Máté Varga

@mvargam.eurosky.social

Developmental geneticist by training, science-blogger by choice. Interested in all things #zebrafish, #devbio and #scicomm. Lab webpage: http://danio.elte.hu/index.html

No true scientist will outsource the fun of the creative process to a machine. We must focus on finding and eradicating the science operators who will stop at nothing to get more recognition & power. The impostors can be identified. We need to rely more on the good old human interactions.

European Research Council (ERC)@erc.europa.eu · 3d ago

Research evaluation faces growing pressure: demand for competitive research funding is rising, while AI is rapidly changing how proposals can be written and assessed. In this context, the ERC & Science Europe had a workshop with research funding and performing organisations from 5 continents.

21627 applications. Nothing to celebrate here. Impossible to evaluate fairly & safely. Neither the science (too diverse & possibly LLM generated) nor the soft criteria (likely LLM generated). Without an interview stage - a security risk! marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/ne...

MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026 receives record number of applications

The 2026 call has attracted considerable interest from the research community with 21,627 applications submitted.

marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu

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

Calling all young developmental biologists from the V4 region and beyond! 🥼 Are you a Master’s student, PhD student, or postdoc? Take part in our questionnaire and help us understand your situation, needs, what’s on your mind, and how V4SDB can support you. 🧵 forms.cloud.microsoft/e/8a1p7Ws3ea

Bild

Four days and many spatial datasets later, the V4SDB Summer School 2026 has come to an end 🔬 Thanks to all the students who joined us, our sponsors, everyone behind the Summer School, and all our instructors and lecturers! 🧵

The V4SDB Summer School 2026 on Spatial Transcriptomics has been rolling since yesterday in Budapest 🔬, with excellent talks from Enikő Lázár (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) and Konstantin Khodosevich (BRIC, University of Copenhagen; @khodosevichlab.bsky.social ) on 🫀 Visium and 🧠 Xenium 🧵

BildBildBildBild

Dear @economist.com, More disclosure of risks (unknown but possibly substantial) & effectiveness (at best very low even in the 1 2019 article you cite & perhaps not to improve much) won't help the embryos involved make better decisions about their futures. Caution needed. I regret your position.

Timothy Caulfield@caulfieldtim.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In praise of designer-ish babies www.economist.com/leaders/2026... cc @hankgreely.bsky.social Once upon a time I studied these kinda issues. At that time, the idea of doing this was viewed (rightly or not) as clearly questionable... Social normalization is sneaky, especially when $$$ involved.

Happy 100th Birthday to David Attenborough! Thank you for a lifetime of inspirational broadcasting, and all your work to promote the understanding of evolution and the natural world.

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement, the greatest source of visual beauty, the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.' David Attenborough. Naturalist and humanist.