Devang Mehta🌱🧬

By way of (re)introduction, here's a repost of a short 🧵 about our latest study published in Science Advances: We discovered that plants sense the duration of TWILIGHT🌅, giving us a new insight how plants measure the length of a day! https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl3199

💡We’re recruiting two junior postdoctoral researchers to join our growing interdisciplinary and international team working on climate resilience and sustainable crop protection! Please apply here: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

I just published: The Church of Impact Factor is selling indulgences Bribery allegations at Cell Press. The open secret of scientific publishing is out. I'm shocked. I'm not surprised. #CellOnions #Elsevil #ScienceCrisis kamounlab.medium.com/the-church-o...

1/8 What bothers me most about this Nature essay is its portrayal of evolutionary biology as a simplistic, gene-obsessed discipline finally being rescued by an appreciation of complexity. It's a compelling narrative, but a poor scientific argument.

Everybody is talking about Lula, but actually the victory in Serbia of a student-led, anti-government group fronting candidates from across society is almost more interesting for what it says about the potential to genuinely transform politics with the right movement at the right moment.

The achievement of Serbian students overthrowing Aleksandar Vučić can't be overstated. In 2024, they began protesting. In 2025, they transformed a protest movement into civil dissidence. In 2026, they became a political party — and two months later, crushed a corrupt state-entrenched authoritarian.

The general greying of society will lead to a lot of things happening simply due to less young people that various people will claim are clearly actually due to whatever bullshit they’re on about. It’s gonna be very irritating.

One of the more annoying things about the ERC StG's projected success rate falling to <5% is that those lucky few who get the grant will be treated by their unis as if they are incomparably better scientists than everyone else, when we all know that this is essentially going to be a lottery.

It's kinda hard to escape the feeling that European policy-making in many different domains, from immigration to science-funding is now just about cannabilizing the young to feed the old, rather than about actually growing the pie for everyone. <yes I'm bitter today, for obv reasons>

For Time Magazine , wrote about the story of the protests that have convulsed India this week: time.com/article/2026...

There is a strain of thought in funding circles that the problem is that the # applications is growing due to genAI. But the real problem is that funding has not kept pace with the # scientists. genAI is simply making it possible for more of our ideas to take the form of a grant application.

Just sickening

🤞

There’s many things Europe does better than North America but tbh the baseline “can’t do” attitude that’s so deeply baked in every institution really grates sometimes…

From The Archive: DOJ To Bring Back Firing Squad As Means Of Entertainment

Methylation clocks fail to generalize across genetically admixed individuals elifesciences.org/articles/105...

A nice idea but wow is this a list that reveals us as a remarkably self-absorbed species. Some of us biologists do prefer to work on scientific questions unrelated to Homo sapiens, y’know! What Are the Biggest Questions in Science Today? 100 Scientists Weigh In. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/05/s...

Respectfully, raw quantity has always been a poor proxy for scholarship quality. We all know examples of great scientists who publish a small number of large papers and others who publish many more strong, concise papers. I've been beating this drum for evaluative purposes for a long while.

"authors could not answer...even basic questions about the paper...difficult to see how they could have verified the paper’s contents" medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...

🤍🕊️In memoriam lnkd.in/p/emescekX

For now eLife is still considered a top journal to publish in the system Belgian universities use for allocating funding.

Happy to note that plant biology papers always seem to be the shortest in queue when I log in to screen 😎🌱 (or we just have the fewest preprints, but doubtful)

Excited to listen to Aaron Panofsky speaking about scientific racism in Leuven following all the ill-informed public commentary around the Cofnas affair in Belgium of late.

Latest paper from my lab !! New insight into transporter endocytosis in plants using TurboID. Proud of liza-pellegrin.bsky.social for the great work and @julnev.bsky.social for driving this. doi.org/10.1111/nph.... @lrsv-toulouse.bsky.social @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social

poems.com/poem/when-gr...

🥬🕐 RESEARCH 🕐🥬 Most cultivated lettuce varieties have a 27 h internal clock but are grown under 24 h light cycles. Anton-Sales et al. confirm circadian resonance effects in a crop species and demonstrate yield increases of 11–29% 🥬📈 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/... #PlantScience 🧪

Congratulations to Elsevier on this insanity my colleague found. Is anything in this clinical trial from Spain and UK real? www.cell.com/the-innovati...

Please submit comments to the EU Commission’s Call for Evidence on how to implement the new rules for "Plants obtained by new genomic techniques (#NGT)". Submission deadline 28 Sept. Below what I submitted. #plantscience ec.europa.eu/info/law/bet... ec.europa.eu/info/law/bet...

everyone is going insane for this but it's a slop machine. the first character i rolled was a child who died in 5th century BCE Iran and the site generated me a picture of "his home" which had drainpipes and telephone wires. fuck this.

I suspected this was the case, good to see it backed by data.

I’ve signed this and I hope more colleagues from Flemish institutions do so too!

Friends, I think Ghent University should hear from us as the eugenicists are out in full force. This letter is from academics there to counter the ridiculous letter supporting the white supremacist now being called a "whistleblower" by his ilk You can add your name👇🏽 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"Jupyter notebooks associated with papers are using software versions beyond their support window[s]...This contributes to reproducibility issues...Similar issues arise with datasets" A paper's a permanent scientific record. If dependencies aren't, it isn't. 1/2 academic.oup.com/gigascience/...

We have written a statement in support of Ghent Uni's decision to suspend Nathan Cofnas. We resist attempts to frame this as a punishment for "whistleblowing" or censorship of "controversial research". We invite all academics who share our views to sign our letter. forms.gle/qwN8xzEM5C7Q...

Me, a US-based academic: I don’t care what any scholar believes, we all need to stand up publicly whenever someone’s academic freedom is threatened Me, continuing: also, the first time this has happened, motivating me to sign my first ever open letter, is in late 2026, to a race scientist, in Ghent

Exactly

A good moment to recommend Angela Saini‘s Superior, which traces back the history of “race science” and shows the institutions that sustain this pseudo-research until today. These pursuits have nothing in common with the principles of academic inquiry www.angelasaini.co.uk/superior

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... “MPIs operate on the Harnack principle: build an institute around a small group of exceptional scientists granted near-absolute autonomy. On paper, scientific paradise; in practice, junior scientists live entirely at the director’s pleasure.” Tranchant…

A great list to follow, and proud to be on this :)

I had not some across this before, but if you want an example Nathan Cofnas’ scholarship, this is a doozy. Again I say, being sacked is not the problem; being recruited in the first place is what deserves scrutiny.