The cells of your body follow simple rules and play off one another to form a complete organism. The researcher Alexander Mordvintsev has developed “neural cellular automata,” building blocks that can self-assemble into any form. @georgemusser.com reports: www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...
“Overall, the message from this survey is positive; evolutionary biologists are readily employable outside of academia, generally well-prepared for those jobs, and report high levels of satisfaction” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Willing to join us @pasteur.fr for a PhD for a project on how interactions between mobile genetic elements shape bacterial adaptation? Subject to be tailored to candidates with keen interest in evolution, genomics, computational biology, microbiology. Check www.pasteur.fr/en/education...
Pueden encontrar el contenido teórico (en español) en GitHub (github.com/romanzapien/...) donde abordamos reacciones químicas ✨, matemáticas 🔢, programación (Julia) 👩🏽💻 y análisis de datos 📈. El código es interactivo y puede usarse desde cualquier dispositivo, así que no duden en compartirlo 😊 🙌 (2/2)
Este Julio tuve el privilegio de organizar el club "Enzymath: Entendiendo a las Enzimas entre Genes y Ecuaciones" 🧪👨🏻🔬🧑🏼🏫 para Clubes de Ciencia México 🇲🇽. Fue una bonita experiencia de la que me llevo muchas alegrías y que espero repetir pronto. (1/2)
Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says retractionwatch.com/2025/08/04/f...
📢 We're seeking a postdoc to work on a project funded by HFSP @hfspo.bsky.social at the intersection of bacterial physiology, ecology and evolution. You can find more details about the project, the position, and how to apply here www.dalbellolab.com/hfsp-project! #bacteria #ecosky #MevoSky #microSky
Behold one of the mightiest tools in mathematics: the camel principle.
I am dead serious. Deep down, this tiny rule is the cog in many methods. Ones that you use every day.
Here is what it is, how it works, and why it is essential.
A NASA Astronaut on ISS caught this sprite over Mexico and the U.S. this morning.
Many such cases - be on guard against DoPRA (science is complex, but let's not fool ourselves that pre-pub peer review functions in these situations; need a year of post-pub to read these things)
Interested (or know anyone interested!) in pursuing a PhD in applied mathematics? Come and join us at Melbourne! A/Prof Doug Brumley and I are advertising a maths + biology project looking at adaptation of bacteria. Find out more 👉 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Here is a recent #BulletinMathBio paper by Arianna Ceccarelli, @apbrowning.bsky.social, and @profruthbaker.bsky.social Approximate Solutions of a General Stochastic Velocity-Jump Model Subject to Discrete-Time Noisy Observations.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🧪
1/n 🧵 Excited to share our new paper! We developed a framework to reveal hidden simplicity in how organisms adapt to different environments, particularly focusing on antibiotic resistance evolution. #EvolutionaryBiology #MachineLearning
In the era of AI, neural networks have become increasingly popular for modeling, inference, and prediction, largely due to their potential for universal approximation. With the proliferation of such deep learning models, a question arises: are leaner statistical methods still relevant? To shed insight on this question, we employ the mechanistic nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE) inverse problem as a testbed, using physics-informed neural network (PINN) as a representative of the deep learning paradigm and manifold-constrained Gaussian process inference (MAGI) as a representative of statistically principled methods. Through case studies involving the SEIR model from epidemiology and the Lorenz model from chaotic dynamics, we demonstrate that statistical methods are far from obsolete, especially when working with sparse and noisy observations. On tasks such as parameter inference and trajectory reconstruction, statistically principled methods consistently achieve lower bias and variance, while using far fewer parameters and requiring less hyperparameter tuning. Statistical methods can also decisively outperform deep learning models on out-of-sample future prediction, where the absence of relevant data often leads overparameterized models astray. Additionally, we find that statistically principled approaches are more robust to accumulation of numerical imprecision and can represent the underlying system more faithful to the true governing ODEs.
