Kim Cooper

Please read and share this ⬇️ journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Really enjoying the Colossal shade today and adding notes for the class I teach about evolutionary genomics and overhyped sci com.

Rhomboid protease Rhbdl2 influences #macrophage recruitment and wound repair in #zebrafish. New study from Saroj Gourkanti, Sonya E. Neal @neal-lab.bsky.social @ucsdhealthsci.bsky.social and colleagues: rupress.org/jcb/article/... #Migration #motility #Immunology

My home department (Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley) is searching for an assistant professor in ecology—please distribute widely! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05489

Dear goodness, yes, please.

We have a tenure-track faculty position in Evolutionary Biology in Columbia's E3B Department. Application deadline is October 15. Come be our colleague. Please RT! apply.interfolio.com/193016

And you may think this is obvious, but have you asked your trainees how they're generating plots?

If you perform a function in Excel or R to make a graph, you are converting numerical data to graphical data. If you ask an AI chat to make a graph, you are getting it to draw a picture of your data. The evidence? "Sometimes it moves the data points around a little." This is NOT ok.

Same

I just spent four hours with two PhD students polishing the final draft of a manuscript, an hour carefully considering the meaning and intent of each sentence of the abstract alone, and I will quit science before I use AI for writing.

As an editor, I recently rejected a paper after revision because the requested illustrative figure was scientifically inaccurate AI garbage, and then the authors responded in 2 days with 7 alternatives that were each worse.

Come be my colleague, too! It's a great place with fantastic people...and more than that one building 😊

I am so excited to announce that the Weber Lab will be opening in the Department of Anatomy, Physiology, & Cell Biology @ucdavisvetmed.bsky.social @ucdavis.bsky.social. We will be investigating the development and evolution of vertebra size, shape, and function. And yes, the jerboas are coming with!

Did you know the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting has an entire session just for NEW PI Talks? And a New PI Keynote Talk? It does! These will be chosen from the abstracts. New PIs, sign up! @socdevbio.bsky.social @rashmi-priya.bsky.social @lowelab.bsky.social scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu

A reviewer of my evolutionary genetic complexity paper asked me to cite Donovan as evidence of the real harm of simplification, and I'm so grateful. This is a hard read.

Bondi was awful, but no worse than Patel. Noem was terrible, but no worse than Hegseth. Funny that it’s only the women who get fired.

If preparing figures please consider "colorblind friendly" approaches (www.nature.com/articles/d41...). I am missing the long-wave opsin, which manifests in strange ways: I can't discern red vs. black. This dichromacy is rare and severe, but ~300 million have more common forms addressed in link.

How many of us who remember watching the Challenger launch in your elementary classroom still get highly emotional when a personed mission launches?

The Cooper lab is hiring a postdoc with a strong background in mouse genetics and molecular biology to advance.our gene drive work. Must be extremely organized, engineering-minded, and outcomes-oriented. Spread the word and have interested candidates email me directly.

Annual reminder: if you’ve been accepted to multiple graduate programs and are still deciding, please let the ones you’re definitely not going to know as soon as possible! -Someone who got into his PhD off the waitlist the day after the deadline

First year and incoming PhD students are impacted the most bc few faculty can be comfortable with a ~5 year financial responsibility.

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Very sad news. Gail Martin (1944-2026) was a figure in developmental biology. She pioneered the field of ES cells. A great colleague, a friend and a lovely person.

I had an email exchange with a guy yesterday who insisted I was making a mistake not outsourcing my writing to an LLM. He said, "It knows more than you do." He couldn't understand that this was impossible because the work of writing is figuring out what "I" think.

Cause that's what heroes do.

"Relax your tight end" for the win...

This is ok tho

Co-loquial literally refers to speaking together, what more could behoove a journal?🤷‍♂️

It would be great if SoCal earthquakes would stop happening while I'm in my office on the 6th floor 🤢

Meanwhile, "Even a casual pass through the great halls of mammals..." was deemed "too colloquial" for another journal. @currentbiology.bsky.social for the win again.

As Julie Packard prepares to retire, a look at her amazing legacy that shaped the Monterey Bay Aquarium and its global impact. 🌊🦑🧪 #scicomm www.montereycountynow.com/news/cover/a...

It's been a good few weeks for cool bird genomcis - incl this, on warblers sharing colour genes through hybridisation (with evidence of between-genus introgression journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Bilaterian guts share embryonic patterning, but what about the adult gut? This study of 5 species reveals conserved TF modules that define A-P #gut compartments, with lineage-specific modifications, illuminating #bilaterian gut #evolution & diversification @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/49pgpH3

I taught Genetics again this year. We need to include discussion of the problematic history of our field, especially as the claims of eugenics are once again centered in our political discourse. Last year I wrote this piece, explaining my reasoning and approach 🧪 1/n www.cell.com/trends/genet...

A new reporter mouse for visualising Hedgehog/GLI signalling activity This Research Highlight showcases the work from Hannah Schrader Dear, Nicole Franks, Benjamin Allen and colleagues: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Look at those tail crescendos!! Another amazing example of disproportionate elongation of mid-tail vertebrae, and they note it is distal to the more functionally-constrained proximal tail.

C'mon people, mustard gas is chemical warfare...

This perfectly encapsulates what the GOP position is on the shutdown.

If SNAP benefits vanished tomorrow, feeding 42 million Americans for a month would cost about $7.8 billion.That’s less than 1% of the combined net worth of the three richest men in the U.S. A reminder of how obscene inequality has become and how easily hunger could be solved if we chose to.

Surely there's no problem for the long term stability of university procurement systems, right?

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Dems really need to be cutting ads with wall-to-wall messaging of “trump and his billionaire cabinet don’t fucking care about you”. All the clips are out there! “Trump is laser focused on his ballroom while SNAP benefits expire” “Bessent fancies himself a farmer, but he is really just a landlord”

Everyone needs to read the book Robopocalypse to see where this could go...

Biology PhD program directors who want to join the conversation, my email and DM are open.

I still contend that >90% of the benefit of writing a review isn't the audience. It's for the author going through the literature, finding gaps in knowledge, learning how experiments are done, etc. It really isn't about writing a review. It's about doing the review yourself. AI can't do that for you

As I work on my own grant resubmissions I have to wonder- is it worth it or will mine sit there unreviewed for months while my lab slowly loses students and eventually folds as well? 2/