The Tattooed Professor

The use of impact factors in the evaluation of researchers has contributed to the distortion of scientific publishing practices and research practices, noted France's CNRS as it walked away from Web of Science, using $$$ saved to promote #OpenScience & #OpenData. www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cn...

GBE | Recombination and Retroprocessing in Broomrapes Reveal RNA-Mediated Gene Transfer Mechanism and a Generalizable Model for Mitochondrial Evolution in Heterotrophic Plants

@limingcai.bsky.social et al. examined mitogenomes of 45 Orobanchaceae species, identifying genetic alterations in genomic shuffling, RNA editing, and intracellular and horizontal gene transfer en route to a nonphotosynthetic lifestyle.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag025

#genome #evolution

Systematic investigation of interindividual variation of DNA methylation in human whole blood - Genome Biology Background Interindividual genetic variability is well characterised, but we still lack a complete catalogue of loci displaying variable and stable epigenetic patterns. Results Here, we report a catal...

Excited to share our latest publication on interindividual variation of DNA methylation in human whole blood, spearheaded by the amazing Olivia Grant and co-led with @leo-schalkwyk.bsky.social and Meena Kumari.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

i feel this in my bones this week

The international boycott of ChatGPT has absolutely exploded.

2.5M people have already joined, and this is just the beginning.

Go to quitgpt.org.
Cancel your subscription, delete your account.
And tell at least one person why.

My op-ed: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Convergent evolution of hexenal isomerases in Lepidoptera and plants - Nature Ecology & Evolution Phylogenetic and functional analyses across 34 Lepidoptera and 183 plant species show that hexenal isomerases found in Lepidoptera exhibit functional convergence with those found in plants despite hav...

Phylogenetic and functional analyses across 34 Lepidoptera and 183 plant species show that hexenal isomerases found in Lepidoptera exhibit functional convergence with those found in plants despite having evolved independently from unrelated enzyme families 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

CheckIfExist: Detecting Citation Hallucinations in the Era of AI-Generated Content The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in academic workflows has introduced unprecedented challenges to bibliographic integrity, particularly through reference hallucination -- the generati...

A bunch of new papers on @arxiv-cs-cl.bsky.social offer tools to address one challenge: id'ing fake citations. Here's the first: CheckIfExist: arxiv.org/abs/2602.15871

Phenogenomics reveals the ecology and evolution of Trichoderma fungi for sustainable agriculture - Nature Microbiology Analysis of 37 genomes together with more than 140 phenotypic traits links genomic features to ecological fitness and lifestyle diversity in Trichoderma fungi.

Phenogenomics reveals the ecology and evolution of Trichoderma fungi for sustainable agriculture

-in @natmicrobiol.nature.com by Andrei Steindorff (@jgi.doe.gov) et al from Irina Druzhinina (at @rbgkew.bsky.social), Feng Cai, Igor Grigoriev, and a large network

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

This game is about to release into Early Access TODAY and I have a spare giveaway key. I'll post it into the replies for anyone to grab once this post reaches 500 reposts

College students, professors are making their own AI rules. They don't always agree More than three years after ChatGPT debuted, AI has become a part of everyday life — and professors and students are still figuring out how or if they should use it.

More than three years after ChatGPT debuted, AI has become a part of everyday life — and professors and students are still figuring out how or if they should use it. n.pr/4biVAz8

Demonstrations of reproducibility are not reproducibility - Nature Ecology & Evolution Nature Ecology & Evolution - Demonstrations of reproducibility are not reproducibility

Correspondence ✍️

"Demonstrations of reproducibility are not reproducibility" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gómez-Llano & De Lisle argue that many recent measures adopted to address replicability and reproducibility in science
may actually undermine these efforts.

Free to read: rdcu.be/e6A99

There is a week left to apply for two available positions in my lab @ipbhalle.bsky.social

- PhD: ipb-halle.mhm.jobs/12-phd-posit...

- Postdoc: ipb-halle.mhm.jobs/13-postdocto...
Earliest start date: 01/05/2026.

We are interested in plant immune receptor biochemistry and evolution. Please share!

Fantastic lecture, recommend! 🧪 #academicsky

Acadeics began studying this failure and realized that the WWII FIRCs didn't create democracies from thin air.

They restored democracies.

Successful democratization requires prior democratic institutions, economic development, and total military defeat.

11/

www.jstor.org/stable/24480...

When you start an illegal war to distract from the other illegal things you've done.

Sexual deception of a beetle pollinator through floral mimicry Cohen et al. report that an African orchid is pollinated by male longhorn beetles, which ejaculate while attempting to copulate with the flowers. They identify a novel macrolide that mediates this sys...

if you too want to read the whole story, it is here and it's really something!! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Well done Valentin.

Valentin Hammoudi, Maria Leptin | EMBO Science Journalism Fellow, former postdoctoral researcher & freelance journalist, talks about their experience with the #fellowship and how they transitioned into #ScienceJournalism: https://www.embo.org/people/bringing-new-perspectives-to-science-journalism/ 🧪

Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy Duplicated self-interacting proteins can interact and interfere with each other’s function. Cisneros, Mattenberger, et al. show that selection against interfering loss-of-function alleles extends the ...

New paper alert: Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy www.cell.com/current-biol...

Following a white man to war because you disliked the sound of a black woman laughing will go down in American history as one of the dumbest acts of self-sabotage ever.

Yep Trump or pronouns... end up being Trump.

‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI Women in rural communities describe trauma of moderating violent and pornographic content for global tech companies

when people talk about AI used in moderation of social media posts, you must remember there is always the human-in-the-loop, often a woman, often in the Global South, always dehumanised and forgotten

1/n

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

I apologize for initially being somewhat skeptical of Phillip Morris.

In all of our interactions, they made it profoundly clear that they are unequivocally opposed to any and all use of tobacco products and that they remain committed to partnering with us to achieve the best possible outcome.

10 Fascinating Animal-To-Human Diseases A zoonosis is a disease which is transmitted from animals to humans. With nearly 850 known zoonoses, many of which are almost never contracted by humans,

Fascinating Zoonoses--
A list.

listverse.com/2013/04/01/1...

Social and ecological factors associated with innovation in urban sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) Cities are challenging places for wildlife, but some species, like sulfur-crested cockatoos, adapt by finding new ways to feed and solve problems. We studi

New paper alert! 🦜

We gave wild cockatoos puzzle boxes across Canberra’s urban gradient. The finding? Urban birds approach faster, but are not better solvers.

Our results suggest that urbanization shapes neophobia independently from cognitive performance. Read it here:

doi.org/10.1093/behe...

No the Chinese Academy of Science woke up to this I wonder if my colleagues will wake up to it as well.... one can always dream.

Publishing needs a complete reset.

“Shattered history’s monstrous tyrannies - and then decided to recreate them, American style.”

A large-scale randomized study of large language model feedback in peer review: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

RCT w/ 20k reviews shows that 27% of reviewers who received feedback from AI updated their reviews, and blinded eval confirmed revised feedback was more informative.

Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres - Nature Evolutionarily related ‘proto-point’ centromeres providing resolution to the evolutionary origins of point centromeres are identified in yeast, and comparison shows they evolved in an ancestor with retrotransposon-rich centromeres and that long-terminal-repeat retrotransposons are the genetic substrate.

Nature research paper: Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres

go.nature.com/4c3kP9A