There's a missing rung on the academic career ladder in Austria and Germany. Historically there wasn't a position like assistant professor or lecturer, so the jump from postdoc to professor was — and mostly still is — huge. Between 70% and 80% of academics in Austria don't have permanent jobs.

Academics in Germany and Austria are stuck in job limbo

Also: Montana's "right to try" law for experimental cures, UK science gets reshuffled, a university sues Anthropic over patents, and more from last week

reviewertoo.com

These stories are often being presented as "cunning AI escapes its test room". I can't see why. It's simply the case that the sandbox was not well isolated by the testing companies. Put the agency and responsibility where it belongs. cyberscoop.com/anthropic-cl...

Anthropic says its AI accidentally hacked three companies during safety tests

Anthropic revealed its Claude AI models accidentally breached three real companies during safety testing after a vendor configuration error exposed live systems.

cyberscoop.com

Everyone in academia reading this "joke"

Skeptical Fry from Futurama

ALT: Skeptical Fry from Futurama

static.klipy.com

The Onion@theonion.com · 7d ago

Teacher Required To Provide Own Salary https://theonion.com/teacher-required-to-provide-own-salary/

Figuring this out in sufficient detail and clarity, not writing the code, is actually the hardest part of the task.

Oops! All Paperclips@all-paperclips.bsky.social · last wk.

Coding will always be hard because you have to know what you want the computer to do.

For real that I am going to make it my life mission so we collectively laugh at people that use the slop machine to make their graphical abstracts 🧪

Jeffrey Perkel (he/him)@jperkel.bsky.social · 2w ago

Also new @nature.com, how to use #AI to create a graphical abstract in minutes. By Ananya Thakur. 🧪🎨🤖 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Only 4 hydration breaks until Christmas

Hello from academia

Jesse Thorn@jessethorn.bsky.social · 4w ago

Drafts are fucked up. Imagine not being able to choose your employer, even where you live, for the first decade of your career.

Sora: dead Atlas: dead "adult mode": dead Abilene expansion: dead OpenAI IPO: dead Tell me again about "inevitability"

The ChatGPT browser is already dead

ChatGPT Atlas didn’t even last a year.

theverge.com

Tired of AI-generated figures? I asked our talented scientific illustrator Manon Zuurmond to draw some of the instruments and lab equipment we missed in NIH's otherwise fantastic BioArt resource. First batch now available as CC BY. Free for everyone to use in publications: github.com/Center-for-P...

I'm so disillusioned, I almost don't even care who gets the FIFA Peace Prize next year

#Poetry #BlueskyPoetry #WendyCope Differences of Opinion I: He Tells Her by Wendy Cope

This is an interesting idea. Since journals are keen to make authors declare when they have used AI, might authors want editors to do the same...?

Drew Steen@drewsteen.bsky.social · last mo.

I think @richardsever.bsky.social has it right here - if you want your work to be freely available, it’s going to be freely available to everyone, including shitty AI bots. What I’d like is statements from journal editors that they will not use AI judgment for any part of the editorial process.

I can hardly imagine a better awardee than @nanopat.bsky.social! Despite his love for small things, his impact is huge! Well done! 🤩

Helmholtz Institute Würzburg@helmholtz-hiri.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Congratulations to @nanopat.bsky.social on receiving the @rnasociety.bsky.social’s Eclipse Award for Innovation in High Throughput Biology! 🎉 The award recognizes the #RNA research methods he developed during his doctoral studies in #HIRI’s Smyth lab. Read more: www.helmholtz-hiri.de/en/newsroom/...

Congratulations to @nanopat.bsky.social on receiving the @rnasociety.bsky.social’s Eclipse Award for Innovation in High Throughput Biology! 🎉 The award recognizes the #RNA research methods he developed during his doctoral studies in #HIRI’s Smyth lab. Read more: www.helmholtz-hiri.de/en/newsroom/...

