I can’t say enough good things about this book, which my entire lab read together several years ago. It was hugely helpful to me even after tenure, and I consider myself to be a strong writer who usually loves writing!

Princeton University Press@princetonupress.bsky.social · 5h ago

A fully updated and expanded edition of the acclaimed writing guide for scientists. The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, 3rd Edition by @stephenbheard.bsky.social is out now! Order yours: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb... #Science #Education #Writing

anyway, if anyone has a lead on jobs for a science journalist/writer who has been a planetarium director (meaning I can talk to the public), please let me know. I am *awfully* broke.

I've got a plane flight ahead and I'm interested in reading up on technical details of ATProto. Any particular suggestions for good blogposts or medium-weight techie reads? Thank you!! #atproto (I'm a #python programmer and a #rust enthusiast, if that matters; lots of Web programming experience.)

Bluesky is a "liberal bubble" because fascist chuds can't get traction without algorithmic assistance and because people here trained themselves to block "debate me" trybois the instant they roll up

The Verge@theverge.com · 2d ago

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

“The role of the university is even lost on many, so bears repeating: produce knowledge and educate at the highest level. AI destroys both at their core.” This is a really good piece that resonates a lot with me. You should read it too. Thanks and solidarity, Olivia.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 3d ago

If useful, here's my attempt to process my feelings about how I feel sadly kinda — or rather very — sick from all this AI fascist nonsense as an academic. 😶‍🌫️ I'd be pleased if even one person finds something useful because there's something to be said for processing this all together, so, um, enjoy?

This is some really cool stuff! A chaining dynamic hashtable that uses *less* space than the input (by using quotienting), that actually seems to have quite competitive performance 🤯 And also a faster flat variant has 1.25 cache misses on average (and at most 2 or 3), that has super fast queries.

arXiv cs.DS Data Structures and Algorithms@csds-bot.bsky.social · 3d ago

Xilin Tang (Cornell University), Yuqi Mai (Cornell University), William Kuszmaul (Carnegie Mellon University), Alex Conway (Cornell Tech): Succinct and Fast Tiny Pointer Hash Tables https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28892 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.28892 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.28892

I'm a casualty of the switch by reddit to requiring logins for the old.reddit.com interface, and by and large that's ok. The one thing is that the actual old.reddit.com page doesn't have anything on it any more. Is there a way to get a non-personalized "top ranked stories" feed??

Reddit Requires Logins for Old Interface, Tightening Automated Access Controls

Reddit, a popular social media and discussion platform, has announced a notable shift in how users will access its old version site, old.reddit.com. Over the next month, the site will require users…

legalnewsfeed.com

I'm looking for good geopolitical podcasts. I liked Diane Rehm back in the before times. Any suggestions?

New in PN: The new "science golden age" looks suspiciously like a grift "It’s impossible not to wonder whether part of Trump’s loathing for universities is that there's no way for him to corrupt the process and make money off it in the same way he can by giving billions to Silicon Valley types."

The new "science golden age" looks suspiciously like a grift

Trump wants to run scientific research like his family business.

publicnotice.co

This post got me writing. www.aaronrosspowell.com/3mrsuois6422y

Your Internet Doesn't Need to Be Big

But it definitely can be better.

aaronrosspowell.com

Oh wow there was research

Nicole Bedera@nbedera.bsky.social · last yr.

While we’re on the topic of COVID, trauma, and schools… Researchers found a major source of pandemic-related trauma for college students was returning to in-person schooling before it was safe. It was an institutional betrayal. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

The increased reliance on print texts from the "pre-LLM era" for model training is objectively NOT good for health/medical topics, BTW. It would be better to have vetted and trustworthy "AI"-free contemporary scholarship now, rather than rely on rapidly out-of-date "pre-LLM era" input data.

Sacrifice! At the Harvest Festival@theharvestmaid.bsky.social · last wk.

Why is everything so transparently evil now?

This is really lovely. Would seem to apply across the board (in academia and science, for me).

JA Westenberg@joanwestenberg.com · last wk.

Stop trying to build for "the algorithm." Stop trying to scale to a million faceless users. If you want to make something people actually give a shit about, shrink your target audience to a single person you know. 5 rules for creating work that leaves a mark:

In 2014, Jason Rosch and I met at a GRC in Tuscany and sketched an idea on a cocktail napkin: what if we evolved S.pneumo in mice, treated them with antibiotics, varied their immune systems and watched what won? 11 years and a huge team effort later, it's out in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social 🧵

From the LinkedIn of an academic I have a lot of respect for.

