Many years ago, my lab helped to discover YUCCAs. Later, Jia-Wei Wang in the lab sussed out the role of miR156s in a range of developmental processes. And now YUCCA and miR156 reappear as partners in this beautiful paper from the Lenhard lab! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #plantscience

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies the ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado | PNAS

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...

pnas.org

Despite many adversities that came their way, the @elife.bsky.social team continues with their innovative publishing model and is a champion in the Publish-Review-Curate space. We have nothing but admiration for what you've done so far. 👏 Learn more about eLife and PRC:

Open Science: What is publish, review, curate?

Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) solves some of the challenges in research communication today. We take a look at the range of organisations working to make PRC a bigger part of scholarly publishing.

buff.ly

Stephen Miller said just the other day that all asylum claims are "fake." A couple deported from the U.S. to Guatemala were gagged, bound, and shot dead. Their 14-month old found crying next to their mother's body. People like Miller don't care though because this is the point: ethnic cleansing.

Overland couple shot dead in Guatemala after local ICE stop led to deportations

The couple’s 14-month-old daughter was found crying beside her mother’s body in a sugarcane field last week, according to Guatemalan authorities and media.

stlpr.org

Everyone says AI will accelerate science. I don't think it will -- at least not in biology, and at least not soon. New post where I explain why, and how the productivity paradox can be resolved: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-ai-wil...

Why AI will not speed up science (yet)

You can see AI everywhere except in the productivity statistics

blekhman.substack.com

How do transcription factors bind DNA strongly, and in a switch like manner, while remaining sequence specific? Our new paper on a canonical plant TF suggests the answer is a previously underappreciated assembly state: transcription factor nanoclusters. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nanoclustering of a plant transcription factor enables strong yet specific DNA binding

Transcription factor nanoclusters balance the DNA binding trade-off between weakly binding oligomers and nonspecific condensates.

science.org

Whew, the editors of @science.org are getting real.

The Assault On Science Funding Continues

science.org

Happy to report that our grant was funded despite this disaster of a review 🎉 (thanks to those who wrote in support, your efforts were helpful and are very much appreciated 💚 (also for others in a similar boat, LLMs seem to be reasonably good at narrowing down possible reviewer identities👀)

Devang Mehta🌱🧬@mehta-lab.com · 4mo ago

Someone in the Arabidopsis/clock community seems to deeply dislike my work on research culture. Just want to say: whoever you are, please write & debate me directly instead of cowering behind anonymous grant reviews that threaten my students’ work. (2nd year in a row)

One if the first responses to this post was “so they did worse when you took away the tool?” as though that was a slam dunk refutation. If you take away a tool and the student can’t do the skill you said the tool was teaching, then the tool didn’t teach the skill. This is education 101. 2/

One of the reasons why we are letting AI destroy our children’s education is because we have failed to root out the false idea that education is measured by what students produce. 1/

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 3w ago

Unfettered access to chatbots can harm educational outcomes Using AI while solving problems improves performance by 48% (GPT base). When access to AI was taken away, students actually performed worse than those who never had access (17% reduction in grades) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines" https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/ai-not-peer-so-it-cant-do-peer-review #ai #peerreview #academia

AI is not a peer, so it can’t do peer review

If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines, says Akhil Bhardwaj

timeshighereducation.com

“.. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. “.. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.” @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

“The process of India becoming a post-truth society is near complete” I continue to look forward to the day when India rejects Hindutva and begins to rebuild from its current catastrophe. That will involve reckoning with how the state treated its own... www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

‘Humanity is a privilege’: Umar Khalid on his six years in an Indian jail without trial

Exclusive: Activist tells of his life as one of India’s most prominent political prisoners and his opposition to the government of Narendra Modi

theguardian.com

This product launch shows that Anthropic misses the point of science: “…it could take Lecoq’s team as many as two years to write such a review. He now has about 10 reviews, many more than 100 pages, with citations that were checked over by reviewer agents.” www.anthropic.com/news/claude-...

