Lukáš Pekárek

I was asked this week who are my ecologist heroes

I said no one. Academia does not need heroes

It needs collaborative, systematic, and non-hierarchical working

Doctors say that vaccines protect children from dangerous diseases. A nepo baby who barbecues dogs and snorts cocaine off toilet seats says that vaccines make children vulnerable to 5G radiation. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

When I was growing up, many songs played over the airwaves in Puerto Rico were in English. I did not understand most of the words. I have to be frank, for many I still don’t. But, I enjoyed them and don’t remember complaining about it. I think that is the case for most of the World.

AI writes papers, AI reviews, AI replies to decision letter, AI makes decision, AI reads papers, AI writes papers...

Trust me, the woman of academia are not at all surprised by the number of academic men orbiting Epstein.

Picture of two pens. The first is an ordinary ballpoint pen, with the caption “how work feels doing it alone”. The second is a picture of one of those novelty pens with ten colours that you had when you were thirteen, with the caption, “how work feels worh an AI employee”. At their bottom it says “hire an AI employee for $0.97/day”.

yeah, just out of interest, how many people choose the pen on the right for real work or art? See a lot of them in professional workplaces, do you?

👇👇

🚨Last chance to apply for two PhD projects in my lab, applying structural biology and single molecule biophysics to investigate gene expression in RNA viruses: www.findaphd.com/phds/?Keywor...

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

chris hill PhD Projects, Programmes & Scholarships - 3 PhDs Listed FindAPhD. Search Funded PhD Projects, Programmes & Scholarships in chris hill. Search for PhD funding, scholarships & studentships in the UK, Europe and around the world.

🚨Attention prospective PhD students🚨
Are you interested in molecular mechanisms, RNA viruses, structural biology or biophysics? 🧬🦠🧪

We have THREE fully-funded PhD projects available for October 2026 entry:
www.findaphd.com/phds/?Keywor...

Please share/repost, and get in touch if you're interested

The four-fold drain of scientific publishing: Money, Time, Trust, and Control.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤

If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
10/10

My first invitation to a predatory journal contribution <3
What an honour!

So happy and proud that my great supervisor and mentor Marcus Jahnel is one of those 13 scientists! Congratulations! 🥳

The academic publishing system is so rotten, it must be completely dismantled. Not partially, and not improved. Dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

When I tell non-academic friends how it all works they stare at me in disbelief. Not only that it exists, but that we still allow it to.

Always shocking to see these kinds of data collected together. "[publishers made]US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024" - That's $12 billion diverted away from actual research or materially supporting the community - these are disgusting numbers.

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

Excited to share my first PhD student’s @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social!

Tracking 5 dyes simultaneously Kavan Gor @embl.org tracks nascent #RNA folding during #ribosome assembly to correlate structural with functional information on single RNA molecules!

Check it out!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I´m hiring a lab technician! | Vanessa Loiacono I´m hiring a lab technician! The position is at the beginning (from September 1) part-time but with possibility of full-time with negotiating salary as it can be additionally funded by a 12 mil CZK PR...

I´m hiring!
Please share 🪴 🧪 🌈

22-Oct 2022 headline from The Economist A new paper claims SARS-CoV-2 bears signs of genetic engineering But it has yet to be peer reviewed. And others strongly disagree

🧵Remember the preprint claiming SARS-CoV-2 has a "synthetic fingerprint"?

It said a restriction map was "extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.”

I took its claims seriously.

The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis collapses. My new preprint explains why.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

What's in yer basement?

3 more days to apply for a PhD position within our training program on biomolecular condensates 👇👇. 12 positions within our a focus from physics and theory to experimental biophysics to biology and medicine/disease.

Dear funding agencies,

I know we all want to discover the wonder drug that will cure the horrible diseases, but to do that, we need to invest in basic, unsexy, foundational research on how the systems work. Funding can’t all be drug development.

Sincerely,
Looking for basic research grants.

We still can’t predict much of anything in biology Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

AI in biology: "I read about some new computational method...get excited because it’s exactly what I need...I try the method...Most of the time things don’t work...I have seen this play out so many times my default assumption is nothing is going to work" blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

That's actually when we used the "transient" foldable furniture the most 😜

I like the analogy and I often use it too even though in a different context - you cannot organize your house/flat with just walls. You have a lot of sub-room organisational units in your flat which can be moved around or (dis)assembled when necessary... 🤔

AI-generated papers
AI-generated peer-review reports
AI-generated images
AI-grant writing
Algorithms to spot promising science

I'm very worried, we should all be very worried

here are some helpful steps for academics who are considering creating genAI images to use for lab branding:

1. don't

How do flexible regions of histone chaperones team up to handle histones? Together with Fred Winston’s lab
@harvardmed.bsky.social, we reveal new insights in our study just out in Mol Cell. Hats off to James Warner and Vanda Lux @iocbprague.bsky.social for their key contributions! dlvr.it/TNB145