David Pollock

In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH. But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔 NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards. Here are funding curves for each.🧵

Just starting to read this paper on genome-wide convergence in fishes. Looks very worthwhile, and nice to see people using CSUBST. @agneeshbarua.bsky.social @msrivastava95.bsky.social Brice Beinsteiner Vincent Laudet @marcrr.bsky.social academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Asking editors to do a semblance of their job seems kind of extremist these days, but is it too late to save peer review?

Midgely is generally a great read

That toxic waste will then pollute the data sets used to train the next generation of AI models, leading to ‘model collapse’ as the AI tries and fails to model incoherent garbage, vomiting out yet more incoherent garbage in the process. Meanwhile repositories of scholarly information are destroyed.

PhD position available at the University of Bern in Prof. Claudia Bank's lab. Application deadline: Jan 9, 2026. Ideal for candidates with a strong math and programming background. More info: https://banklab.github.io/positions/ #phd

This looks nice. Thinking of going back to grad school so I can sign up...

The first of its kind! ecomagazine.com/news/coastal... @azti.bsky.social @lanzen.bsky.social #eDNA #Biodiversity #MarineEcology

>dev/null I am repeating myself, but I think this should be the standard treatment for ai slop like this. End of file and send to the abyss as soon as possible.

>/dev/null

It’s officially happening folks! The Microbial Population Biology Gordon Research Conference is back in Andover, New Hampshire starting June 27th of 2027! See you there!! @wcratcliff.bsky.social @ksbakes.bsky.social @surtlab.bsky.social #microsky #mevosky

Bioluminescence, phylogenetic analysis, ancestral reconstruction. This looks like a fun paper for my reading list. (credit to @evolutionsoup.bsky.social for bringing to my attention). royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Good advice to beginning graduate students (and others, maybe everybody): "good writing is downstream of clear thinking and a strong understanding of the subject matter at hand." --Jamelle Bouie @jamellebouie.net

This is an interesting distraction driven by @jessicacalarco.com. The comment below misses the point that human-support (and art) wage rises are a lagging effect. It seems that what needs to happen is to accelerate the effect to counteract inequality. UBI perhaps? Decrease educational costs?

These two have made a difference. This prize will help them make even more of a difference.

"The digestive systems of carnivorous plants" This looks really cool. 👌 Work from Matthias Freund, Dorothea Graus, Rainer Hedrich & Kenji Fukushima et al. academic.oup.com/plphys/artic... #PlantScience

recent protein language models can extract embeddings from protein sequences reflecting high-order features, developed statistical tests to evaluate the adaptive convergence of such features. Interested to see how people will use this (I edited it, not an author). www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Job Opening **ASSISTANT PROFESSOR MARINE ECOLOGY**, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island. jobs.uri.edu/postings/15960

My department at UT Austin is looking to hire an Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology, broadly defined. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have. apply.interfolio.com/177547

Congratulations Joe!

Happy to share Jialin's first publication. She did a great job exploring the transition to land in animals. Co-supervised by the great Jordi Paps and me and in collaboration with Davide Pisani and @phil-donoghue.bsky.social

Super piece.

Open position at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics: We are looking for a Director of the Center of Pathogen Bioinformatics apply.refline.ch/499599/0346/... I am in the Center's steering board together with fantastic colleagues (Emma Hodcroft @firefoxx66.bsky.social, Richard Neher @neher.io, and

📢 Open Call! The Max Perutz Labs invite applications for a Tenure-Track Professorship in Genome Biology. We are particularly interested in researchers investigating the molecular and biophysical mechanisms underlying genome function and regulation. More details ➡️ tinyurl.com/3t7vvdct

Now accepting proposals for the Small Grants for Local and Regional Outreach, which provide up to $1000 USD for a variety of evolution education & outreach projects, workshops, and events. Submit your proposal by March 2, 2026! shorturl.at/I8HqO

I'm super stoked that Colorado voted to fund free meals for kids for schools. (I've been saying lunches, but the program includes breakfasts, too.)

Please register for BAPG at Stanford 12/6, especially if you want to give a talk or a poster. The deadline is Nov 16. bapg2025.github.io/bapg2025stan... And please reshare on bsky!

Oh, the dreadful onions and mustard. Should be pun trigger warning on link.

One month left for early-career researchers to apply for a funded place at our Workshop 'Novelty, Co-option and Divergence During Gene Network Evolution' organised by James Hombría & Antónia Monteiro Deadline 5 Dec. biologists.com/workshops/ju... @isabelalmudi.bsky.social @jlopezrios.bsky.social

#phahe #phagesky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Surely we can agree that p-value jokes only have a low prior probability of being funny.

mceb2026.sciencesconf.org

The end of an era: the Tree of Life Web Project is going dark after 3 decades. Anyone interested in communicating phylogeny online should read David's account of goals, history, and future. @bembidion.bsky.social subulatepalpomere.com/2025/11/02/t...

I keep telling my dog it is only just after 5 pm but she is pretty sure it is dinner time and I am just gaslighting her.

🚨 We're hiring! 🚨 Our lab at the University of Málaga, Spain🇪🇸 is looking for a bioinformatician researcher for a postdoc position (1+1 years). Check the ad, and if you're interested, get in touch! 📅 Starting date early 2026, with some flexibility. 🙏Please, RT!

50 years ago, King & Wilson published a foundational paper that underlies the cis-regulatory paradigm (CRP) of #DevoEvo #EvoDevo, i.e., that *almost* all morphological evolution is driven by mutations in regulatory elements, rather than proteins, and it all arose from simple misunderstanding 🧪 🧵

Come join the Workshop on Phylogenomics in Cesky Krumlov, Czechia, from January 25 through February 7, 2026! Applications close November 15! #phylogenetics #evolution #genomics #ai evomics.org/apply-worksh...

Come join us in beautiful Britanny, France in May 2026 for a workshop that I am organizing with @lucievirevolte.bsky.social and @psudmant.bsky.social on Rapid host adaptations to infections: sites.google.com/berkeley.edu...

One of the most exciting works of my career, years in the making. We used high-throughput precision genome editing to test the fitness effects of thousands of natural variants. Our findings challenge the long-held assumption that common variants are inconsequential. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I talked about why the replication/reproducibility crisis is, and has always been, rhetoric, rather than fact. Masking scientific progress in general in favor of a simplified crisis narrative has caused a lot of epistemic, ethical, and practical harms so far. We can and we must stop feeding it.

Blocking this site for producing what looks to be AI-generated nonsense, despite human-looking names that supposedly wrote and edited. Acetylcholinesterase *inhibitors* are the medicine, not acetylcholinesterase. The article, mixing words together, produces the exact opposite of true explanation.

"my AI says its trending toward significance" is enough reason to throw your AI out the window (let alone all the other reasons). It is painful to realize that the nonsense phrase "trending towards significance" was found often enough in the training data to make the AI parrot repeat it.

Wanna to go to a virtual No Kings rally that focuses on healthcare (with a side of "vaccines are good, actually" and "eugenics is bad, actually")? Organized by disabled folks who can't go to an in-person event. Join Saturday at 2:30pm Pacific time, zoom link: us06web.zoom.us/j/8467741742...

No deployment of the military in our cities. No illegal mass racial profiling. No kings in America.

Also just thank you to everyone out there who is able to show up, and please be safe.

Please remember that many disabled people won’t be at the No Kings rallies tomorrow. A lot of the planned events are not accessible and/or disabled people are not safe or well enough to attend. Anything you can do to increase accessibility and inclusion will help the resistance!

"it is a tunnel to nowhere on both sides"