Claude Science, an AI workbench for scientists

Claude Science is a customizable app that integrates the tools and packages researchers most often use, produces auditable artifacts, and provides flexible access to computing resources.

anthropic.com

My contribution to the ongoing "1%" science discourse is this picture you can send to your favourite preprint author(s) after reading their papers to tell them you liked their work! #SciArt #PawReview

Ruling against TPS for Haitians, the Trump justices on the Supreme Court have set a new impossible standard for proving discrimination against non-whites: if there is any other reason *in addition* to the racism, the racism doesn’t count www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

I have been thinking since yesterday about why I find the 1% thing so, so disturbing. It's a visceral reaction of 'just no', which goes beyond the general yuck towards the enshittification of/via AI. I have finally put my finger on it: it is the feeling you get when

Tried qed science for the first time. I’m not very impressed tho I suppose it will get better. But I think we’re all underestimating how fundamentally AI review undermines the essence of science: communication between humans to progress OUR understanding of the natural world (not that of machines)

The funny thing about the AI model behind the 1% thing is that it bills itself as a more content based ranking of research but then advertises its high correlation with SJR rankings (journal rankings) to show its effectiveness 🙃

Rippling Ideas@ripplingideas.bsky.social · last mo.

The qed 1% club controversy highlights a difficult road ahead for openRxiv as they embark on the next decade of trying to bring about a bigger preprint ecosystem. But it also raises questions about the motivations of some open science "advocates"

Central to our philosophy at bioRxiv and medRxiv is decoupling dissemination and evaluation, so _we_ will not rank papers. But 3rd-party discovery services - from familiar tools like Google to qed - will always be entry points to our corpus. It'll be interesting to see which are adopted. 5/n

Long-shot but any @nytimes.com opinion ppl here: tomorrow Europe is set to finally approve gene-edited plants for cultivation, a major turnaround after 25 years of anti-GMO policy. We have an OpEd ready about this, if someone can put us in touch with an editor @ayuhas.bsky.social @carlzimmer.com.

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. 👇

We just published our new paper about an active Helitron transposon in wheat 🌾🧬 We found that it can be mobilised by heat stress when DNA methylation is reduced. We document its full lifecycle: RNA -> circular DNA -> integration www.nature.com/articles/s41... #TEsky

An active Helitron transposon family in wheat - Nature Plants

Helitrons are a recently identified category of transposons. This study reveals that heat stress combined with reduced DNA methylation can mobilize a Helitron family in wheat. Its mobilization is gene...

nature.com

'Despite the increase on the previous programme, the Commission emphasised that 70 per cent of 2021-25 proposals deemed good enough to be funded were not able to be supported due to a lack of budget.' 2/2

Here are sitting Dutch MPs cheerfully meeting Milan Mazurek - a man who is so extraordinarily racist that that *the Trump administration* denied him a visa to enter the US last month, on the grounds that (in his own words!) “I am on a list of members of a Nazi party” bsky.app/profile/levi...

Levi@levi98k.eurosky.social · 2mo ago

De Vos, Baudet en Etalle gezellig in gesprek met Milan Mazurek, iemand die de holocaust een sprookje en een leugen noemde.

Lidewij de Vos isn’t well known outside 🇳🇱 but she’s not a marginal figure. Leader of a party with more than twice as many seats as Christian Union. And she is openly praising people who admired Hitler,denied Holocaust, said women can’t vote. And seriously want to deport all minorities. A dark moment

There’s not much new to say about this but I find it very sad that in multiple countries in Europe, including the Netherlands and the UK, “there are too many brown people and we should deport them” has become a fairly mainstream talking point for sitting MPs. Not something I expected to live to see

dr. Marina@drmarina.bsky.social · 2mo ago

de Vos van #fvd “already leading in parliament”?

TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...

How much of Thermo Fisher’s antibody data has been manipulated?

We’ve documented more than 100 instances of apparent data manipulation in Thermo’s catalog

reeserichardson.blog

A very good response by the concerned department about the Cofnas affair at UGent.

Pieter T. L. Beck@ptrbck.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences issued a statement on the hiring of Nathan Cofnas /43 www.ugent.be/lw/philosoph...

The Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences issued a statement on the hiring of Nathan Cofnas /43 www.ugent.be/lw/philosoph...