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Philipp Bayer

@philippbayer.bsky.social
1K followers 1.2K following 1.2K posts

From plant breeding bioinformatics to marine eDNA to rare disease drug development! 'It is required that one man should goof gloriously for the people.'

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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23h
First ANZ (or second??) eDNA conference had a bingo card for ECRs to ask attendees and start networking- "has eaten their study organism" was a box on there, too
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Marine eDNA Dude @marinednadude.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Most vertebrate diversity can be found in only a handful of #eDNA samples. Fun to see this preprint out from our work with community scientists to characterize backyard biodiversity in some local SoCal MPAs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Using Community Science and eDNA to Inform a State-Designed Marine Protected Area Monitoring Program: A Case Study from Malibu, California
Management of marine protected areas (MPAs) require long-term monitoring and evaluation that is often limited by the cost and effort of conventional visual based surveys. We evaluated a community scie...
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Dr. Hilary Rose Dawson @hilaryrosed.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Australia's research funder is trialling a partial lottery for their new high risk, high reward grant scheme. Details are yet to come, but it'll be interesting to see how this changes the national funding landscape. 🧪 #ecology #research
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Well done!!! I'm happy to see people reusing data from our preprint :)
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Booksale! Booksale!! Another success
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Was wondering how much UWA's executive layer had grown in the last 10 years and had an LLM try to piece together the numbers - from 4 pro-chancellors to 9 PVCs in 10 years. Sporting! At the same time, rankings went up, so UWA will be Nr. 1 uni in the world at about 18 PVCs....
Figure: UWA rankings vs numbers of PVCs
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
My feelings in my third career, summarised
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
New Opus is out and immediately refuses to work on my repos, time to get whitelisted. Seems like security theatre
Warning from positron session sating that opus 5.5 can't work on this repo
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Why do white men become white nationalists? Interesting new empirical results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
ere we show with three national surveys of non-Hispanic white adults (conducted from 2021 to 2025) that support for white nationalism is (1) higher among white people encountering personal hardship and local social distress, consistent with strain theories3,16; (2) unrelated to local racial composition or recent demographic change, complicating status threat accounts4,17,18; and (3) elevated among white people with close friendships primarily online, consistent with theories of extremism driven by online mobilization7,10,19.
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
What if all mathematics is grotesque and we found the tiny subset that happens to be pretty
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
What if mathematics is pretty because the mathematicians only look for pretty proofs. What if the upcoming swarms of LLMs find all the ugly theorems and ugly proofs. What if mathematics is just really ugly its just nobody ever looked
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
This is such a joy to read; after spending all week drowning in AI slop from left and right, just wonderful to read short, honest, funny, beautiful sentenced again
Cover: a journey round my skull, frigyes karinthy
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I grew up being told that the world was my oyster but I've yet to see the thing open
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Prediction: since LLMs still can't innovate but are great at working from what we give them, we will get technically far better papers answering more boring, safer questions
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I was wondering whether I looked at my old papers through rose-tinted glasses, so I gave one of them to Opus with instructions to critically assess. More brutal than reviewer #3 on the methodological shortcomings. May need to lie down
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Annaliese Mason @annaliesemason.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
My faculty is advertising a tenured open-call #cropscience / #plantscience professorship linked to the PhenoRob Excellence Cluster at Uni Bonn, Germany - apply until 30th Sep :) www.uni-bonn.de/de/universit...
uni-bonn.de
W2 Professorship within the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob
W2 Professorship
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Seeing the scienceblogs.de comment section quoted in a 'AI solves old riddle' post gives me the strangest flashbacks
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Every iteration of frontier LLMs writes worse English. I see Opus sentences so random, they may as well have come from a Hidden Markov Model. Structurally sound nonsense
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
What if the accelerationists were right after all
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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
For anyone not following the drama, there's been apparently a big development in ai math, along with some accusations of very bad behavior by OpenAI. But we don't have details yet. If I understand it, Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge made a big discovery on Navier-Stokes. Events go something like this:
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Another week of typing things into Claude Code, then reading what it says, then accepting, then typing in more things
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Another week, another "university underpays staff by millions" scandal thewest.com.au/news/educati...
thewest.com.au
Probe uncovers Perth University underpaid staff by $5m
Murdoch University has shelled out nearly $5 million in backpay to hundreds of staff members after underpaying them for a decade.
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Dazza!!! But a) its funny that they gave the rat names and b) the winner is Hero, what nominative determinism
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Every sommelier wears a suspiciously large hat
