The syllabus for my course Philosophy of Scientific Communication is now available here. Please share to anyone who might be interested in teaching a course like this (and kindly give me an acknowledgment if you use it): drive.google.com/file/d/1LDKY...

David Colaço@davidcolaco.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Several people seemed interested in my Philosophy of Scientific Communication course, so here is my schedule of readings. Thanks to everyone for their help; I hope to get to additional topics mentioned using these as the anchors:

Very cool pair of papers demonstrating little link between amount of additive genetic variation and amount of nucleotide variation within species: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Levels of additive genetic variation vary substantially between species

Adaptive potential determines how populations respond to environmental change. This study compiles evolvability estimates from over 170 multicellular species, revealing substantial variation across th...

journals.plos.org

From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation iucn.org/news/202607/...

From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums

The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation: a formal acknowledgement that natural history museums,...

iucn.org

A few days left for our call for papers on Philosophy through Art, Games and Fiction, dedicated to Helen De Cruz think.taylorandfranc... I am convinced that being playful and creative makes us better philosophers. Prove me right! #philsky #philosophy

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations doi.org/10.59350/5zt... 🧪

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations

Phylopic, NIH Bioart, Bioicons, Scidraw, Open Science Art, Health Icons, Servier Medical Art, Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Noun Project, Segment Anything, Excalidraw, draw.io, Biographics

doi.org

Wow! A fourth class of transmissible cancers. CONTAGIOUS FISH MELANOMA, discovered in Lake Memphremagog (Vermont / Quebec) 🎣 🧬 😷 www.nature.com/articles/s41... @uvmvermont.bsky.social

Brown bullhead catfish melanoma represents a novel transmissible cancer - Nature

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of tumour and matched non-tumour host tissues of the brown bullhead catfish reveals a type of naturally occurring transmissible cancer.

nature.com

#philsci

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 2w ago

This is very well done, I think: leidendeclaration.ai A few choice quotes, that should be of interest well beyond mathematics: >>

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

Fun review on viral taxonomy: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... 🧫🦠

Virus taxonomy and the ICTV – 21 FAQs for the perplexed virologist

Just over 125 years has passed since the ‘filterable’ agents of tobacco mosaic disease and foot-and-mouth disease were first described as infectious, replicating entities smaller than bacteria. Today,...

microbiologyresearch.org

Summer reading recommendation! This new book by Elana Shever is fantastic. It's an ethnography of dinosaur science in the spirit of Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life. Historians and philosophers of paleo, this is a must read. #Philpaleo #philsci www.ucpress.edu/books/making...

Making Our Beasts by Elana Shever - Hardcover

Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

ucpress.edu

Have ideas for your own, independent research program in Theoretical Biology? Then come and join us as a Group Leader at the @mpi-evolbio.bsky.social in Plön, Germany!

Group Leader in Theoretical Biology (m/f/d)

Experience in Theoretical Biology, Applied Mathematics, Theoretical Physics

mpg.de

this is amazing, will be using this to teach about social construction of colors in my philosophy class #philsci moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You

An atlas of the vibrance of the real world

moultano.wordpress.com

🚨 Ever wonder why some viral reassortants establish and spread while others disappear? Us too! Led by @ricardoriveroh.bsky.social, we studied drivers of viral reassortment across hantaviruses and found that it varies dramatically among lineages (1/3) Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...

THIS: "“LLMs export their trust to external content moderation strategies that exist on sites like Wikipedia or Reddit or Quora or StackExchange."" Yes, and those content moderators are often unpaid volunteers. LLM AI companies benefit from the free labor pf people just trying to be in community.

Jason Koebler@jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 2mo ago

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...

