Martin Johnsson
@mrtnj.bsky.social
PhD in genetics. Associate professor (docent) at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala. The Jar Jar Binks of animal genomics. Writes in English, svenska & gruntings. he/him
love when people get caught using LLMs for some important analytical task "to save time" and then they're like "don't worry we rigorously vetted the results." man....you either saved time OR rigorously vetted the results, but i promise you didn't do both
I would like keynote speakers to provide AI use statements.
Martin Zuidhof: "You're familiar with this image ..." Yes, the most famous chicken image. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Pro tip: if you're feeling lost at a conference, go find a poster by a modeller. They'll always be able to tell you something new and exciting, and they're used to explaining their stuff to ignoramuses.
I should have known that plant breeders would have thought about this stuff!
Introducing {rdoom} - Play Doom in #RStats (in time for #UseR2026 !) github.com/coolbutusele... This is a demonstration that {tigerfb} + {nara} can do realtime interactivity in R! Includes: keyboard & mouse control, audio, cheat modes!
Neuromancer, William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel, was first released exactly 42 years ago today. I read it for the first time in 2025. It holds up remarkably well and is remarkably prescient about AI—so much so that I wrote an essay about just how uncanny it is at times. I also made art
"Bayesian fine-mapping pinpoints candidate genes and pleiotropic loci of production traits from a chicken backcrossing scheme" Fun stuff from colleagues in Germany. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Bayesian fine-mapping pinpoints candidate genes and pleiotropic loci of production traits from a chicken backcrossing scheme - BMC Genomics
Background Understanding the genetic architecture of economically important traits in poultry is critical for improving breeding strategies. In this study, we investigated a backcrossing scheme betwee...
link.springer.com
Our paper is out! 📣 we find that molecular measures of genetic variation do not predict heritable genetic variation across species - important implications for the application of genomic data for conservation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Nucleotide diversity is a poor predictor of short-term adaptive potential | PNAS
The capacity to adapt is essential for a population to avoid extinction in a changing world and is recognized as a global conservation priority. Ad...
pnas.org
TSG is one of very few popular books in which the author addresses academic colleagues and the general reader on equal terms. Thinking about its arguments is literally doing evolutionary biology. This is exactly why many aspiring scientists, reading it for the first time, found it so exciting.
Twitter is going kind of crazy about crime and genetics right now (What's new?). My next post is a deep dive into a paper behind a widespread claim that brutal execution in Medieval Europe selected for reduced aggression, allowing civilization to develop. The title says it all, really.
Capital punishment is not a breeding program
No, medieval execution didn't "genetically pacify" Europe
sequencesandconsequences.substack.com
Don't worry, you can just ask a chatbot what Planck's position was, and it will give you a plausible bullet-pointed summary that you can't check without access to a major university library that holds a physical copy.
This is what makes it art: '(...) the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.' www.science.org/content/arti...
Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?
Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame
science.org
Sherlock Holmes: Moriarty, my one intellectual equal Moriarty: Holmes, my one nemesis, for you alone can match my genius Sherlock Holmes: let us settle this great game, this contest of wills, in the only way it is appropriate *two drunks kick each other in the stomach by a waterfall*
Study: Majority Of Middle-Aged Men Lack Support Network They’ll Need To Handle Neil Young’s Death
Study: Majority Of Middle-Aged Men Lack Support Network They’ll Need To Handle Neil Young’s Death
NEW YORK—Warning that millions of men aged 35 and older would be left utterly adrift following the traumatic loss, researchers at Columbia University published a study Monday that revealed the majorit...
theonion.com
It's really quite sad how open access used to be presented as the moral thing to do that would disrupt publishing, and in the end, it became a way for publishers to extract more money from universities.
GOOD ARGUMENT: Have a read of this article considering whether OA has run its course - most work is published OA now, at a huge cost. "Should we re-orient our efforts towards the scholarly commons and the promise it holds for non-commercial, community-led publishing? I think so."
Jeff Pooley@jpooley.bsky.social · 2mo ago"Even though open access was motivated partly by the desire to rein in commercial publishers' profiteering, it has in many ways simply reinforced their dominance" — @samuelmoore.org www.researchprofessionalnews....
Gee wiz, you mean that biological organisms are made of all this physical stuff? I need to go tell the geneticists; I bet they've never heard of that.
I finally figured out why AI causes such a visceral reaction in thinking humans: I am writing my book chapter on PLAY, and AI is the opposite of play. We play for the joy of the process, not for the outcome. Yes it is nice to win, to have the art/ poem, but the point of life is to play.
Jag tror det vore bättre om överklassen gick i en normal skola.
When you see the story about how the world now has its first trillionaire, and when you see the story about how laboratories in Congo have run out of supplies to test for Ebola, it is important to understand that in many ways these are the same story.
I wrote a very short piece on models & modelling in part because we need to protect our scientific praxis damage caused by AI in terms of addictive frictionless thinking, esp since it harms society broadly too. "Models" doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Thanks @carvalhais.org for inviting me to write this.
This theoretical approach (previously in this @pnas.org s.org paper by @nigelgoldenfeld.bsky.social and Carl Woese www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...) seems consistent with the recent work by @tonigabaldon.bsky.social on the complex paths towards the emergence of LUCA.
While many appreciate waffles, and in this paper I offer no objections to them, my present purposes allow me nevertheless to focus exclusively on pancakes.* *My thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.
