Alexis W

Français Titre : Le Bidule du Truc : Ambivalences et contradictions dans la nuance de la subtilité (1634-1892) But : Détruire une discipline qui n’a pas besoin d’être détruite Sources : Maladie de l’érudition : veut faire un portrait exhaustif du sujet et montrer qu’il a bien révisé. Pour ça cambriole de biens meilleurs livres sur le sujet en les citant le moins possible. Méthode : Être très sarcastique Structure : Il y a environ 180 chapitres, la table des matières prend 10% du livre Persuasion : Crie victoire tous les trois paragraphes en espérant vous rallier à force Anglais Titre : [Jeu de mots sur une citation de Shakespeare] But : Recréer une discipline qui n’a pas besoin d’être recréée Sources : Une soupe incohérente des 20 derniers livres qui traînent sur la table de chevet de l’auteur Méthode : Espérer que l’idée centrale est suffisamment séduisante pour pas avoir besoin de trop la défendre Structure : Structure parfaitement adaptée à l’argument -- mais on voit encore plus à quel point le livre est vide. Aurait plutôt dû être abrégé en un article (mais personne l’aurait publié). Persuasion : Est incapable de critiquer une théorie sans proposer une théorie encore plus stupide Allemand Titre : Grundrissen der Grundrissen der Wissenschaftsstiftung But : Peu importe le sujet, tente de conclure simultanément 4 grands débats théoriques qui durent depuis 1850 Sources : Cite littéralement toutes les références sur le sujet mais d’une manière oblique qui demande à déjà les connaître pour pouvoir comprendre quoi que ce soit Méthode : Vaincre le lecteur par KO Structure : Très dense. L’auteur a malheureusement réalisé qu’il n’y avait pas de limite légale à la taille d’un chapitre ou d’un paragraphe. Persuasion : La thèse centrale est très convaincante si on la rate pas à la page 837.

Elle circule à nouveau mais j'ai jamais posté ici mon analyse scientifique des bouquins universitaires clivants suivant leur langue

Portrait of Galileo by Francesco Porcia

Galileo Galilei was born 15 February 1568, it's more than 15 years since my infamous deflation of his bloated reputation #histsci
thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/e...

Experience-dependent reconfiguration of thermoreceptors regulates neuronal response plasticity Harris, Dutta, et al. find that experience-dependent plasticity in the activation threshold of the AFD thermosensory neurons is mediated by modulating warm and cold thermoreceptor levels at the sensor...

Our first 2026 paper is out @currentbiology.bsky.social!
👏 to @nathancsharris.bsky.social (now Asst Prof, GA State) and PD Priya Dutta.

Here we show how transcriptional and trafficking pathways coordinate thermoreceptor levels to precisely modulate response plasticity
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Word of the Day goes to ancient Sumeria

H2O2 avoidance is not abolished by cilium structure mutants

We set out to identify which neurons are required for chemotactic avoidance of hydrogen peroxide.

Our first surprise was that cilium structure mutants (with strong defects in chemosensation) reduced but did not abolish H2O2 avoidance.

How did the worms retain some of the avoidance behavior? 3/

Friends! I am so happy to share our new preprint!

Hydrogen peroxide has been the most common reactive chemical threat to life forms since the Great Oxygenation Event 2.5 billion years ago.

How do animals like C. elegans sense it fast and escape?

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thread 1/

Text stream: Them: If I recall at some point you posted or re-posted a good back of the envelope outline of an aims page But now I can’t find it Can you share if it’s easy to share? No worries if not Me: It’s on my bulletin board at work, and I don’t seem to have a copy. Here’s what I remember: Paragraph 1: there is a big probem Paragraph 2: This innovative insight / tool / recombination / opportunity gives us new traction on this big problem, including these specific gaps. Paragraph 3: therefore our overarching goal is… Specific Aim N (where n=1…3): active verb Paragraph Final: This will advance science IN ONE SENTENCE. This will impact health IN ONE SENTENCE. And it is feasible in our hands because ONE SENTENCE Paragraph 2 is sometimes 2 paragraphs where it makes it clear why solving those gaps would be particularly pivotal and is newly tractable. That help? This is also what I teach peer reviewers their basic take home out of an Aims page should be. So your job as an author is to give the reviewers what they need

Slide saying: How to review an Aims page in 3 minutes • Having read this, in my own words, I think this proposal is to address the problem of ____________________. They will do this by ____________ 2-3 sentences about aims/methods. ___________. • The author argues it is significant to this funder because of _____________. • The author suggests it is feasible because of _____________. • The 2 most compelling things about it are, to my mind, ____________ and ___________. • Coming out of the Specific Aims page, I have the following 1-3 major concerns: _____________, ____________ and ___________.

