Kevin Bonham
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Kevin Bonham
@kevinbonham.com
1K followers 1K following 690 posts
Assistant Professor at Tufts Medicine studying microbes, brains, and the immune system 🚽🦠🧠

Fermenter, gardener, Zen Buddhist. Ask me about #julialang!

🎙️: https://audiommunity.org
🌎: https://blog.bonham.ch
💻: https://GitHub.com/kescobo
Posts Replies Media Videos
kevinbonham.com
This construction happening right outside of my office for the past few weeks regularly shaking my entire building feels like a metaphor for something, I just don't know what.
November 25, 2025 at 7:21 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
apricity.black
I am mad and ugly crying for those poor babies. It’s a terrible way for an infant to suffer. It is 100% preventable. I want to harm the people who caused this.
November 25, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
badphysicist.bsky.social
Document programming in #Typst and #LuaLaTeX: some examples

t.co/wKrWZOS5MW
https://lee-phillips.org/TLexamples/
t.co
November 23, 2025 at 6:48 PM
kevinbonham.com
@theharvardcrimson.bsky.social has been killing it.
jfallows.bsky.social James Fallows @jfallows.bsky.social · 3d
Student Journalists (Again) Showing Us How dept:

—@theharvardcrimson.bsky.social plays latest 'Harvard about to cave' story the way it should. Ie, as another MAGA claim. (Left image)

—Gives "well, actually...." context missing from most MSM reports. (Right)

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
Headline: "White House Renews Claims That Settlement With Harvard Is Close." News story: McMahon’s remarks Thursday aren’t the first time the Trump administration has said it is close to a settlement with Harvard. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the White House was on the verge of finalizing a deal with Harvard. When he first announced in June that talks had resumed, he predicted that an agreement would be reached “in the next week or so.” More than four months later, no deal has been announced. Trump previously told reporters in the Oval Office on Sept. 30 that the White House had “reached a deal” for a settlement with Harvard before clarifying that the agreement had not yet been finalized. “All you have to do is paper it, right?” Trump said to McMahon. “It’ll be great.” Trump said in September that reaching a deal would mean that Harvard’s “sins are forgiven.” A settlement would likely resolve multiple federal investigations into the University, which have targeted everything from its ties to the Chinese government to its financial aid formulas. It might also halt attempts to force Harvard to stop enrolling international students and protect the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding that Harvard researchers receive each year. But the pressure on Harvard to accede to a deal lightened somewhat after a series of favorable decisions from federal judges. A judge agreed this summer to Harvard’s requests to temporarily block revocation of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification and a Trump order that would prevent many of Harvard’s international students from entering the U.S. In response to a separate lawsuit by Harvard, a judge agreed to restore billions of dollars in multiyear federal funding that the Trump administration attempted to freeze this spring.
November 22, 2025 at 10:58 PM
kevinbonham.com
I already have too much travel planned for 2026, but wish I could go to this 🧪
wimpouw.bsky.social wimpouw @wimpouw.bsky.social · 4d
Academic publishing is broken due to for-profit actors. Time to explore alternatives as researchers → A Diamond Open Access conference, Feb 5-6, 2026 in Nijmegen NL.

Free registration (limited seats): horizondiamond.nl

Let's build a sustainable publishing infrastructure together.
November 21, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
nicoleackermans.com
I had a wonderful time with Kevin and Matt on Audiomunnity talking about my recent brain injury review - we mostly laughed our butts off but managed to talk some immunity as well.
Check it out wherever you get your podcasts! 🧪 🎙️
audiommunity.org audiommunity.org @audiommunity.org · 5d
This title isn't about the HHS secretary!

This was an amazing conversation about Headbutting (it's related to #immunology, we swear) with @nicoleackermans.com 🧪, who just published a review describing the last 10,000 years of human thought on animals bashing skulls

audiommunity.org/episodes/epi...
Episode 49 - Scratch that itchy worm in your head
YouTube video by Audiommunity
youtu.be
November 20, 2025 at 3:15 PM
kevinbonham.com
This was a super fun conversation - quite different from our typical fare on @audiommunity.org!

Among other things, I learned that whales have an anatomical feature called "the junk", that woodpeckers and hummingbirds' tongues *don't* wrap around their skulls, and science snark exists everywhere!🧪
audiommunity.org audiommunity.org @audiommunity.org · 5d
This title isn't about the HHS secretary!

This was an amazing conversation about Headbutting (it's related to #immunology, we swear) with @nicoleackermans.com 🧪, who just published a review describing the last 10,000 years of human thought on animals bashing skulls

audiommunity.org/episodes/epi...
Episode 49 - Scratch that itchy worm in your head
YouTube video by Audiommunity
youtu.be
November 20, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
audiommunity.org
This title isn't about the HHS secretary!

This was an amazing conversation about Headbutting (it's related to #immunology, we swear) with @nicoleackermans.com 🧪, who just published a review describing the last 10,000 years of human thought on animals bashing skulls

audiommunity.org/episodes/epi...
Episode 49 - Scratch that itchy worm in your head
YouTube video by Audiommunity
youtu.be
November 20, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
kristenefunk.bsky.social
Assistant Professor position posted for my Department, Biological Sciences at UNC Charlotte! Current research foci: Immunology, Microbiology, Virology; Biomolecular Function; Proteostasis; Genome Integrity; Epigenome Regulation; Cancer; Environmental Risks. jobs.charlotte.edu/postings/65141
Assistant Professor
Applicants should possess a Ph.D. in the biological sciences or related fields.Candidates are expected to document expertise in their specialty by a record of postdoctoral training, peer reviewed publ...
jobs.charlotte.edu
November 19, 2025 at 2:16 PM
kevinbonham.com
This video is well worth watching. Excuse me while I go make a donation to the wikimedia foundation
Wikipedia and the Destruction of Trust
YouTube video by Hank Green
www.youtube.com
November 18, 2025 at 5:42 PM
kevinbonham.com
This should be fun! With @woodrufflab.bsky.social 🧪
audiommunity.org audiommunity.org @audiommunity.org · 7d
Excited to be talking to @nicoleackermans.com today about her work on headbutting in animals throughout the centuries! Do you have burning questions about neuroinflammation in bighorn sheep or the differences between woodpeckers and football players? Let us know!