My paper on Agnes Arber and her understanding of teleology is now part of the topical collection "Histories, Cultures, and Practices of the Botanical Sciences": link.springer.com/collections/... The collection is still open for submissions, so #plant people: hand in your manuscripts! #HPBio #HistSci

🎉Exciting news! My new article, 'The ‘fancy of the private collector’: Walter Rothschild’s global animal procurement network and collaboration in the animal trade' has been published in BJHS Themes as FirstView and is available OA: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #naturalhistory #animaltrade

#philsky

NBER@nber.org · 2mo ago

Examining weight stigma shows that the "obese" cutoff increases patient mortality. Analyses of diagnostic effort and clinical documentation point to stigma as a mechanism, from Manasvini Singh www.nber.org/papers/w35277

Today, the AAUP released the Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2025–26. It is sobering. Full-time faculty salaries are down about 0.4% in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Average full-time faculty salaries remain 9.5% below fall 2019 & about 5.8% below fall 2008. 1/

Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession Now Available

This year's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession finds that faculty salaries are still losing ground to inflation and expands data collection on part-time faculty pay.

aaup.org

Next week, we welcome Samantha Muka ‬(Stevens Institute of Technology) in our lecture series. Samantha will speak about coral reefs and how they are defined in modern conservation biology. 🪸 Just register here to participate 👉 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #HPBio #PhilSci

📢 Call for Abstracts -> PhilML'26! (please share) 4th Philosophy of Machine Learning Conference October 7-9, 2026 at LMU Munich. Extended abstracts (up to 1,000 words) due July 1. No participation fee! @lmu.de @lmu-mcmp.bsky.social @munichcenterml.bsky.social sites.google.com/view/philmlc...

PhilML Conference - CfA Conference

Conference for Philosophy of Machine Learning

sites.google.com

This is absolutely nuts: hackers are hijacking high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI chatbot to change the email on the account. Meta's AI does it, hacker gets password reset code, they're in. A staggering security issue www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

The exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI.

404media.co

Several people have asked for possible content and structure for comments regarding the proposed OMB regulations. With some suggestions from others, I have posted on example (as a Word document) for downloading). jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g... I hope this is helpful.

Interesting new tool to extract phylogenies from images (Tremble). It is crazy that this is still something we have to do. doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

Treemble: a graphical tool to generate Newick strings from phylogenetic tree images

AbstractSummary. Phylogenetic trees are ubiquitous and central to biology, but most published trees are available only as visual diagrams and not in the ma

doi.org

My colleague @stephseifertphd.bsky.social just published new groundbreaking work on hantaviruses in the United States as part of our shut down @viralemergence.org project. Want to prevent hantavirus outbreaks here? Fund her work. wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

Beyond hero and villain narratives in ecology and conservation science 🌎 @aibsbiology.bsky.social academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Beyond hero and villain narratives in ecology and conservation science

Abstract. Storytelling is an essential part of science writing. To craft compelling stories, scientists are taught to think of their variables as character

academic.oup.com

#philbio

Ben Allen@evodynamics.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Excited that this has officially come out! Smith et al. (including @joannamasel.bsky.social ): "Why are there so many definitions of fitness in models?" academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Day 5 of my #Coverbirds Birdathon for @birdscanada.bsky.social Today’s coverbirds are… not easily identified. I have the good fortune to live in a very ducky place, but honestly most of the time they are just so far away 😂. I would love to have some help with ID so I imagined a guide (1/7) #birds

So is there any positive evidence for the value of AI in actual learning? I see the case for helping already-trained professionals work faster, but not for new students of a topic. www.404media.co/nature-retra...

'Nature' Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education

“What educators, parents and policy officials really needed was high quality data and evidence to help guide them. What they have had to deal with instead is some substandard research.”

404media.co

We parsed 3.6 million historical names with 96% accuracy by moving away from expensive frontier models to fine-tuned Qwen 3.5 models. We also found that switching our output format from JSON to YAML dramatically increased stability.

Highly recommend!

CASP: Consortium for Advancing a Science of Purpose@casp-life-science.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Applications invited for three-year postdoctoral position that is part of a new grant-funded project, the "Consortium for Advancing a Science of Purpose" (CASP). More details, including how to apply, online: cla.umn.edu/mcps/news-ev... #philsci