😢

https://theconversation.com/emma-johnston-was-a-visionary-scientist-environmentalist-and-leader-with-an-abiding-hope-for-humanity-272609

University of Melbourne’s pioneering vice-chancellor Emma Johnston dies aged 52
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/dec/29/emma-johnston-university-melbourne-vice-chancellor-dies-aged-52 Johnston specialised in the ecological impacts of human activities on marine ecosystems and was a chief author of Australia’s most recent State of the Environment report. She was a great scientific communicator - I always enjoyed her social media posts about the life aquatic. #education #ecology #environment #SDGs #auspol

A recent scientific paper compared long-term mortality by vaccination status.

I noticed that Table 2 drew a lot of attention, but was actually included in the paper as a static image. So I built a quick dataviz project to explore.

On this page I’ve added a % Incidence change (vaccinated vs unvaccinated) and emphasised that with data bars. This is quicker for general readers to grasp than hazard ratios.
🧵

Brazil: COVID-19 Alters Host RNA, Disables Immune Response.

"Researchers at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil have discovered that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, uses a sophisticated tactic to evade the human body's defense system. In addition to its ability to evade the immune system before invading the host cell, which is common to other viruses, SARS-CoV-2 acts on a second front by manipulating the host cell's genetic material in a way never before seen in other pathogens."

Source: https://www.miragenews.com/covid-19-alters-host-rna-disables-immune-1591931/

Study: https://academic.oup.com/narmolmed/article/2/4/ugaf034/8268881?login=false

Huge thanks to @mike_honey_ for all the valuable COVID data he tracks. His work has become incredibly important for scientists and health professionals, and with so little data available now, it really matters for people who want to stay safe and informed.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/covid-tracker-melbourne-man/uq72woqzq

@taosky yeah good question! Likely a mix. Some of the fungi grow only at cold temps and are new taxa, others are known to be collected only from cold enviro. But others are quite common and produce spores. Maybe they have just blown in there and become active once we get them back to the lab. We do know that microbial metabolic activity happens at frozen temperatures, so at least some of the soil microbes are active there at times, but they likely have dormant stages

Very happy to have our new paper out, which represents the hard work of many people over more than 6 years. Antarctic fungi are slow growers!
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21501203.2025.2579297#abstract

#fungi #lichen #moss #lichensubscribe #mosstodon #antarctica

@Ruth_Mottram I'm just wanting organisations and individuals in academia to consider consent here. It shouldn't be ok to upload someone elses original unpublished work, without their knowledge or consent, to train LLM or re-write their work. It's not like a spell check at all.

@Ruth_Mottram
This is such an ethical issue for me re multiple authors on academic papers. Have all authors consented to have their work fed into/altered by LLM? Their original (unpublished?) work has now been used for training the LLM, but more than that, there's implication that a bot can improve on the writing of a human expert in their field? It baffles and enrages me that a tool that's confidently wrong around 60% of the time is being so embraced by some in academia 🙃

EDIT: The Malwarebytes article has been updated:

"After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case."

This confusion could've been easily avoided if Google was more clear in how they communicate with their users.

ORIGINAL:

PSA to anyone who uses Gmail!

"Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or AI-generated replies. Unless you decide to take action."

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/gmail-is-reading-your-emails-and-attachments-to-train-its-ai-unless-you-turn-it-off

#gmail #AI

💁🏻‍♀️ ICYMI: 🍄🎹 What happens when you attach sensors to a mushroom? Scientists and musicians Jon Ross and Andy Kidd of Bionic and the Wires set out to find the answer.

Using equipment that measured the bioelectrical signals a fungus naturally produces as it processes nutrients, they converted those signals into MIDI #data. The result was a mushroom playing a synthesizer through robotic arms and mallets triggering keyboard keys.

👉 Learn more: https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/fungi-music-bioelectrical-signals-video?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=new_content&utm_content=fungi-music

#art #biology #chemistry #fungi #Manchester #mushrooms #music #mycelium #nature #play #science #sound #technology #tech #uk #tksst #video

"Charting the landscape of cytoskeletal diversity in microbial eukaryotes", Mikus et al. 2025 (Dudin lab)
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)01127-4

CC @davi

#CellBiology #cytoskeleton #ExM

"The reality is that there are no regulations for indoor air quality," she said.

"In a society like ours, more than 90 per cent of the time we are indoors, be at home, office, school … so it is indoor air which is the most important for our health.

"This is the problem right now — we must establish indoor air quality standards, and mandate those standards."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-11-03/lidia-morawska-prime-ministers-science-prize-air-quality/105959260?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

Please teach your students not to do this.

I understand there is a continuum between spellcheck/grammar check and LLMs, and there could be ways to use LLMs to improve wording or grammar, etc.

But please teach your students not to use LLMs to “draft content”. I don't care if they disclose it (tbh, I prefer they don't!). I don't care if they "take responsibility for the content".

The thing about writing is that it has a social function. The social function is *not* to cause text to exist. The social function is to communicate from your mind to my mind. Text is the means, not the end. If you must use an LLM, skip it and just send me the prompt.

(No, I'm not going to link to the paper. The point is not to dunk on people who end up on the wrong side of a social question. The point is to do better.)

RIP Jane Goodall, who has died at 91.

She was a gentle disrupter who reshaped how we understand our place in nature. Her research with chimpanzees revolutionized science, and her boundless optimism touched the world.

https://theconversation.com/jane-goodall-the-gentle-disrupter-whose-research-on-chimpanzees-redefined-what-it-meant-to-be-human-205909
#JaneGoodall #science #history

The #genetic culprits responsible for spreading multidrug resistance in #bacteria have been identified by new research mapping 100 years of bacterial evolution
#Microbiology #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2025/09/mcb09262501.html

"If I were to ask a problem to a human, they might say “I don’t know” if they don’t have enough information, or they might give vague pointers on where to find the answer, or if they’re really afraid of not knowing the answer, they’ll give a mealymouthed lie that will fold under some cross-validation. What they won’t do is rattle off an incredibly plausible sounding, detailed, but wrong answer that makes finding the issue to the answer a game of Where’s Waldo"
👍#AISlop
https://kai.rbind.io/posts/2025-07-07_no-ai/

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com p.s. this week I am on a USA/Canada tour with my new book. Details and preorder links at tomgauld.com

A new server = new #introduction

👋 Hello, I'm Hegeezias. I typically make abstract art in very tedious ways using traditional mediums.

I tend to just post my art on these sort of platforms, so follow if you're interested in getting the occasional pretty picture in your timeline.

I also stream my art sessions live every now and then on Twitch and my Owncast instance. Would be great if you stopped by sometime.

Find me here: https://hegeezias.link/

#art #abstract #ink