bubble Yes, it's a bubble. And yes, it's going to burst.

NEW: Welcome to the Great AI Bubble. Yes, it’s here. And yes, it’s going to burst.

It’s also got way more in common with the Epstein scandal than you really want to know.

open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

Sequence-aware Prediction of Point Mutation-induced Effects on Protein-Protein Binding Affinity using Deep Learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.15.688659v1

To reform universities, first tackle global rankings Universities are in thrall to a rankings system that prioritizes narrow aspects of academic life. Three changes would give institutions the freedom to explore fresh ways of working.

University reputations and finances often hinge on their position in global ranking tables that prioritize narrow aspects of academic life. Elizabeth Gadd writes about three changes that would give institutions the freedom to explore fresh ways of working. #Academicsky 🧪

It's really not a surprise. I've spent the last 5 years explaining to researchers why samples collected over 2 consecutive EU projects and extracted using wildly different protocols are in no way comparable.

Too many labs think omics-related research is "just sequencing innit".