Andrew Kennard @askennard@qoto.org

Brits ask “A penny for your thoughts?” and Americans respond with “Just my two cents”. At current exchange rates ($1.00 = £0.80) this means Brits are receiving 1.6p of American thoughts for just 1p. In this paper we propose an alternative asset pricing model for the marketplace of ideas, considering—

Our latest #preprint https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/6959/ explains why fitness can be defined in so many ways, and which version(s) you should use when. Fitness quantifies what #NaturalSelection favors. @gdoulcier #EvolGenPaper #Evolution 1/

I believe that in order to stay sane during a #PhD, we need a hobby that allows us to relax our minds.

I love drawing and painting scientific illustrations, and I'm very proud to be featured in this month's SciArt profile of @the_node!

https://thenode.biologists.com/sciart-profile-maja-mielke/science-art/

#sciart #illustration #PhDlife

It takes most students a long time to learn HOW/HOW NOT to cite (e.g., "In a 2020 study, Jones (2020) found that water is wet, which was also found later...").

This is one of the better refs I've found giving students advice beyond punctuation/formatting.
https://www.writingclearscience.com.au/when-to-cite/

Professors: you can use yt-dlp to download YouTube videos and add them to directly your presentations.

I've seen so many lectures get derailed by an embedded YouTube video breaking in PowerPoint. Or they minimize their presentation, open up a browser and navigate to YouTube (revealing embarrassing personal recommendations), then make a lecture hall full of people sit through an ad for some fly-by-night home security system or whatever.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

#education #teaching #academia

@futurebird Someone once told me "It's not Kafkaesque to wake up an insect. If you wake up an insect and your first thought is that this might make you late for work...*that* is Kafkaesque." That completely changed my perspective on a lot of things.

Imagine if every time you looked up anything in the Yellow Pages or encyclopedia, there was this big section at the top of the page called "Notes from Gary" where some guy named Gary who seems to know about 20% less than the average person just sorta gets to say whatever he wants about the subject, no matter how irrelevant it is.

This is what it's like to use Google now.

"...I recommend this job to anyone who is looking for a dynamic, fast-paced work environment."

OK listen. Doll.

NO ONE is looking for a dynamic, fast-paced work environment in 2024. We are exhausted. Get in your DeLorean and take that attitude back to 1984.

The first few messages that humanity received from the Galactics were surprisingly articulate and erudite. However, over time the weird inconsistencies added up enough that humanity gradually realized that they were talking to a Galactic chatbot.

Thus began the Great Crusade against the Galactics.

#MicroSciFi

In a new paper, published today in Current Biology, we analyse the genome of renowned composer Ludwig van Beethoven using a polygenic index related to musicality, as a way to illustrate the limits of genetic predictions at the individual level. Beethoven, one of the most celebrated musicians in history, scored unremarkably, ranking between the 9th & 11th percentile based on modern samples. We explain why this is no surprise & how it can provide a valuable teaching moment on the complex relationships between DNA & behaviour.
An interdisciplinary collaboration across two Max Planck Institutes (Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen & Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt), University of Amsterdam, Karolinska Institute, Vanderbilt University and others.
#MastodonScience #science #music #genetics #genomics
@mpi_nl @maxplanckgesellschaft

https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0960982224000253

The good news is, if you thought Twitter's descent into Musk-filled madness might be detrimental to your efforts to get other scientists to cite your work, fear not. In this regard, Twitter was not actually that useful.

Monster Movie: making movie files from microscopy data

https://quantixed.org/2024/03/19/monster-movie-making-movie-files-from-microscopy-data/

#computing #science #ffmpeg #FIJI #ImageJ #microscopy

Our minimal MAP (i.e., microtubule associated protein) - the starPEG-KA7 peptide (see https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E19-05-0247) is going places, er..., biomolecules🧬 !

New work by the Göpfrich (Heidelberg) and Kierfeld (Dortmund) labs shows that starPEG-KA7 deployed on DNA filaments facilitates the formation of DNA rings that are able to contract upon heat or molecular crowding cues:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46339-z

#actinmyosin #synbio #artificialcell

Another typical science mastodonian thread tha reach a solution for #lablife #troubleshoot from @dhananjaythakur
🦣🦣🦣
https://mastodon.social/@dhananjaythakur/112095146560498091

@tsturm @sohkamyung I think if a giant clam posted, it would be something like:
Clam Log, shell growth line 12,601
Insolation optimal, photosynthetic output at maximum. Basking at maximum shell gape. Growing a new line for the day.
SOMETHING TOUCHED ME, CLOSE UP CLOSE UPPPP
False alarm.
Proceed with scheduled photosynthesis

In Memoriam

Bill Weis (1959–2023): Pioneering structural biologist and biochemist who revolutionized our understanding of cell adhesion and Wnt signaling

Obituary by Mark Peifer and Alexander R. Dunn published in @JCellBiol

https://t.co/WwIm1qhtme

Whenever I think someone is way too excited about fractals I zoom out a bit and find someone else even more excited...

Helping someone debug someone, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

Hello naparistas! We are proud/relieved to announce the release of napari 0.4.19! 🥳 Back in August @czaki was like, "I think we should make a quick bug-fix release post 0.4.18”… 6 months later… 😅 #FOSS #OpenSource

We fixed major, long-standing bugs with color handling in Labels layers, and improved performance — especially for (u)int8/16 data. It's also easier to create custom colormaps — see 1st pic which uses a variant of Glasbey. 😍

Check out the full release notes! https://napari.org/stable/release/release_0_4_19.html