MScRes bursary of £2000 available at Bangor University to study Bacteriophages as natural biocontrols for plant pathogens. Deadline is 19th October. Please contact me for more details #PhageSky #MicroSky

Excellent lab news - congratulations to @kadeayomikun.bsky.social, who has won a Warwick PATHWAY fellowship to stay on for several months after handing in his PhD and develop publications & funding applications 🥳

“Universities have managed staff costs significantly below inflation,[between 2016-17 and 2023-24] increasing only 14% compared to the 41.2% increase in RPIX [measure of inflation]” Substantial real terms pay cut, which continues a trend existing years before that…

Cost of undergraduate provision and qualifications in England

A study of the full economic cost of providing undergraduate-level higher education and other qualifications in England.

gov.uk

This is why I think it's so important to push back against the personification of LLMs. If a person shoots someone while wearing a hand puppet, they can't claim the hand puppet did the murder.

Courtney Milan@courtneymilan.com · 5d ago

Referring to the harm as being caused by LLMs, when it is caused by people, actually serves to exonerate the people as if they did not make explicit decisions.

“The #phage space is developing very rapidly in the UK, and it’s an exciting time to be a part of it.” #MicroSky

UK Health Security Agency@ukhsa.bsky.social · last wk.

Sharaine works at Porton Down, in what is sometimes called our 'top secret lab'. 🔬 🧪 Go behind the scenes and find out about her work on phages - a possible alternative treatment for antibiotics. 🧫

1/17 Submissions are now open for the 2027 Microbial Population Biology GRC! We expect this meeting to be extraordinarily oversubscribed. If you want to come, time is of the essence--apply ASAP! June 27–July 2 • Andover, NH www.grc.org/microbial-po...

god, i was born in the wrong era. imagine being around in the Cambrian period. you could just evolve something simple like shell or legs that nobody had thought of before and coast on that your whole life

There’s still time to join us at our Publishing Fundamentals webinar—An Introduction to Peer Review on 16 September! Register now to secure your spot: https://microb.io/4wJUeEY

Publishing Fundamentals – An Introduction to Peer Review

microb.io

Ten years ago Tami, Roy, and I released a movie we made of antibiotic resistance evolving in real time. I thought maybe a couple thousand people tops would see it. I couldn't have imagined it would be seen millions of times, and be taught from middle school through the graduate level worldwide

Join us during #PeerReviewWeek for a Publishing Fundamentals webinar dedicated to the peer review process. This event will take place on 16 September and is free for members; for non-members: £10. Register here: https://microb.io/4wJUeEY

Please share! We are looking for a PhD student excited about gene transfer, and tackling Antimicrobial Resistance in Klebsiella pneumoniae. 🧬 More details & applications on funder website by 21st Oct 👇🏻 gw4biomed.ac.uk/developing-c...

So (if I understand this correctly), the way AI (companies) will "solve" all the major problems in maths, biology, and medicine in the next 5 years will be by stealing and building on the ideas of researchers naive enough to think their chats with AI companies would be private.

🧬 Postdoc ad is now live: evolutionary genomics of Klebsiella pneumoniae phages. How do prophage depolymerases vs SGNH-esterases shape phage host range? Krakow, Poland. Deadline 21 Sept: mostowylab.com/job-postdoc-...

Thrilled our latest paper out @natureportfolio.nature.com Nature Comms, lead author @microberamon.bsky.social, who developed P-FLO, a urine-flowing human micro-bladder model in collab with Oxford & Leicester to understand #UTI biology & treatment failure 1/4 #UTISky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Effect of human urinary microenvironment and fluid flow on antibiotic and phage therapy efficacy against uropathogenic Escherichia coli - Nature Communications

Maset et al. show that bladder conditions strongly influence how urinary tract infections respond to antibiotics and bacteriophages, highlighting the need for more realistic lab models to improve diag...

nature.com

At this point, it might be easier to make a list of Dan Ariely papers that do not use suspect data 

Data Colada@datacolada.bsky.social · 3w ago

An influential paper by Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002) reported two studies with tampered data. Post 1 of 2. datacolada.org/138

It's taken 12 years and a lot of work from many fantastic people, but we have published an analysis of how our reconstruction of Bald's eyesalve kills bacteria. This was driven by @tosinorababa.bsky.social & Jess Furner-Pardoe through their PhD work #MicroSky journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... [1/n]

@rachelmwheatley.bsky.social and I really enjoyed putting together a special issue of Essays in Biochemistry on the social lives of bacteria. All the papers are now out, and here's our editorial :D @biochemsoc.bsky.social #MicroSky portlandpress.com/essaysbioche...

