Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 1h

Our thanks to @gleonetwork.bsky.social for hosting this as part of its Limnoseries. And for this impressive catalogue of past workshops & talks on youtube - an excellent resource:

www.youtube.com/@gleonetwork...

GLEONetwork

www.youtube.com

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 1h

If you watch this video and go through the scripts (or attended live), we'd be happy to have your feedback!

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Feedback for GLEON experimental design workshop

Thank you for attending the GLEON workshop on 'How to design better experiments' by Mridul K. Thomas & Ravi Ranjan on 23/09/2025! This is a quick survey about your experience at the workshop. We are h...

docs.google.com

1

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 1h

R scripts and presentation:

github.com/mridulkthoma...

No need to be familiar with Github, just download two files at the link.

GitHub - mridulkthomas/experimental-design-limnoseries-workshop: Materials for workshop "How to Design Better Experiments"

Materials for workshop "How to Design Better Experiments" - mridulkthomas/experimental-design-limnoseries-workshop

github.com

1

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 1h

Our experimental design workshop had ~40 participants from >15 countries!

@raviranjan.bsky.social and I focused on refining ideas, estimating parameters precisely, leverage in linear & nonlinear regression, and using simulations to compare designs.

Presentation & R scripts in next post:

Limnoseries: How to Design Better Experiments

YouTube video by GLEONetwork

www.youtube.com

1 3

Reposted by Mridul K. Thomas

Chris Catano @chriscatano.bsky.social · 18d

I'm developing a grad course on experimental design (study design generally) & data analysis in biology. What topics, papers, etc. do you think are most important? If you teach something similar, I would love to hear what/how you teach (if you are willing to share a syllabus that would amazing!).

8 6 9

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 18d

Sure thing! And it's great that you're developing this - I think there's a real need that's broadly felt. Ravi and I taught a short online workshop on this just a couple of days ago and there was a fair amount of interest.

1

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 18d

On pseudoreplication, I remember the Hurlbert - Oksanen exchanges in the early 2000s being useful.

And following Cottingham et al. 2005, there's @jaytlennon.bsky.social 2011 enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... & Kreyling et al. 2018: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

To replicate, or not to replicate – that is the question: how to tackle nonlinear responses in ecological experiments

A fundamental challenge in experimental ecology is to capture nonlinearities of ecological responses to interacting environmental drivers. Here, we demonstrate that gradient designs outperform replic...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

2

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 18d

On this one aspect of experimental design (multiple driver studies), I'm part a working group that has written a couple of relevant papers in addition to the one Ravi mentioned:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29476630/ &
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The need for unrealistic experiments in global change biology

Climate change is an existential threat, and our ability to conduct experiments on how organisms will respond to it is limited by logistics and resour…

www.sciencedirect.com

2

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 29d

This looks great! Looking forward to trying it out.

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 29d

Thanks! There isn't a page specifically for this workshop or the series, but the general GLEON page is here: gleon.org

Perhaps more usefully, here are recordings of all previous workshops in the series:
www.youtube.com/@gleonetwork...

GLEONetwork

www.youtube.com

2

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · 29d

Thanks, Thomas!

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Sep 15

This @gleonetwork.bsky.social workshop series is aimed at limnologists but it's open to all. We are targetting PhD students and postdocs across the environmental sciences.

1 2 2

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Sep 15

@raviranjan.bsky.social & I are teaching a free online workshop with on experimental design for environmental scientists on the 23rd.

We'll focus on using simulations to evaluate how well different experimental designs help achieve your goals.

Please sign up & share! forms.gle/MZTxeQs4UpMr...

Poster for 90 minute workshop on HOW TO DESIGN BETTER EXPERIMENTS, by Mridul Thomas & Ravi Ranjan.

Details: September 23rd 16:00 CEST ; 14:00 UTC

Description:

Experimental designs can make or break an experiment. A good experiment has a clear goal and efficiently uses experimental resources to achieve that goal. In this workshop, we will review what experiments are for, basic and advanced principles of designing experiments, and how to use simulations to evaluate designs before actually doing the
experiment. We’ll do a moderate amount of coding in R and so experience with this would be helpful but is not required. We intend to have small-group discussions to help participants develop their own experiments, and encourage participants to think of a specific question they would like to answer with an experiment.

2 21 27

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Sep 10

Timely as always, @xkcd.com

xkcd.com/3140/

1 9

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Sep 10

Discovered that SAR11 has proteorhodopsin and wanted to declare it an honorary phytoplankton. It produces ATP in light! But this only slows death in the absence of carbon and does not increase growth otherwise.

Is it a photoheterotroph? Chemoheterotroph? Is photomixotroph a word? I'm baffled.

1

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Sep 8

Lunar eclipse over the waters

5

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Sep 4

Original paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature

In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

www.nature.com

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Sep 4

I don't really understand this yet but it's some of the most interesting and bizarre biology I've ever encountered.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother

Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

www.nature.com

1 2 15

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Aug 23

Sure, done!

1

Reposted by Mridul K. Thomas

HIFMB @hifmb.de · Jun 23

The call for our 2026 Postdoc Cohort is now open. We offer 4 full-time positions. Apply until August 24th. hifmb.de/jobs
Please spread the word.
#postdoc #jobsinscience #marinebiodiversity #antarctica
@awi.de @hillebr1.bsky.social @ibaums.bsky.social @thilogross.bsky.social @merenbey.bsky.social 🦑

24 28

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Aug 4

My first Amanita muscaria! Spotted this weekend by @joelyndelima.bsky.social

4

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Jul 28

A good day to celebrate the bitingly hilarious lyrical genius of Tom Lehrer.

Retired from his relatively short musical career...to teach maths at Harvard, MIT, and UCSC. Worked briefly at Los Alamos and the NSA. And mercilessly satirised every system he encountered.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvhY...

Tom Lehrer - The Vatican Rag - fabulous version - LIVE FILM From Copenhagen in 1967

YouTube video by The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel

www.youtube.com

3

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Jul 19

I'm not sure what exactly you'd put priors on here but I recently learnt that you can even put priors on R^2 (arxiv.org/abs/1609.00046), so I imagine you're right.

Bayesian Regression Using a Prior on the Model Fit: The R2-D2 Shrinkage Prior

Prior distributions for high-dimensional linear regression require specifying a joint distribution for the unobserved regression coefficients, which is inherently difficult. We instead propose a new c...

arxiv.org

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Jul 18

I will never understand how this became so influential. Instead of using either evidence-based teaching or tried-and-tested methods (both defensible), we somehow ended up with fad-based education.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language

Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited[8] educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children. The method became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK in the 1980s and 1990s,[7] despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness.[9] It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally.[10][11][12]

Mridul K. Thomas @mridulkthomas.bsky.social · Jul 16

Just learned about the existence of shape-constrained GAMs and they seem rather useful!

In species distribution modelling: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Code: fundacion-azti.github.io/gam-niche/sh...

Original paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Modelling species presence–absence in the ecological niche theory framework using shape-constrained generalized additive models

According to ecological niche theory, species response curves are unimodal with respect to environmental gradients. A variety of statistical methods h…

www.sciencedirect.com

1 3 10