Ben de Bivort

Are you interested in supporting scientific research and teaching focused on living things and the natural world? My department, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology is hiring two full-time Lab Coordinators (faculty assistants). Union jobs with good benefits. careers.harvard.edu/job/laborato...

Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/b... Let’s try to make this as big a story as possible Please share

We are hiring a second TT position this fall in Cell Biology, again broadly defined. This one may be relevant to any physiologists out there. @uicbios.bsky.social has been a fantastically supportive place to start a research program, right in downtown #Chicago! uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

The Xystodesmidae, compared to most millipedes, are relatively large-bodied animals. Although Nannaria and Pachydesmus here aren’t at the utmost extremes, it’s neat to see the range of sizes in these Appalachian members of the family.

I found another upload by the actual dev if you feel like raising this one's numbers instead

🚨TT Assistant Professor search!🚨 Scripps has a broad search for an assistant professor in Chemistry, Immunology & Microbiology, Integrative Structural & Computational Biology, Molecular & Cellular Biology, Translational Medicine, or Neuroscience. Join us on the Mesa! apply.interfolio.com/195438

And now back to my full time job, texting the word "stop" to every living Democrat.

When you forget fluorescence Friday.

You can buy my work at artologica.etsy.com All the paintings are hand painted originals, not prints. The scarves and ties are digital prints on silk of my artwork. I clearly disclose this. Now I'm going to do the Sunday cleaning because I am a real human being.

Faculty opening in my department at MIT! Please apply if you are on the job market, and circulate to relevant potential candidates.

#HHMIInvestigator Harmit Malik & team @fredhutch.org thrive on competition — between genomes, that is. These researchers study how viruses & proteins rapidly evolve to keep up with their foes, uncovering insights that could inform the development of new antivirals: bit.ly/3U5yQNq.

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

Had this idea in lockdown, half-built it, forgot about it, remembered it again, though might as well finish it.

Happy Hagfish Day! Today we’re celebrating hagfishes - hagfishes are ancient marine animals perhaps best known for their remarkable ability to produce large amounts of slime when threatened. When the slime hits seawater, it expands to form a gel which can clog a predator's mouth and gills.

@bostonu.bsky.social is hiring! Up to 6 new neuroscience faculty positions! www.bu.edu/convergent-r... Send us your awesome neuroscientists and repost! 🌟

🛎️ How I’m voting on the nine (!) ballot questions - read more details in my latest newsletter: eepurl.com/Xha-K2Fnoe

*A community benchmark enables high-resolution, cross-lab quantification of mouse social behavior* Introducing HiDRA: 82 supervised classifier heads for 33 dyadic and solitary behaviors. Works out-of-the-box on new data and outperforms video foundation models. neuroethology.github.io/hidra-site/

We now are hiring TWO teaching track faculty! Apply by Nov 1!

My journey from the eminently decipherable retina to the entangled mess that is the mammalian motor system. No turning back now. !https://www.thetransmitter.org/methods/what-to-do-when-traditional-mechanistic-approaches-no-longer-work/

🧠🪰 Excited to share our paper in @elife.bsky.social detailing the synaptic connectome of the neurosecretory network in Drosophila. We mapped the hormone-releasing neurosecretory cells (NSCs) in the fly brain and their connectivity. 🧵https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.102684

Another way in which AI is undermining the human practice of mathematics

how is the car staying on the inverted ramp when it is moving so slowly? It seems to detach for no obvious reason related to its speed, before it reaches end of ramp. It appears to have no batteries. Moved along ramp via magnets?

40 years ago today, the BDSC made its 1st shipment. To celebrate, Trudy Kaufman, who packed the 1st shipment, boxed up the same kinds of flies for John Roote at Cambridge, who placed the 1st order. Watch for pics of the arrival next week. We’ve shipped 4,882,378 vials total. That’s a lot of flies!

BDSC is an incredible resource to the field and is behind so much important science. I didn’t realize it is only a couple years older than I am! 🎂 🧪

Paleobotanists, come be our colleague at the wonderful Yale Peabody Museum! apply.interfolio.com/194803

How do 🐁deal with complex landscapes? Turns out they learn a lot very quickly. We think they do this by learning a set of repeated sparse paths, which form a type of compressed world model. Joint work with the Hermundstad lab, led by Tzuhsuan Ma and Alison Comrie: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

hot take: instead of the signs saying "bridge ices before road" they should just say "bridge may be icy"

Can linear algebra feel pain?

Of course, the recent discovery of the tilcayo was interesting, but there is a lot more to talk about when discussing tiger cats! So have a little comparison: #SciArt #tilcayo #tigercat #oncilla #tigrina #guide

If you are an NIH funded scientist and have not commented, you are agreeing that this change is a good idea. If, you, like me, think ditching peer review is a bad idea, take the 5 minutes and post a comment.

We're nowhere near the bottom of how bad the US is going to get.

If you've ever wondered how the brain *really* keeps things in mind, come let Aaron, Nick & their colleagues in the Nagel lab tell you how the fly does it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

That time I put almost all the chipmunk species in the western USA on one map. Did you know there’s 1 species of chipmunk in Asia, 1 in eastern USA & >20 in western USA? (I’m not the crazy one here. The chipmunks are the crazy ones.)

Academic freedom in the U.S. has arguably reached a new nadir—maybe worse than the 50s. This is not only due to the scale and range of the assault on higher ed, which is targeting everything (individuals' views on Gaza, DEI initiatives, the curriculum, collaborative research with other countries)...

“The backlash against A.I. is a backlash against unchecked inequality”

...and you can go no contact with your boomer parents without danger of being an un-dialectical, (petty) bourgeois individualist! Came up in my office hours and I thought I'd share here. 6/6 Receipts: www.marxists.org/archive/marx... www.marxists.org/deutsch/arch... www.marxists.org/deutsch/arch...

#Glia are essential for proper nervous system #development and function, but a high-resolution view of glial development is lacking. This Resource analyses longitudinal single-cell RNA sequencing of the #Drosophila visual system as glial diversity arises. 🧪 #NeuroSky plos.io/4dcP8KJ

The late mathematician Ronald Graham was also a skilled juggler. Fifty-five years ago, he posed a question that may have stemmed from the hobby. This year, it was finally solved. https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-harness-randomness-to-crack-a-55-year-old-conjecture-20260928/

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I'm excited to share our new preprint: Generation of a transgenic cephalopod tinyurl.com/pc86jxz8 Cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus & squid) are crazy critters that dynamically camouflage to their surroundings by changing the color, pattern, & texture of their skin, which they control w their brain.

🐟🚨 Fish paper alert! 🚨🐟 You might already know that individuals are unique, even when they’re genetically identical clones raised in identical environments. But what about groups? Groups of clones are distinct from birth, but (unlike individuals) those differences do not predict later behavior!