The use of Galleria mellonella to study microbial interactions, immune responses, & substrate interactions - super, comprehensive review from Evgenia Maslova, Ciaram Staber & @ronanmccarthy.bsky.social portlandpress.com/essaysbioche... #MicroSky

The social lives of bacteria as revealed through CLASI-FISH - thank you @jmarkwelch.bsky.social for this lovely review, covering the structure of bacterial communities in the human mouth, mouse gut and associated with kelp portlandpress.com/essaysbioche... #MicroSky

Great piece from Marvin Whiteley. But it can be impossible or near-impossible to access the samples needed to benchmark models properly. I spent over a decade trying and failing to source resected CF lung, and we’re in year five of trying to access another sample type for one of our projects.

Vivek Mutalik@vivekmutalik.bsky.social · 4w ago

Building better microbial infection models: a call to do the “field” experiments | mBio journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... #microsky

Cool study – #Mtb is notoriously slow growing, but inside macrophages, a subpopulation replicates fast and in doing so, actually evade #antibiotics better than the slow-growers - which is counter-intuitive (multiple theories discussed) #MicroSky #Tuberculosis #Tb www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fast-growing intracellular Mycobacterium tuberculosis populations evade antibiotic treatment - Nature Communications

The slow growth displayed by Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been historically associated with pathogen’s persistence and drug tolerance. Unexpectedly, here the authors identify a rare subpopulation of...

nature.com

The ten artists I’ve enjoyed seeing live the most, in no particular order and from various phases of life: Blind Guardian VNV Nation Rachel Stamp Apocalyptica AntiProduct Public Service Broadcasting Sisters of Mercy Manic Street Preachers Epica Pulp

Craig Winstanley@cwinstan.bsky.social · 4w ago

I can do a supplementary punk/new wave one just from undergraduate days. All paid for with a student grant… The Clash The Ramones Buzzcocks The Jam Stiff Little Fingers Gang of Four Specials Monochrome Set XTC Siouxie & The Banshees

The possibility that accidental or unofficial releases of big cats led to self-sustaining populations in the UK countryside has been contentious. @warwicklifesci.bsky.social’s Robin Allaby is one of the people who’s been assessing the evidence, using DNA: www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts...

Black leopards are quietly thriving in the British countryside – here’s the whole incredible story | Discover Wildlife

Sightings and DNA tests suggest that large cats such as black leopards are quietly naturalising in Britain. Here’s the whole story.

discoverwildlife.com

HIRING MICROBIOLOGIST: effective start asap! The PDRA/PDRF (per xp) will investigate the interactions of bumblebee antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) with the gut microbiota & more. Our work has shown AMPs have striking specificity for ecological microbes. careers.exeter.ac.uk/vacancies/13... 1/2

Postdoctoral Researcher Associate or Fellow in Cornwall | University of Exeter

View details and apply for this Postdoctoral Researcher Associate or Fellow vacancy in Cornwall. Postdoctoral Research Associate / Fellow This job is part of an Advanced Research + Inventio...

careers.exeter.ac.uk

Whatever Arday and his employers did or didn’t do, the person pushing the story is an open white supremacist (full video available in the linked thread).

Gregory Kohn@kohngregory.bsky.social · last mo.

In the wake of Arday's death, Nathan Cofnas (who led the X mob against him) states his motivation. Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'.

Looking forward to reading this! #MicroSky

Sheyda Azimi@sazimi.bsky.social · last mo.

New preprint of our work on effects of intra-strain diversity of Pseudomonas on modulating host response is out! Some variants of concern, flip the switch in host responses! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We have some impressive undergrad students at @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social @warwicklifesci.bsky.social 💜 Access, equity, and ambition: rethinking early careers in the life sciences portlandpress.com/biochemist/a...

bioRxiv/medRxiv have been dealing with endless bot attacks recently (plus usual DDOS stuff, etc). Tricky to address without impacting genuine users - many of you affected. Apologies. We're working with our hosting service on solutions & think we're getting there [he shouts in his Red Queen costume].

Preprint from @tosinorababa.bsky.social and a crack team he assembled to explore the mechanism of action of tEDTA against P. aeruginosa #MicroSky

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · last mo.

Tetrasodium EDTA disrupts Pseudomonas aeruginosa membrane integrity, shows suppressed resistance evolution and reduced cytotoxicity compared to meropenem https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.11.744140v1

Excited to share this perspective article from my group - how can the interactions between microbes shape the spread of antibiotic resistance mutations? Thank you @microbiologysociety.org for inviting us to submit this 🦠 www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Microbial interactions as key players shaping the emergence and spread of de novo resistance mutations

Antibiotic resistance and the microbiome are two of the most prominent and highly active research areas currently in microbiology. However, these studies are commonly siloed. Research into antibiotic ...

microbiologyresearch.org