Tristan A.F. Long

Having just finished a full day of student meetings—last opportunity before final papers are due—I can’t emphasize this enough: the most valuable thing instructors can offer is time with students, talk time for troubleshooting key aspects of their projects, one-on-one chances for personal feedback.

A group of amazing fruit fly biologists posing behind a table as they wait for their lunches!

Had a great end-of-semester lab lunch with the hard-working #DrosLife gang! #Drosophila @laurierbiology.bsky.social

Framing GenAI as a battle between teachers and students is a red herring. Students and educators are on the same side. The real opposition are the data extraction firms and brokerages and their allies among the managerial class.

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

If you have only one thing to read today...

"Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience."

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

WLU Economics Fund Drive is raising funds for The Food Bank of Waterloo Region This is our 8th Annual Fund Drive for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region! Thank you for your donation!

The Economics Dept at @wilfridlaurieruni.bsky.social has launched the 8th Annual Fund Drive for the @foodbankwatreg.bsky.social ! Calling all faculty, staff, alumni and friends to join us in raising funds for our local food banks
🥦💰🥪👇

foodbank.donorsupport.co/-/NELFLDQK?m...

This bird’s greed delights me

What are we doing here folks

the viral image of that lab rat with giant genitalia

#HigherEd isn’t even close to ready for what’s coming with #AI in assessments

Our policies and practices can’t reliably prove AI use—and students can (and do) insist that yes, they genuinely believed the rat anatomy looked like that
(Example anonymized, obviously)

We need a serious rethink

After another ~9 generations of experimental evolution, Owen is back with (another) final behavioural assay for his dozen #Drosophila populations! #Dietmorphism #ScienceDoughnuts

Career Opportunities Applicant Log-In

My department at California State University Northridge is hiring! We're looking for a new colleague studying microbiology or molecular/cellular biology. I'm not on the search committee, but happy to answer questions about the department and campus, and life in LA

buff.ly/Pc1KOaC

More journals should do this! Art is inherently a part of science and this helps to normalize that. Also... IT LOOKS SO COOL.

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.

The Larry Sandler Award recognizes excellent recent graduates who have completed a PhD in Drosophila research. The awardee will receive a fantastic opportunity to present the Larry Sandler Memorial Lecture at the 67th Annual Drosophila Research Conference in Chicago, IL! The deadline to nominate is December 15, 2025. Nominate Here Eligibility Any student completing a PhD in an area of Drosophila research between July 2024 and December 2025 is eligible. Students may be nominated by their thesis advisor, department chair, or supervisory committee member. Nominations Nominations may be submitted by the student’s thesis advisor, department chair, or supervisory committee member, and should include the following: Nominee's CV Nominee's thesis abstract of 1–2 pages A nomination letter directly answering the following questions: What are the main discoveries in the nominee's thesis? What are the intellectual and experimental contributions of the nominee to the project? How does the thesis work advance what was previously known in the field and to previous work from your lab?

Drosophila colleagues--Please submit nominations for the Larry Sandler Award. which recognizes excellent recent graduates who have completed a PhD in Drosophila research. Details are below and at this link:
genetics-gsa.org/drosophila-2...

Join us next June in Québec City for the 30th International Conference on Liquid Crystals!
For more information, check out the conference website:
www.ilcc2026.org/en

#ILCC2026 #LiquidCrystals #LCScience #SoftMatter #MaterialsScience #Chemistry #AdvancedMaterials #Optics

Historian of eugenics here. I don't normally like to retweet bad arguments, but this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of eugenics, I think it's important to point out. I don't have time to debunk all of the ways this is inaccurate, but I'll highlight a few things and then recommend some books🧵

The swimming candy cane

🌊🐟🦑🦇

A QR code for the survey

What are the most pressing questions
about the status of #insects? Our survey is available here in multiple languages: bit.ly/insectquestions! #insect #entomology #biodiversity

If “AI” did the thing, organizations would be bragging about the outcomes instead of jawing endlessly about the tools.

Pteridology (FERNS) with Dr. Fay-Wei Li — alie ward Fronds. Forest dwellers. Spores. Houseplants. Queer icons. We’ve got ferns. The charming and hilarious professor and author of “Ferns: Lessons in Survival from Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants,” Dr. Fay-...

WE GOT FERNS, folks.

I hope you like ferns. If you don’t, just listen and you will like ferns. 🌿🌿🌿

Dr. Li is hilarious and charming and you will love him. And ferns.

In conclusion: ferns.

www.alieward.com/ologies/pter...

I think it is still too early to study how many of the CERC and Canada150 stayed in Canada after the $$$ ran out, but someone needs to do this analysis. I think we'll find that these programs, without increasing CIHR and NSERC budgets, are not doing what they intended.

I would pay a premium for a “classic” AI-free version of these programs!

"The message was clear. Let ChatGPT redesign your class. Let ChatGPT tell you how to evaluate your students. Let ChatGPT tell students how to use ChatGPT. Let ChatGPT solve the problem of human education. It was like being handed a Mad Libs puzzle for automating your syllabus."

Claude, an American alligator with albinism, lounging on his favorite heated rock.

It's with heavy hearts that we share that Claude, our beloved albino alligator, has passed away at the age of 30. Claude brought joy to millions of people at the Academy and across the world during his 17 year tenure. We will miss him dearly. 🤍

Please apply to the ASN student research awards! This is such an amazing opportunity to get experience grant writing as a grad student, and the $$$ has funded some really fantastic research!!!

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

“The irony couldn’t be starker: the… programs best equipped to study the social and ethical implications of AI were being defunded, even as the university promoted [its] use…across campus. This isn’t innovation—it’s institutional auto-cannibalism.”

Again, Refuse/Resist is the only reasonable stance

At the moment it is apparently in the free pilot phase, and in the new year you would need to convince the Dean/admin office why a licence is needed. Hopefully common sense (if not budgetary concerns) wins out!

That's what one of our upper admins told us (and explains why these companies are trying so hard to get us to adopt AI)!

Figure 2 from the linked paper, showing a hypothesized dispersal history from North America east to Eurasia, Japan, and Polynesia on a north polar view of the globe; and a time-calibrated phylogeny of Vaccinium species by their geographic locations

Blueberry species (genus Vaccinium) circled the Northern Hemisphere to travel from North America to Hawai'i— and then closed the loop to hybridize with a North American species 🌿

buff.ly/3mu6eqJ

It’s also extra galling when a university is paying 500$ yr per individual for a copilot licence! That cash could be used in so many more important places!

Here’s a sneak peek at two of the amazing topics that will be presented - Ahna Skop’s 'Tactile Mitosis' project to create more inclusive, multi-sensory learning tools, and Janet Iwasa’s software that allows users to create molecular visualizations!