The Tattooed Professor

Imagine Australia with an excess $36 billion spent on producing stuff instead of gambling.

New Resource: "Chromosome-level phylogenomics and genome evolution of the grape family" rdcu.be/25RCaLYxvmia Family-wide phylogenomics sheds light on evolution of grapevine; role of Helitron transposons in the expansion and regulation of NLR resistance genes in grapevines. #PlantScience

Not all nuclei are the same. We went to some of biology’s most exceptional nuclei 👉 dinoflagellates with genomes 80× ours 👉 Giardia’s twin nuclei 👉 ciliates carrying two nuclei in one cytoplasm & asked a simple question: what sets nuclear density? 🧵 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Article submission on a 304 km/h high speed train unlocked

Stairway to heaven Mt Tai.

🎥 Videos now available for: COMPUTATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS SCIENCE A CCN satellite meeting, hosted and sponsored by the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. Website: computationalconsciousness.github.io YouTube: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

A talk I gave at NYU about what I think is the most pressing problem for the science of consciousness right now. If I am correct, a significant part of the past ~30+ years of research on consciousness might be wrong. I explain how we can try to mitigate that problem.

This is a really lovely scholarly look at an idea I've been thinking about for a year since @jbyoder.org made a similar point in this blog: denimandtweed.jbyoder.org/2025/09/the-...

⏰ Deadline extended! The submission deadline for our special issue on plant immune receptors is now 30 November. More time to share your latest discoveries. We look forward to your contributions! 🌱 #PlantScience #PlantImmunity #MPMI

Our review from the @uti-revisited.bsky.social consortium is out in @lancetmicrobe.bsky.social 🥳. We bring together the urinary tract microbiome and its (often overlooked) role in infections. Understanding this could improve UTI diagnosis and treatment. 🦠🔗👤 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

New online! Small variant calling in the era of long-read sequencing

Multi-isolate GWAS identifies broad-spectrum and isolate-specific resistance-associated loci for #Septoria tritici blotch in synthetic hexaploid wheat doi.org/10.1007/s001...

Sea smoke & -6 oC - first chilly #HelsinkiBikeCommute of the season I guess #wintercycling has begun 😃

Orchid conservationists help photographers snap great pictures with minimal impact on native flora www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10...

HyARQ: a Snakemake workflow for allele-specific read counting and quality control in F1 hybrids https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.16.759667v1

Dark Academia – How Universities Die, by Peter Fleming I'm not very optimistic that academia can change for the better - I think it's too far gone - but this book at least identifies most of what is wrong. Perhaps, if enough of us read it, we can try to reverse the decline.

@3rdreviewer.bsky.social I have pushed a tool that among other things should do a “flip assist” on genespace plot objects github.com/Hanliconius/...

@deboraycb.bsky.social, @aidaandres.bsky.social, Tim Connallon & @maxreuter.bsky.social support the intuition that a large fraction of loci under balancing selection will be invisible to standard tests for balancing selection. 🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... #societyjournal #evobio #molbio

When olives are one of your last agricultural resources, how incredibly cruel to have them destroyed by “settlers” for no other reason than to make your life there unliveable. While beating up a foreign photo-journalist. Aided and abetted by Israeli soldiers.

To help researchers with the new ARC Research Points system I made a simple spreadsheet calculator for 'what-if' scenarios - looking at various roles, across schemes, across NCGP period (2027 - 2029). Let me know if you use, and it's useful! www.linkedin.com/pulse/arc-re... @arc-tracker.bsky.social

ARC has given some details of how new Explore scheme will run ▶️ www.arc.gov.au/news-and-pub... ❗️There's a lottery❗️ Peer review yields 3 categories: highly competitive, competitive, uncompetitive. After funding highly competitive apps, competitive ones enter a lottery for remaining $.

This is a truly startling paper. It shows that mRNA can perform regulatory functions *in addition to* its role in encoding a protein. In other words, the distinction between protein-coding RNA and noncoding regulatory RNA is fuzzy. /1 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Wanted to share a new preprint where we use #MALDITOF not just for species ID, but rapid Sequence Typing 🧬 Even without DNA sequencing we can determine strain lineage 🦠, enabling rapid + cheap outbreak detection Amazing work led by Hoai-An Nguyen #IDSky #MicroSky www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Global tech sell-off deepens as Asian markets tumble www.ft.com/content/cf5f...

