Matthias C. Rillig

Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? People with aphantasia are offering a window into consciousness.

Very interesting to me, especially since I have aphantasia. I wonder what it's like to have active mental imagery.

Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains?

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Spectacular talk today by Klaus Schlaeppi, University of Basel.

@kschlaeppi.bsky.social

What is contentment in academia? Should you be content? Can I be content?

A stream of consciousness about being content in academia.

Wrote this mostly for myself, perhaps you also find it interesting.

open.substack.com/pub/matthias...

Looking forward to this meeting and the presentation!

Fungal ecology in the age of 'omics The advancement of technology in recent decades has given us an unprecedented ability to observe the natural world. With modern sequencing and bioinformatics technologies, we can obtain more informat...

Reading in journal club

Shelton et al.
Fungal ecology in the age of 'omics

@newphyt.bsky.social
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Gott und die Welt mit Matthias Rillig "Wenn wir den Boden wertschätzen sind wir bereit, ihn mehr zu schützen", sagt Matthias Rillig, Biologe im Gespräch mit Klaus Böllert.

Mein Radiointerview mit ndr zum Bodenschutz und dem Buch "Mutter Erde"

www.ndr.de/kirche/podca...

I just call it a friend. Despite of distance and frequency of contact. Based on how it works when we actually are at the same place, which may only be once a year, and based on how I feel when they leave (sad).

Academic friendships and creativity Friends are important for creative ideas in science

Academic friendships are super important for creativity in science.

What's been your experience?

open.substack.com/pub/matthias...

Number and dissimilarity of soil amendments influence soil properties and plant communities in a greenhouse experiment Soil health is fundamental in supporting plant diversity and productivity. In turn, a species-rich plant community enhances soil functions and is cruc…

New paper out:

Li, Rongstock et al.
Number and dissimilarity of soil amendments influence soil properties and plant communities in a greenhouse experiment

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Atmospheric microplastic emissions from land and ocean - Nature A global atmospheric microplastics dataset is compiled, and comparison with size-aligned microplastic models in the literature indicate that fewer microplastic particles are emitted into the atmospher...

Evangelou et al. in Nature
Atmospheric microplastic emissions from land and ocean

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Environmental drivers can shift in effect direction when acting in concert with other factors Results from a recent paper from our group in Nature Communications

Environmental drivers can shift in effect direction when acting in concert with other factors

open.substack.com/pub/matthias...

Oh no!
I've always liked the idea that Prototaxites was a fungus.... 😅
But it looks like it wasn't.

Wer weiß was Archivböden sind....?

Jörg Blech & Matthias Rillig: "Mutter Erde" Ein Gespräch mit dem Bodenökologen Matthias Rillig von der Freien Universität Berlin

Gestern mit rbb radio 3 über das Buch "Mutter Erde" gesprochen, sowie über den Boden des Jahres - den Archivboden.

@fubcp.bsky.social @bodendesjahres.bsky.social @bvboden.bsky.social
www.radiodrei.de/programm/sch...

Stressor Combinations Shift Soil Microbial Communities From Rare to Unknown Taxa and Alter Genomic Strategies Effects of environmental stressor factor number on soil common, rare, and unknown taxa. High-stressor numbers reduce the abundance and diversity of rare taxa but increase unknown taxa and had no effe...

New paper out in Global Change Biology

Cheng et al.
Stressor Combinations Shift Soil Microbial Communities From Rare to Unknown Taxa and Alter Genomic Strategies

w/ @manudelbaq.bsky.social & others
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We also found exponential dynamics in a re-analysis of long-term soils data from the UK.

Eine sehr interessante Diskussion in der SKAE zur Diversifizierung von Anbausystemen von Nutzpflanzen; das Positionspaper ist gerade erschienen.

Or, asked another way: what can we do to increase the likelihood that researchers in 50 or 100 years will still be interested in reading our work?

Soil biodiversity effects on ecosystems - Nature Reviews Biodiversity Soil biodiversity is poorly studied compared to aboveground biodiversity, but is an important driver of ecosystem functioning. This Review discusses advances in research into the relationships between...

Reading in journal club

Eisenhauer et al.
Soil biodiversity effects on ecosystems

@eisenhauerlab.bsky.social @natrevbiodiv.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

How many years into the future will people read our scientific output? Is it 5 years, 10 years, or a hundred years? Should we care?

Newsletter for this week is out:

How many years into the future will people read our scientific output?
Is it 5 years, 10 years, or a hundred years? Should we care?

matthiasrillig.substack.com/p/how-many-y...

It intends to describe that this is a global-scale study on soils (without necessarily implying that this was covering the full globe, since there aren't the data to do that).

Productivity-driven decoupling of microbial carbon use efficiency and respiration across global soils Resource-dependent microbial adaptability decouples microbial growth from respiration and limits soil carbon storage.

New paper just out in Science Advances, led by Humboldt fellow Yongxing Cui in the lab:

Productivity-driven decoupling of microbial carbon use efficiency and respiration across global soils

@fubcp.bsky.social @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social @humboldt-foundation.de

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

Ich kenne die Regeln nicht wie das entschieden wird, denke aber für so etwas müsste sich das Buch vielleicht besser verkaufen?

Global change factors differ in effect when acting alone and in a multi-factor background - Nature Communications Urban soils are exposed to numerous human-driven stressors that can interact in unpredictable ways. This study concludes that the impact of adding one factor does not correspond to the impact of remov...

Link to the paper:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Hidden Risk of Combined Stressors for Soils New study by researchers at Freie Universität published in “Nature Communications” shows that independent environmental stressors such as heat, drought, and microplastics affect soils differently when...

Press release of @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social for our recent paper in Nature Communications.

The Hidden Risk of Combined Stressors for Soils

@fubcp.bsky.social
www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/in...

Nicht dass ich wüsste...

I am not sure yet what language it will be and for what age group. There are a lot of different ideas....

Neues Buch über Erdboden: Wie ein Sohn Speyers gegen dessen „Imageproblem“ kämpft - Speyer Biologie-Professor Matthias Rillig aus Speyer veröffentlicht gemeinsam mit Co-Autor Jörg Blech sein erstes Buch: „Mutter Erde“, eine Liebeserklärung ...

My hometown newspaper (Die Rheinpfalz) has a story about my new book "Mutter Erde". (D, €)

www.rheinpfalz.de/lokal/speyer...

The summary:

Big fan of trying out new things like this, and it was a very interesting read - kudos to the authors.

Didn't understand the math; and were in the end unsure of the heuristic value of having these clusters of the PTBT identified.
Discussed if this is possible to do for fungi...

Thank you! Yes, getting those first hires right is hard, but super critical...