Björn W

The authors show that "... amino acid transporter LAT1 (SLC7A5) and transcription factor NRF2 regulate [the increased sFlt-1/PlGF ratio] via a previously unknown mechanism to produce sFlt-1 and PlGF in an anti-angiogenic ratio as observed in PE"

Photo of a clouded landscape taken from a Swiss mountaintop. A tiny white church or chapel can be seen in the middle distance

AWS down, post your own cloud

A painting of a very large hog.

AWS is down, post hog

A Scottish Wildcat, a tabby patterned wild cat looking angry in a field of Heather.

A Scottish Wildcat, an angry looking wild cat with a tabby pattern hiding behind a tree.

A Scottish Wildcat, an angry looking cat with a tabby pattern skulking behind some rocks.

A Scottish Wildcat, an angry wild cat with a tabby pattern staring up furiously with a dusting of snow.

AWS is down, post Scottish Wildcats

Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025.

www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

J’attendais le jour où une première grande étude basculerait la ligne rouge : et c’est aujourd’hui. Elle démontre que le changement climatique commence désormais à faire dépérir nos forêts plus vite qu’elles ne se régénèrent.
1/9

The snail farmer of London, his mafia friends, and a £20m vendetta against the taxman Terry Ball runs elaborate mollusc-based tax avoidance schemes that are costing London councils millions of pounds. Yet when London Centric tracks him down, an even stranger story emerges.

I think this is the weirdest story I've ever reported. www.londoncentric.media/p/terry-ball...

Photo of a narrow-gauge rail of a very steep funicular through a yellow-green autumn landscape

Photo of a small herd of grey-brown "Braunvieh" cows lying handsomely in a green pasture with yellow leaves. The cows, curious as always, are looking towards the camera

Took the smallest train to see some pretty cows

**Please Repost**

Pallavi Singh Lab is looking for two Postdocs to join our team studying how plants balance carbon, water, and resilience in a changing climate.

PlantPlug PDRA: vacancies.essex.ac.uk/tlive_webrec...

REVOLUTION PDRA: vacancies.essex.ac.uk/tlive_webrec...

Deadline: October 15.

Inouye Lab - Research Background Technological advances have continued to drive the study of biology towards the statistical and computational sciences. We are now able to differentiate and quantify biomolecules at levels ...

Not unrelated... I've recently updated the Research page on our lab's website (first time in nearly 10 years!) www.inouyelab.org/home/research

and we are now recruiting PhD students for autumn 2026 @dphpc.bsky.social @cam.ac.uk - feel free to get in touch!

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

Professor or Assistant / Associate (tenure track) Professor in Plant Ecology The Faculty of Science is looking for a full professor or assistant/associate professor (tenure track) in Plant Ecology. The aim of the professorship is to strengthen scientific research and education...

Open position: Professor or Assistant / Associate (tenure track) Professor in Plant Ecology (U. Turku Finland) Please share

ats.talentadore.com/apply/kasvie...

Entente, by Tal National from the album Tantabara

Est-ce que tout le monde ce vous êtes chaud? (OUI) Vous êtes prêtes? (OUI) C'est Tal National ... on y va!
talnational.bandcamp.com/track/entente

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

The #interrail has an interesting start. First, a little late out of the city bc of reports of people near the tracks, and now in the countryside we roll verrrry slowly because there are COWS on the track

Soccer is a globalist sport and it is hard to imagine an organization better equipped than FIFA in navigating corruption. Trump stands no chance.

Using modern coexistence theory to understand community disassembly Community disassembly examines how species extinction alters ecological communities. Sometimes, the extinction of one species can trigger the loss of others, known as secondary extinction. These secon...

Excited to share a new pre-print in collaboration with @sebastianschreiber.bsky.social, "Using Modern Coexistence Theory to understand community disassembly"! We set out to understand how techniques used to study coexistence can be extended to understand community disassembly. (1/X)

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

"...vi är helt beroende av freden för att frihet ska uppnås" ja jo visst men var kommer den freden ifrån och vilka "vi" får sen ta del av friheten? Jisses

Hacia el Amor, by Emicida & Ibeyi 1 track album

Or
emicida.bandcamp.com/album/hacia-...

YouTube video by DaftPunkVEVO Daft Punk - Giorgio by Moroder (Official Audio)

With a click on the 24-track, there's the sound of the future
m.youtube.com/watch?v=zhl-...

View of an alpine landscape with rocky ground in the foreground and mountains in the background on the other side of a valley (the Rhône valley). The higher peaks have a thin layer of snow.

A thinnn layer of snow

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

A causal framework for the drivers of animal social network structure Author summary Behavioural ecologists ask mechanistic questions about behaviour—causal questions. When studying animal societies, these questions often concern the drivers of social network structure....

Are you studying animal sociality?

My (now published) first PhD chapter proposes a Bayesian + causal framework to infer the factors shaping the social relationships that animals form with one another.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

PhD Fellowship in Computational Systems Immunology (286608) | University of Oslo Job title: PhD Fellowship in Computational Systems Immunology (286608), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Wednesday, October 15, 2025

We’re recruiting a PhD Fellow in Computational Systems Immunology. Work on large-scale immune receptor datasets and develop computational models in close collaboration with experimental labs. Apply here: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Photo of an alpine landscape facing south-west towards Haute Savoie in France from a point above Montreux. The foreground has trees, with forested alps in the background reaching into an overcast grey sky.

After a couple of cooler days, there's now the thinnest layer of snow on the mountains, the same ones that are almost visible in the clouds from last week's hike

Lucia sitting in front of her laptop and smiling while talking to a coworker

How to overcome an "existential modeling crisis" as a science researcher, from DSE postdoc @lucialayr.bsky.social:

✅ Define modeling in your own words
✅ Embrace validation
✅ Find allies
✅ Trust in "the modeler's mindset"
✅ Draw from other experts

📸 @uofcalifornia.bsky.social by Mathew Burciaga

Feel free to contact me for info about this open position and the project! Fully funded through @hfspo.bsky.social and in collaboration with @jacrickets.bsky.social and Shawn McGlynn

Looking for examples of a very simple mathematical model interactive exercise to help students understand reproductive trade offs, e.g. using offspring number vs survival, working through a basic equation. Has anyone done anything like this in a workshop that they'd be willing to share?

I now have the same question myself, did you ever get an answer?