#ARCSenateOrder Sep26: ARC's grant recommendations in September have been published ➡️ https://www.arc.gov.au/about/our-organisation/reporting/senate-requirements/agency-grants-pratt-motion PDF: Link to ARC's PDF XLS: Link to ARC's Excel file /bot

Talking about us the reamining staf... "They're doing more with less, covering subjects they didn't design, supervising students they didn't recruit, watching their colleagues disappear"... because of 'leaderships' agenda, who disappeared with golden hamshakes to fuck something else up...

Inquiry finds six NSW universities appeared to overstate financial woes to justify job cuts

This past summer, work from my dissertation was published in MBE ! We found that the sex ratio supergene in Formica likely has two origins, one Nearctic and one Palearctic. This likely happened due to recombination between two standing haplotypes that underlie colony queen number! 🐜🐜

We read @johnjschenk.bsky.social lab's hugely informative paper on the myriad "Modified" CTAB protocols, and that led to the snipe hunt of trying to hunt down the original. Which has the same provenance and publication history of, like, a mimeographed 'zine from the 80s. doi.org/10.1002/aps3...

I will not only be relieved but truly *ecstatic* to be wrong, if more and better studies soon start showing that AI actually improves learning and cognitive motivation. But so far they all show the opposite, and that is consistent with the evidence that I and other educators are seeing on the ground

Protamines sound super cool, because they are, they evolve, superfast, and are of the first examples of positive selection at the gene level!

I recently posted the first output of our partnership with Zack Smith's lab, here I post it again this time with the other 2 manuscripts that were generated from this partnership thanks to the fantastic postdoc Yusuke Kijima: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Learn about centromere evolution, chromatin-mediated genetic conflicts and more at the EMBO Workshop "#ChromatinEvolution from molecules to genomes" in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Spain, 4–7 Oct 2027. Deadline: 10 Jun 2027 https://meetings.embo.org/event/27-chromatin-evo #EMBOchromatinEvo #EMBOevents 🧪

I’m co-hosting a one-day visioning workshop on developing hands-on DNA sequencing experiences for public engagement and secondary school audiences in the U.K. if you or colleagues are interested share this link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"Of course, we have to teach our students about AI technologies. Teaching about AI technologies should be just like how we teach ‘no smoking’ or the causal links between lung cancer and cigarette smoke; yet, we do not teach students how to roll cigarettes and smoke them." zenodo.org/records/2008...

It's time to escalate our bargaining campaign at #ANU. If you're not already a @nteunion.bsky.social member, you need to join today. www.nteu.au/join

PRESS RELEASE - Can this biotech innovation halt the destructive march of a cereal killer? 🌾🦠 A UK-led research collaboration has taken a significant step in the global effort to protect crops from the devastating wheat fungus pathogen

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

📣 Applications are now OPEN for the John Innes Foundation Rotation PhD Programme This 4-year #PhD programme trains graduate students in Plant & Microbial Sciences @earlhaminst.bsky.social @johninnescentre.bsky.social @thesainsburylab.bsky.social ➡️https://okt.to/qjy60T 🗓️ Apply before 12 Nov '26

One of the coolest topics in molecular evolution

It's time to apply for the New Phytologist #TansleyMedal! The prestigious prize is awarded annually to early career scientists that have made an outstanding contribution to #PlantScience. Deadline: 1 November 2026. Apply now: www.newphytologist.org/grants-award...

Exciting findings by Yiheng Hu @kemenlab.bsky.social on microbial interactions in phyllosphere www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Materials sharing has increased over the past decade, which is great, but these materials are often tricky to use. Tools like this will really help improve usability bsky.app/profile/dsqu...

New preprint from the team #AdaptiveIntrogression #Haplotagging #PopGen #MarEvol "Adaptive introgression in subdivided populations leaves distinct genomic footprints under global and local selection: a case study in Ciona intestinalis" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

“Ecosystems are not human societies: they don’t have kings, and they certainly don’t award any favours or exclusive privileges to any species. These are all human inventions”