Vanessa Higham

‘Blindsided’: father of Port Arthur massacre victims says NSW hunting bill will take a ‘jackhammer’ to gun control Walter Mikac, who lost his wife and two daughters in the 1996 shooting, warns that Labor-backed Shooters party bill will weaken national firearms agreement

No. No Just no. We do not want guns in Australia and governments should resist the lobbying #AusPol
www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Could be treated as a complement to this paper finding that most LLMs tested (9 out of 10) had a tendency to over-generalize clinical trial results in summaries.

(Claude was a repeated exception, for whatever reason).

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

"Any book worth banning is a book worth reading."

Isaac Asimov

Abandoning the vision of liberal arts education is at the heart of how fascism has come knocking.

Scientists speaking of abandoning humanities have not learned the core lessons of our history - and by our history I even mean THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE. Science is never separated from society.

An important piece on #AI generated #preprints and why it's important to consider their impact on scientific ecosystem.

Some other important considerations related to this that are not covered in the article 👇

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#AI4Science #AI4Research #ScAISci #SciSci

Please help us spread the word! Please amplify!

We are searching for an associate or full professor (Canada Excellence Research Chair) in Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph! 🐟🌿🦠🐜🐸🐝

Applications are due October 6 2025.

careers.uoguelph.ca/job/Guelph-C...

#AcademicJobs #EvoBio

Harvard University lays off fly database team The layoffs jeopardize this resource, which has served more than 4,000 labs for about three decades.

FlyBase, a Drosophila database, will lose a third of its team in early October because the Harvard grant that covered the employees’ salaries was canceled. Scientists warn that losing FlyBase could devastate fly research.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/community/ha...

Winter Harvest Check out Winter Harvest - <p>When her beloved daughter Kore vanishes, Demeter is distraught. Suspecting betrayal and mistrusting of her family, she searches across the world, unable to come to terms ...

🇬🇷 Greece- Ioanna Papadopoulou, Winter Harvest

A retelling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone that focuses on the pain and violence done to the women in classical myth (god, Zeus is such a fucking asshole)

A reminder you/your lab can support FlyBase at Cambridge through the following link. Every bit helps. Please share if you yourself can't donate.

www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

We can't go back in time, but we can change our directory going forward. If you don't mask, you can do so from now on. Kindness is one (pretty important!) way to fight fascism, and i can't think of any kinder act than protecting each others' health.

There is, of course, no such thing as "PhD level intelligence". PhD level stubbornness ("I'm going to finish this if it kills me") or PhD level sunk cost fallaciousness, sure.

A PhD is awarded for the creation of *new* knowledge. Which is one thing that LLMs are incapable of doing.

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Additional needs The British Academy has set aside specific funding to support any additional needs that applicants and award holders may require. This funding would be in addition to the amount already requested for ...

So you'd like a research grant from @britishacademy.bsky.social but you've got an additional need that makes that difficult? Well we still believe in equality, diversity, inclusion, and so there is a fund you can apply to for help with that www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/addi...

Details : Postdoctoral Fellow, Paleoecology : The University of Melbourne Careers at The University of Melbourne

Rare Australian post-doc for a palynologist/paleoecologist with statiistical skills! jobs.unimelb.edu.au/en/job/91951...

Now seems a good time to mention that I haven't yet filled a postdoc position in phylogenetic methods. If you just lost your job, need something temporary, and know something about bioinformatics/statistics/evolution, talk to me.

Newton International Fellowships | Royal Society This fellowship is for non-UK scientists who are at an early stage of their research career and wish to conduct research in the UK.

If you're a non-UK scientist who wants to come to the UK for a postdoc, this year's Newton Fellowships are now open. You'll need a lab to host you (which could be me, but truly, could be any PI, so get in touch with someone you'd like to work with!)

royalsociety.org/grants/newto...

Associate Professor in Animal Ecology with specialization in Evolutionary Ecology - Uppsala University Associate Professor in Animal Ecology with specialization in Evolutionary Ecology , Department of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala University

📣 We are recruiting! Please spread the word!

We look to hire an associate professor in animal ecology, specializing in evolutionary ecology. Apply by Feb 7 2025. Come join us in Uppsala, Sweden!

Application page and contact info 🔗👇 #ecology #evolution #job

www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Super interesting article by Martin Picard

Reproductive output of old males is limited by seminal fluid, not sperm number What causes an old male to reproductively fail? Is it his sperm or seminal fluid? In fruit flies, old males produce fewer offspring than young males. But s

Is low fecundity of old males a consequence of seminal fluid or sperm declines, or female post-mating responses? Our new paper in evolution letters finds some surprising answers!

academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Ewald Lab @ EMBL-EBI. We identify and characterize chemical hazards to both humans and ecosystems with cell profiling data, machine learning, and integrative data analysis.

🎉 I'm starting my own lab at EMBL-EBI (Cambridge, UK; June 2025) 🎉

We will focus on identifying and characterizing chemical hazards to humans and ecosystems using computational biology methods.

I am beginning the search for two postdocs now - stay tuned for more details!

ewaldlab.org

Color blind friendly palettes for data visualizations with categories A discussion of color blind friendly palettes for labeling unique catergories in data visualization.

Having a color-blind colleague is a good reminder that we need to be more careful when designing figures for scientific publication 🧪
My lab has found this page especially useful for selecting color palettes, used in combination with different symbols: thenode.biologists.com/data-visuali...

There are few better feelings than when former students go off and do great things, and then write to you and let you know about them.

Students: never wonder if you should get in touch with a former teacher or supervisor to share this kind of thing. It is one of the purest rewards there is. /1

King’s College Cambridge has just announced a Research Fellowship on the topic of Symbiosis and/or Coevolution for early career researchers.

www.kings.cam.ac.uk/about/work-a...

Every year around now, I start to see grad students on social media bemoan that they’re going home for the holidays to a family that doesn’t understand their research, or what they do in general, and it breaks my heart. 🧵 🧪 #SciComm

DAY 7 #12daysofanglerfishmas Did you know there are anglerfish on coral reefs? Just like their relatives, frogfishes are sit-and-wait predators who use lures and have an extensible stomach!

A conserved bacterial genetic basis for commensal-host specificity Animals selectively acquire specific symbiotic gut bacteria from their environments that aid host fitness. To colonize, a symbiont must locate its niche and sustain growth within the gut. Adhesins are...

Drosophila and Lactiplantibacillus plantarum in the spotlight (again), what a wonderful model (disclaimer I am biased ;-) ).

Congrats Will and team!

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