Barrett Davis
@barrettdavis.bsky.social
PhD Candidate in Biomedical Engineering · Synaptic Plasticity, Single Molecule Biosensing and Comp Systems Bio · Photographer · Advocate for Cleaner Air
Methodological individualism is antithetical to public health practice. The 'public' is not a mere sum of 'individuals.'
Ryan Marino, MD@ryanmarino.bsky.social · last yr.CDC ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging. “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” a spokesperson said, echoing a line from a recent editorial RFK Jr. wrote
👋 Public Health Communicator from Australia here. One of the reasons Australia punches above its weight in sports is that it prioritizes sports science. It's no surprise that Aussie athletes like the swim team have been consistently masking to prevent themselves getting sick before competitions.
Emergency departments can be as loud as construction sites, but they don’t have to be. Quiet is part of safe care and should be designed into departments, monitoring equipment, and everyday practice, writes @docib.bsky.social www.bmj.com/content/394/...
"don't cite what you haven't read" remains the basic entry level academic responsibility; & if your discpline "doesn't have that as a norm" then sorry, your discipline needs reforming for this new world. Citations are structural parts of trust and knowledge building, not trinkets or optional extras
Miles Klee 🦉@milesklee.bsky.social · 8mo agoAcademics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.
Tired of AI-generated figures? I asked our talented scientific illustrator Manon Zuurmond to draw some of the instruments and lab equipment we missed in NIH's otherwise fantastic BioArt resource. First batch now available as CC BY. Free for everyone to use in publications: github.com/Center-for-P...
It's wild that the IP hazard is not instantly disqualifying for most companies. Corporate has extensive lectures and training about IP integrity in every other aspect, but for this they just go "yeah, it's fine, don't worry about it." Can I get that in writing from the head of legal, please?
A few more from the Wolf Park, this time swapping out my Yellow 15 for a 720 nm filter. Leaning into the limits of f/5.6 to appreciate the caustics effect here.
Visited the local Wolf Park conservation center over this past weekend with both IR and visible camera in tow
About ten-minutes worth of silent spectacle over a leafy, moonlight-dappled clearing #Nature #Fireflies #BlueTue #LongExposure
My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735
I challenge anyone go try and reproduce some random papers, even those based on open free public datasets, but without the code and/or a detailed description of how the data was obtained and processed, and not become militant about the necessity of code and complete data sharing at a minimum.
NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵
Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants
Mandatory reviews by top health officials and checks for 235 disfavoured terms have left hundreds of vetted grant applications in administrative limbo.
nature.com
🔥 Published today, and just in time for summer conferences, here are your guidelines for presenting badly www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/fqa92
I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student, funded by a new ERC grant. The grant focuses on the role of the hippocampus in visual perception, using 7T fMRI (hippocampal subfields, cortical layers) and MEG+iEEG. The intended start dates for both positions are in early 2027. 🧠🟦 1/3
New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...
It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests
"We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently."
404media.co
I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)
Easy meals for the bird, fewer bugs for the bison. Aerochrome-inspired shots from this past weekend's visit to Kankakee Sands. Shot on a full spectrum digital camera with a yellow filter. #fullspectrum #infrared #wildlife #bison
Creating multiple data tables within one spreadsheet is a data crime, and you should *not* do it Great resource from @carpentries.carpentries.org h/t @cbahlai.bsky.social datacarpentry.github.io/2015-03-09-I...
Formatting data tables in Spreadsheets
datacarpentry.github.io
Thankful the sun decided to pop out from behind the clouds for this shot on Sunday 📍Kankakee Sands, Indiana #infrared #photography #wildlife #nature
A few more shots from a recent photo walk. All patterns captured in camera. #photography #invisible #bnw #abstract
Experimenting with a new technique, patterns captured in camera #invisible #fullspectrum #photography #bnw
The Lin Lab is hiring! We're seeking motivated postdocs for projects on voltage imaging and optogenetics in the brain. If you're excited to develop new methods to undersatand and correct brain diseases, working together with other neuroscience labs at Stanford, drop us a line!
It's widely accepted that hantavirus transmits from rodent excreta to humans via inhalation of aerosolized virus, so I don't understand why we're so reluctant to acknowledge the inhalation route for human-to-human transmission. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/h...
Hantavirus Doesn’t Spread Easily, but Officials May Be Downplaying Risks
nytimes.com
We invented “triplet tumbling microscopy” (TTM) to track protein-protein interactions in living cells! Tag your protein with GFP and see it interact with *untagged* binding partners www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