Neat looking paper: "Are Statistical Methods Obsolete in the Era of Deep Learning?" The answer seems to be "no," at least in the case where there's a mathematical structure to the model.
arxiv.org/abs/2505.21723
7 PhD positions in Translational Evolutionary Research available @uni-kiel.de
Application deadline is March 27, 2025
Please spread the word!
www.kec.uni-kiel.de/news_events/...
Partners in both life and research, the physicists Roger Guimerà and Marta Sales-Pardo recently developed a “machine scientist” algorithm that is proving to be a powerful tool for scientific discovery. (From the archive) buff.ly/0dgSvHG
Interested in a starting PI position at University College London to work on Genetics, Evolution or the Environment? My department has opened the call for expressions of interest for sponsorship of independent fellowship applications.
www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
New 🗒️led by Alex Pigot - Macroecological rules predict how biomass scales with species richness in nature -Standing biomass increases with richness when large-bodied spp are numerically rare but independent when spp size & abundance are uncoupled. @ucl.ac.uk - Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Let's try this again... 7 is the LEAST "random" number.
When we asked Britons to think of a number from 1-10, 33% chose 7 - this isn't the first time this phenomenon has been observed
How Brits respond...
1: 2%
2: 4%
3: 7%
4: 9%
5: 8%
6: 14%
7: 33%
8: 14%
9: 6%
10: 4%
yougov.co.uk/society/arti...
We offer 2 PhD Positions in Evolutionary Biology!
1️⃣ Evolutionary Developmental Biology – Craniofacial evolution. (March 31, 2025)
2️⃣ Evolution of Polygenic Traits – Genetic adaptation in Drosophila. (April 30, 2025)
More here: www.evolbio.mpg.de/1639156/Job_...
#PhD #EvoDevo #Genetics
Lower survival rate among trainees in labs with highly productive mentors raises important concerns about what we value in academia. Many interesting things to stew over with this paper!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I have been preparing a lecture on Parameter Inference for undergrad students 📊. The experience has been particularly fulfilling because I did not learned from a textbook 📖 but by doing 👨🏻💻. At the end, apart from teaching others, structuring knowledge in a lecture is a newly discovered joy for me 😄 🙌
📆Join us next Tuesday for our online seminar: Hal Caswell (Woods Hole) will present on:
⭐The formal demography of kinship: Demographic stochasticity in the kinship network⭐
Free for all to join!
Zoom Link: iite.info/seminar/
Global Times: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/f...
NB Euro time shift!
I’m thrilled to share my first ever publication, now published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
With mentorship from the amazing @ksxue.bsky.social, I looked at how the outcomes of species introductions to microbial communities are influenced by the number of introduced microbes.
"...applications of model discovery in biology are among the most exciting, precipitated by the astounding quantities of biological data and the extent to which we do not know the structure of most biological networks; there is a lot to learn." #SingleCell #MLsky
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Lawful good: Bayesian models Neutral good: Social network analysis Chaotic good: Dynamical systems theory Lawful neutral: Drift diffusion True neutral: Information theory Chaotic neutral: Agent-based models Lawful evil: Symbolic logic Neutral evil: Neural networks Chaotic evil: Quantum mechanics
I have a bunch of things I have to get done, so naturally I decided to procrastinate by making an alignment chart of mathematical models
1/46 Hey folks, we have a new paper out on the MuLTEE. Strap in and I’ll tell you the story of how this “little paper on polyploidy” turned into the most data rich paper our lab has produced, largely thanks to the leadership and work ethic of @kaitong25.bsky.social.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
It's our birthday! 🎂 The Royal Institution was founded on this day in 1799 for "the teaching by courses of Philosophical Lectures and Experiments, the application of Science to the Common Purposes of Life".
In this 1985 video, George Porter shows us Faraday's lab, which you can still visit today
I'm delighted to announce that the 2025 @microbiologysociety.org meeting on "Understanding and predicting microbial evolutionary dynamics" will be held in Liverpool 26-27 November 2025! Abstract submission will open soon... #microsky 🧪🧫🦠 microbiologysociety.org/event/societ...
