Tristan Caro

Microbial growth rate is a stronger predictor of soil organic carbon than carbon use efficiency - Nature Ecology & Evolution Microbial carbon use efficiency is a strong predictor of soil organic carbon stocks. Here the authors reveal that the microbial growth rate is a more reliable and informative predictor, and that model...

Soil microbes grow, respire, die. Because their biomass eventually becomes necromass, and necromass can be stabilized in soil, growth rate emerges as a powerful predictor of soil carbon: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Microbial growth rate is a stronger predictor of soil organic carbon than carbon use efficiency - Nature Ecology & Evolution Microbial carbon use efficiency is a strong predictor of soil organic carbon stocks. Here the authors reveal that the microbial growth rate is a more reliable and informative predictor, and that model...

Folks interested in soil carbon and microbes, you may want to check these two papers recently published in @natecoevo.nature.com: Xianjin He et al., Microbial growth rate is a stronger predictor of soil organic carbon than carbon use efficiency... (1/4) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A digital illustration of Skeletor as depicted in the 80s He-Man cartoon. For those unfamiliar he is a a blue man with a fantasy bodybuilder physique. He wears a cross-body harness with some little bones at the center and a matching purple hood that frames hood face which is somehow just a yellow skull. Here he is seen yelling up to the sky and shaking his little blue fists at the heavens. Cutting him off at mid-abs is some gleaming 3D lettering in the style of the Masters of the Universe logo that reads ‘Maybe it will happen today’.

Two fully funded PhD candidate positions in Electromicrobiology (3 years) Application deadline: 4 March 2026 at 23:59 hours local Danish time

In addition to the 2 postdoc jobs posted yesterday, we’re recruiting 2 PhD students (environmental microbiology/ molecular ecology) to join us from April. The projects will map microbial populations across niches in bioelectrochemical systems relevant to biomethanation & link them to performance.

Leave a comment on PubPeer so others down the road don't have to do the guesswork! pubpeer.org

'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.

"Make sure you cook them thoroughly or you'll start seeing tiny people."

Me: 𝗡𝗼𝗱𝘀 𝗜𝗻 𝗨𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 ᵗᵘʳⁿˢ ᵈᵒʷⁿ ʰᵒᵇ

www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

It's a mistake to assume ignorance at this point. It is certifiable malevolence.

Excited to join the Editorial Board of @plosbiology.org, the #PLOS flagship journal in the Life Sciences, that's blazing a trail in support of selective, equitable #OpenScience and reaching global audiences to help advance science faster 📝 🤓 🌱

Multi-omics reveals nitrogen dynamics associated with soil microbial blooms during snowmelt - Nature Microbiology Soil microbial populations bloom and then die-off in ecosystems with seasonal snowpack. This study showed that distinct taxa utilize different N sources for growth or energy during the microbial bloom...

Multi-omics reveals nitrogen dynamics associated with soil microbial blooms during snowmelt www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Entering the Permafrost Research Tunnel is like walking through a time machine, says microbiologist @tacaro.bsky.social. Surrounded by mammoth bones, ancient vegetation, and 40,000 year old permafrost, researchers study the effects of thaw on our planet. bigpicturescience.org/episodes/col...

I was thrilled to be featured on this week's episode of Big Picture Science "Cold to Hot"! Wonderful reporting on permafrost thaw, greenland ice sheet, NCAR, and more!

Congrats to @noahhoupt.bsky.social for this massive effort (1000 generation!) evolution experiment demonstrating the importance of organism-derived environmental modifications in shaping adaptive evolution. A great example of how bacterial evolution only makes sense in the light of phage :)

Excited to see this published! A big part of why SAR11 is so tricky to grow like "normal" microbes.

Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land, analysis says

Happy to talk to @olliemilman.bsky.social about the potential impacts IF people followed the new dietary guidelines. We’re talking potentially 100M acres of additional ag land and 100s of millions of tons of more CO2e. But if we instead ate more plants, we could have our protein and forests, too.

‘Shattered’: US scientists speak out about how Trump policies disrupted their careers Researchers lay bare the human toll of lay-offs, funding cuts and attacks on science one year after the president’s return to the White House.

Like so many, I’ve been affected by the new US federal stance against science. As a result of this and seeking a better life balance, I have accepted a new Full Prof position at the University Helsinki, Finland 🇫🇮🤩

I will miss CA deeply, but a new adventure awaits 🐟

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

I keep my obsidian vault in a onedrive folder, so i'm able to use that to sync the .md files between multiple devices. for native obsidian sync, you can pay

Spatiotemporal dynamics in airborne fungi and fungal allergens across the United States A broad diversity of fungi can be found in the near-surface atmosphere, with both the amounts and types of airborne fungi varying across space and time. However, the specific spatiotemporal patterns i...

New preprint up on airborne fungi across the US with a focus on fungal allergens - would love feedback.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

do you ever randomly think about the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption while pouring a cup of coffee or are you normal

Artist's impression of rocks on a barren ocean floor, devoid of life, tectonism, or volcanic activity. Europa's seafloor is probably a bit like this, but in absolute darkness (which doesn't make for all that compelling a picture).

New paper alert!

tl;dr: the seafloor of Europa is probably tectonically inert, meaning little to no active fracturing that could expose fresh rock to seawater.

Without such water–rock reactions the prospect for there being life within Europa just took a big hit.

A thread:

Constructing a “periodic table” of bacteria to map diversity in trait space Abstract. Despite an ever-expanding number of bacterial taxa being discovered, many of these taxa remain uncharacterized with unknown traits and environmen

New paper up - inspired by the periodic table of the elements, we attempted to organize bacterial diversity in genome-inferred trait space academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

Soil structure changes under reduced tillage and cover cropping enhance carbon mineralization in Mediterranean croplands Conservation agriculture practices like no-tillage and cover cropping are promoted for rebuilding soil health and sequestering carbon, but their effectiveness in irrigated systems remains questioned....

New paper: 19 years of conservation tillage + cover crops built 50% more soil carbon, but also created macropore networks that triple carbon mineralization rates when soils are wet.
A carbon sequestration paradox for irrigated agriculture.

#soil
acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A satellite image of the Earth and its weather.

"Positive 'greening' of our daily activities may soothe our consciousness, but a sole focus on the individual consumer level runs the risk of displacing or subsuming attention paid to larger-scale organizational carbon practices in the private as well as public sectors."

A forlorn landscape of layered rocks in the foreground, with hills fading into the background haze. At upper top right, a small crescent moon, and a bright star.

Open up this picture fully.

Then look at the surface of Mars.

Then look up to the top right.

Spot Mars' moon Phobos high in the sky.

Then notice the bright spot beside Phobos.

That's Earth.

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

ggplot, your time is now!

and moratorium on travel for feds

💾 Prokka 1.15.6 is released!

This is the last major release of Prokka. But don't be sad, because @oschwengers.bsky.social already has an excellent replacement called Bakta you can migrate to.
#bioinformatics #microbiology #genomics

github.com/tseemann/pro...

Want to restart the idea machine? Multiply NSF’s budget by 10.

That would bring it to about 40% of annual investment in AI.

cool!!