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Last year, I publicly complained multiple times (see e.g. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...) that the open access movement had been captured by publishers, and we are now worse off than before open access. Well people got mad at me for saying it. But I think things are still getting worse.
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Katharina Hoff @katharinahoff.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
A revolution in annotating protein coding genes in eukaryotes: Richard Krieg, Joscha Diehl & @masta.bsky.social developed Vipsania, a genome foundation model with integrated HMM-layer: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🎉💐 So impressive work! Congratulations!
biorxiv.org
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Claus Wilke @clauswilke.com · 30/08/2026
I'm really frustrated by the constant fear-mongering about AI-designed superviruses. Can we focus on the things that should actually worry us, such as measles? blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/im-sorry-y...
blog.genesmindsmachines.com
I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus
God save us from economists who think they can competently talk about biology
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I will be able to give you tips!
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Yeah! Someone! (I do wonder why we don't have transcripts that fit known disease-relevant protein isoforms)
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I am in the process of becoming the worst version of myself. That's an accomplishment
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
May I interest you in some flounder of wishes? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fis...
en.wikipedia.org
The Fisherman and His Wife - Wikipedia
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Today I learned that the many ensembl transcripts per human gene aren't really linked to the isoforms on Uniprot - even if you translate the transcripts chances are, most won't fit a Uniprot isoform. How strange!
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Outside ot the US, postdocs are regular staff. It's always interesting to see Americans justify their unusual ways to themselves
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Toby Hodges @tobyhodges.carpentries.org · 27/08/2026
This was a difficult blog post to write, but an important one. With the impending reduction in Core Team capacity, we had to make tough decisions about what work we put down. [1/4]
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
This is such a delightful talk - what an energy! youtu.be/656058JxTM0?... His book on how he traced the hacks in 1986, The Cuckoo's Egg, is one of my favorite books
youtu.be
DefCon 34 - Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later - Cliff Stoll
YouTube video by DEFCONConference
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Those Isekai anime setups are getting desperate
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
*bioinformatician. Aaah!!!
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Optimist: The cup is half full. Pessimist: The cup is half empty. Bioinformitician: you thought the cup had content, but that is based on a long-disappeared postdoc's Perl script's outputs, which by the way you can't replicate using new data, and by this point you doubt whether there ever was a cup
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
I have watched the German remake of IT Crowd and it's exactly like what it sounds like (never made it past the pilot)
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The Carpentries @carpentries.carpentries.org · 19/08/2026
The Carpentries Executive Director @drkariljordan.carpentries.org and Associate Director @erinstellabecker.bsky.social will step down on 1 September 2026. Dr. SherAaron Hurt will serve as Interim Executive Director for a 6-month term from 2 Sept. Full announcement: carpentries.org/blog/2026/08...
carpentries.org
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Genome Biology and Evolution @genomebiolevol.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Zhang et al. generate the first chromosome-scale, haplotype-resolved nuclear genome assembly for any Australian terrestrial orchid 🔗 academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... #societyjournal #genome #evolution
academic.oup.com
Interhaplotype Inversions and Repeat Expansion in the Sexually Deceptive Orchid Chiloglottis trapeziformis
Abstract. High-quality nuclear genome resources remain scarce for most orchids, particularly Australia's diverse terrestrial lineages. Chiloglottis trapezi
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Now that LLMs can write decent-ish, average-ish papers and journals are getting flooded with submissions, can we finally move beyond judging researchers by research output? No? Ah, thought so
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T. Ryan Gregory 🇨🇦 @tryangregory.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
If you're a biologist, especially one in a field that has a history of eugenics and racism (which absolutely includes my own field of evolutionary biology) and you choose to remain "neutral" as race science once again crawls out from under its rock, you are not in fact neutral.
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Book sale! Book sale!!!!
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
The newest Positron finally has in-line figures in Quarto documents!!!! No more blind describing of figures that render somewhere else Seems simple to display some figures but knowing computers, probably took a ridiculous amount of work
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Ill use the office microwave too!!!
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Idea of the day: I should microwave lutefisk
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
How come they release tenth anniversary remastered editions of records i could swear were released a few months ago
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 08/08/2026
initially seems good, but the more you use a tool like this, the more you lose your own ability to forecast cylones
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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Another piece of work i was involved in in a past life: capturing the gene content of wheat landraces 'missing' in elite lines www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Capturing the missing gene content of elite wheat by analysis of wheat landraces
There is a need to breed superior wheat cultivars to meet increasing global food demand. However, modern cultivars have undergone a substantial loss of genetic diversity due to intensive breeding. A p...
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