A compassionate, evidence-based look at pregnancy loss—how and why it happens, and why the assurances of the medical industry don’t reflect the reality. Pregnancy Interrupted by @kateclancy.bsky.social publishes August 25. Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... 20 October UK/EU pub.

The only reason we're alive today the only reason is that most viruses don't want us extinct. Because if we die, they die too. We're their habitat. Their printing press. Their evolutionary future. They need us. And we need them 8% of our genome is viral DNA that became us.

This was a post from @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy that I thought was reasonably optimistic 😆 and I enjoyed reading pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/t...

It’s worth noting that Taco Bell identified the source before the FDA did, and promptly pulled it from their stores. The FDA didn’t even name the source until Taylor Farms outed themselves, and hasn’t issued a recall. Basically, Taco Bell is now a more reliable authority than the FDA.

Forbes@forbes.com · 3w ago

Taylor Farms, which supplies major fast food and grocery chains, was identified as the possible source of the cyclosporiasis outbreak Thursday.

1/ Excited to share the newest tool in the pangenome MUMiverse: Shredtools! Shredtools enables a user to navigate the pangenome coordinate system with multi-MUMs. More in the thread🧵 Code: github.com/vikshiv/shredtools Interactive tool for querying HPRC assemblies: vikshiv.github.io/shredtools

Navigating the pangenome coordinate system with Shredtools

Existing notions of pangenome coordinates rely on hard-to-compute multiple sequence alignments. On the other hand, pangenome-wide exact unique matches (multi-MUMs) can be computed efficiently, and rep...

biorxiv.org

The Casey Dunn keynote was amazing. From real world hunt for Physalia diversity across the world to CAD, assembly technique and more. The bit on common mathematical formalism utilized across many(most?) contemporary biology questions was 🤌 dunnlab.org/phylogenetic... #ismb2026

there is a lot that is packed into this quote.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff.bsky.social · 3w ago

Popularism and populism both derive from the same essential impulse, which is to construct a synthetic version of The People that will cure democracy of the need to adjudicate between competing claims.

Across Gobi Desert, autonomous tracked robots are transporting & installing solar panels with minimal human intervention, doubling installation efficiency. The energy transition isn't just about building more solar. It's increasingly about automating the process of building the whole infrastructure.

Oh this is lovely!

Anthony Moser@anthonymoser.com · 4mo ago

i'm reading this after @olivia.science recommended it (h/t @sven.blacksky.app for this link) and it's great

Also for a scientific method that definitely can apply to coding, see: mu.social/profile/anth... Getting a lot of mileage out of this these days, enjoy!!

Anthony Moser@anthonymoser.com · 4mo ago

i'm reading this after @olivia.science recommended it (h/t @sven.blacksky.app for this link) and it's great

Thinking today about how often SFF folks scoff at the idea that romance requires worldbuilding when we're out here daring to build societies where consent exists and is even tangentially understood, which is a task more ambitious than any magic system.

Bree (half of Kit Rocha)@mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 5mo ago

One thing that I suspect many people outside of the romance genre have rarely considered is how much worldbuilding it takes to create a world where consent is normalized. Its lack is so baked into our culture that it's more fantastical than flying cars and sea monsters. Days like this remind me.

Whenever I watch the US Men’s soccer team play, I remind myself the US Women’s soccer team have won their World Cup 4 times and remain the most successful team in tournament history.

Abusers sabotage their own agenda and betray those who share it while placing the burden on victims to come forward and be punished, blamed, shamed, disbelieved, or not come forward and suffer in silence and let an abuser hold power. Abusers demonstrate radical selfishness.

Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · 4w ago

this dynamic described by jenny racicot is, as i understand it, very common among progressive women in maine. they’ve been put in an impossible position and feel like they’re tanking platner’s campaign when in reality he did that on his own by being a violent and reckless person.

Hi ocean -omics folks, someone (a while back) mentioned to me that they thought the Tara Oceans metagenome sequencing effort did some "blanks" sequencing - negative controls intended to get at contam & artifacts. I can't find any mention of them in papers tho. Can anyone help me find 'em? thx!