I often get texts like this -- harkening back to the old days of #ScrawledGrantAdvice on twitter via IHPI

So reposting here a text version, including my gradual evolution, so maybe I can find it next time and don't have to re-type it

Cow Tools!

We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years.
We breed them and exploit them

It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS

Here I describe our study

(paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social
with @auersperga.bsky.social

☠️ The world's most dangerous animals by annual deaths.

This is such a cool illustration of how the Mercator map distorts the size of Greenland, which looks as big as the whole continent of Africa on that map but is actually the size of Mexico.

A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026

🧵

Après Saute-canton, un nouveau jeu geographique addictif !

🥁 Fausse Commune 🎺

faussecommune.fr

Demande d'aide aux anglicistes, dans un texte de 1623, j'ai cette abréviation p'telie dans la phrase :

Honnarable Companie have with greate charges endeavoured to procure, & p'telie uppon those hopes have contynewed...

Quelqu'un a une idée de la signification de ce mot?
Rt appréciés.

The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees

🧵

All right it’s time for the annual “please tell us about one (or a few if you are ambitious) paper from 2025 that really impressed you and why we should all read it“! Go! If you tell us how it changed your view of the world and what makes it so powerful and consequential It would be excellent.

Bridget the cat infiltrates the 'Abbey Road' cover shoot and becomes THE definitive fifth Beatle.

THREAD.

My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments.

I've collected his work here...

The rapid increase in battery storage that made solar so much more feasible should really be the technological revolution everyone talks about rather than the fucking plagiarism probability machines

They were circulated that way at the time, as a 3-paper bound reprint. They also have a collective title (frequently mistaken - including on the Nature website - as the title of the W&C paper): Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids.

Screenshot of page 1 of Franklin and Gosling

Screenshot of page 2 of Franklin and Gosling

I am seeing a lot of posts about Rosalind Franklin that themselves ignore her publication record on DNA!

In fact Franklin and Gosling's paper, including the famous Photograph #51, was published, along with Wilkins's paper, back-to-back with the Watson and Crick paper in Nature in 1953.

“Overly honest methods”

OopsA was predestined

🌍Open call: Junior Group Leader positions!

Join a world-class biomedical research institute at the heart of the Vienna BioCenter, where curiosity drives discovery.

Lead your own lab, pursue bold ideas, and shape the future of science at the IMP: www.imp.ac.at/career/open-...

Check out our work on RNA structure in introns! Testing >100k base pairing patterns, we found that RNA structure can predictably tune gene expression. Just by changing intron sequence, we see a dynamic range of regulation comparable to messing e.g. with promoters. @karlaneugebauer.bsky.social

If you believe either that Franklin discovered the double helix, and / or Watson and Crick stole her data, ask yourself how you know this. Then take a read of this article.

There are a few limitations. Of course the sample size. Also, when 2 researchers works in the same team, does it count as 2 separate labs? I saw both cases in the list, so we're either under- or over-counting depending on the definition of "lab".

So applying the proportions to the full list (1,681 labs), that would give us 224 inactive labs, 958 active (primary) C. elegans labs, or 1,177 labs if we include "worms along with other models".
...

...not really C. elegans labs. Out of the 26 still active labs, I counted 17 as primary worm labs (57% of 30), 4 as using worms along with other models (13%), and 5 as not worm labs (17%).
...

Right. I thought about using the website URLs, but many of the links are dead, even for labs still active. So instead I took a sample of 30 and looked them up (quickly, may have made some mistakes)

Out of 30, 4 are no longer active (13%). One other problem: many labs are listed, but...

How many (active) C. elegans labs are there?