Award-winning novel methods in RNA research

Patrick Bohn receives RNA Society Eclipse Award for Innovation in High Throughput Biology

helmholtz-hiri.de

I miss Web 1.0. You click a link, you get to the website, you read the content. What a concept.

😎 to have this out! --> stay tuned, this is a series about 📊#dataviz for #science 🧪

Nature Methods@natmethods.nature.com · 2mo ago

We are very excited to bring back our popular Points of View column, written by @helenajambor.bsky.social! Check out her first column in our July issue about the usage of color scales in scientific figures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cognitive friction is a key source of life. This rapid deployment of AI is horrifying. We need to create our own words. We need to think. If we don’t create and don’t think, how can minds develop?

Thermo Fishy

Reese Richardson@reeserichardson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Doing a linear stretch on these images shows how dramatic the "edits" were, revealing the deception in clear terms. This should be a complete scandal for Thermo Fisher and more people in the biosciences should be talking about it.

Reese Richardson@reeserichardson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

OMG!!! It’s also such a messy western background to cheat into!!!

Reese Richardson@reeserichardson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Having "ideas" is not the rate limiting step for doing science (no matter what the AI bros seem to think). I have 10 times, a hundred times more ideas than I could ever investigate, even given unlimited resources. Ideas are cheap. Execution is hard. And luck is the biggest factor of all

Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation@laskerfdn.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Have lots of ideas. Keep producing a mental state in which things bubble up," says Johns Hopkins University molecular biologist Jeremy Nathans. Watch as Nathans shares how he finds and refines his best ideas. 🌟🧪

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

Fuck viruses man. Get your own protein synthesis you shitty little free loaders

Very happy to share our prototype to perform aCOS experiments for rapid, accurate interaction measurements with fluorescence 🕺. This wouldn't have been possible without the fantastic Andreas Hartmann and Simon Letzer & support by #SMWA, #EFRE/JTF, @bcube-tud.bsky.social and @tudresden.bsky.social 🧪🧑‍💻

Academia: we are going to evaluate you purely based on number of papers (and citations) Some researchers: let's game the system Acamedia:😱

Alan McElligott@amcell.bsky.social · 3mo ago

2026. Thousands of scientists inflate their CVs with self-published studies that cost millions of dollars of public money. An analysis...... reveals that one in eight is filled with articles written by the editor, particularly at the publisher MDPI. english.elpais.com/science-tech...

Excited to share that my 2025 collection of science-inspired drawings is now live on the Protein Data Bank (PDB) website. Thank you @rcsbpdb.bsky.social! It is free to explore and download. I’d love to hear what you think! pdb101.rcsb.org/sci-art/bezs...

PDB101: Irina Bezsonova Gallery

PDB-101: Training, Outreach, and Education portal of RCSB PDB

pdb101.rcsb.org

Academics don't like being told that they live in an Ivory Tower, but I have to say, only people who have spent practically their whole life within the security of tenured employment could come up with such a cruel solution. There are more equitable ways to solve the low success rate problem.

Lazy use of AI by half-ass researchers is putting digital asbestos everywhere, which will be a huge pain in the ass to clean up. Just do your damn job as a scholar or let someone else with more integrity and competence have your position. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?

Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

nature.com

"genAI can be used to create podcasts from a paper to teach st-" Let me stop you right there. Before you feed somebody's paper to a slop machine, invite that somebody to talk to your students about their paper. We're right here. We academics won't shut up about our work, man. 🧪

My first PhD student‘s, Kavan Gor, paper on 5-color single-molecule imaging of co-transcriptional RNA folding is out in @science.org Advances! He finds how RNA modification enzymes, antisense oligonucleotides and ribosomal proteins re-route nascent RNA folding. See more details in EMBL post below!

EMBL@embl.org · 4mo ago

(1/2) EMBL researchers led by @olivierduss.bsky.social have developed a microscopy technique that enables them to observe individual RNA molecules being produced and folding into different shapes. Learn more: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...