🧪
November 18, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
anthonymoser.com
All of this natural language everything is a kind of attack on formal systems as tools of expertise

it bakes in a layer of imprecision that makes it harder to express things that capital does not want expressed, and harder to notice the ways it constrains and shapes expression
November 16, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
beebrookshire.bsky.social
CAN LLMs write about science? @science.org decided to find out, and they did it the curious, scientific way. They did an experiment.

Love this thoughtful convo. www.lastwordonnothing.com/2025/11/12/w...
The Last Word On Nothing | Why AAAS won’t be using AI to write press releases anytime soon
www.lastwordonnothing.com
November 13, 2025 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
microbiomevif.bsky.social
Healthy microbiome—moving towards functional interpretation
by 🇵🇱Kinga Zielińska

Check out the paper: academic.oup.com/gigascience/...

2/3
MVIF 43
November 12, 2025 at 3:22 PM
kevinbonham.com
Apologies to folks using the RSS, this episode was a bit delayed (because I broke the feed). But it's good, you should listen to it! 🧪
audiommunity.org audiommunity.org @audiommunity.org · 19d
In the latest episode, we're talking neonatal Tregs! What are they? Still don't know! What do they do? Still don't know! Where do they go? Ahh, the right question - it's the skin of course!

With special guest @zackhilt.bsky.social 🧪 #immunology
Episode 48 - The tyranny f the FACS machine
YouTube video by Audiommunity
www.youtube.com
November 11, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
maxjtelford.bsky.social
My book 'The Tree of Life' is published in the USA and Canada today.

Available as book, on kindle and as audio.

I would be really grateful for reposts.

www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So...
www.amazon.ca/Tree-Life-So...
Cover of book titled The Tree of Life: solving science's greatest puzzle.
November 11, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
drannieandrews.com
That feeling when you are so mad and sad and frustrated and disappointed and activated that you want to just run for office yourself and then you realize you already are.
November 11, 2025 at 3:17 AM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
gbbranstetter.bsky.social
I'm in @thenation.com this morning on the repeated failure of transphobia as political strategy, efforts to scapegoat trans people for Democrats' own failures, and Zohran Mamdani's model of solidarity
For any politician facing them, there are two ways of handling these attacks: by promising to care less about trans people or by promising to care more about everyone. If you are not responsive to the needs and interests of a broad coalition of working people, you can be more easily caricatured as dedicated to the interests of some nefarious (and often racialized) other. But if you do have a compelling vision for how to improve all people’s lives, the fact that not all of those people are the same carries less weight. It is true that many Americans would rather starve than share a table with someone they view as less deserving or too deviant from their own experience. But it’s especially true if all that’s on the menu is scraps.
November 7, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
badphysicist.bsky.social
“Practical Julia” is designed to teach scientists how to use the best language for science, with chapters on #physics, #mathematics, #biology, #statistics, and more.

amzn.to/3Jn1QdR

A review: lwn.net/Articles/966...

#julialang
Practical Julia: A Hands-On Introduction for Scientific Minds
Practical Julia: A Hands-On Introduction for Scientific Minds: 9781718502765: Computer Science Books @ Amazon.com
amzn.to
November 6, 2025 at 9:55 PM
kevinbonham.com
Like deciding to rob a corner store at gun-point because you saw someone snag a couple of pennies from the give-a-penny/take-a-penny tray that they didn't actually need
queenofthesouth.bsky.social Kayla B @queenofthesouth.bsky.social · 19d
Elon musk is finna be a trillionaire after he destroyed the Federal government and murdered people. But you want me to be mad that 3% of people who get SNAP are getting it fraudulently.
November 6, 2025 at 11:58 PM
kevinbonham.com
Am dad, can confirm
sarahjeong.bsky.social sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 19d
incredible pun work in the replies. bluesky, the official social network for dads
sarahjeong.bsky.social sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 20d
logging back on to discover the jury did not return a verdict in the sandwich guy case. what the fuck lol
November 6, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
sarahjeong.bsky.social
incredible pun work in the replies. bluesky, the official social network for dads
sarahjeong.bsky.social sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 20d
logging back on to discover the jury did not return a verdict in the sandwich guy case. what the fuck lol
November 6, 2025 at 2:58 PM
kevinbonham.com
Man doesn't believe in germ theory, but thinks heart attacks might be contagious?
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 19d
RFK Jr's response to someone collapsing nearby him was to haul ass out of the room as quickly as possible
November 6, 2025 at 7:24 PM
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
chribue.bsky.social
And we have another open position, this time with a focus on Genome Biology! Join a great community in Vienna to bring your research to the next level!
maxperutzlabs.ac.at Max Perutz Labs Vienna @maxperutzlabs.ac.at · 20d
📢 Open Call! The Max Perutz Labs invite applications for a Tenure-Track Professorship in Genome Biology. We are particularly interested in researchers investigating the molecular and biophysical mechanisms underlying genome function and regulation. More details ➡️ tinyurl.com/3t7vvdct
November 6, 2025 at 4:35 AM