James Galbraith
@gulbruth.bsky.social
740 followers 720 following 59 posts
Evolutionary biologist, Luddite, coffee addict. Postdoc at University of Edinburgh researching the evolution of weird chromosomes and sex determination in insects, opinions my own, he/him.
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Reposted by James Galbraith
ucuedinburgh.bsky.social
“We don’t see how the university can continue to provide quality education to students with drastic reductions in staff. Management does not appear to be listening—students may [be] able to insist they do.” Sophia Woodman UCU Edinburgh President
Edinburgh University spends thousands on chancellors bills while staff fear redundancy
The UCU have called the chancellor's perks a 'slap in the face' to striking staff
thetab.com
Reposted by James Galbraith
ryanestrada.com
If you do find your name, go here to file to get your money!

www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com
gulbruth.bsky.social
This is the most entertaining and most genuine piece of cinema I've watched I quite a while.
Reposted by James Galbraith
molbioevol.bsky.social
Red devil spiders from the Canary Islands have a genome half the size of mainland counterparts - Pisarenco, @jrozasub.bsky.social et al. show how purifying selection against slightly deleterious DNA and TE insertions is the primary mechanism.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf206

#evobio #molbio #TEsky
How Did Evolution Halve Genome Size During an Oceanic Island Colonization?
Abstract. Red devil spiders of the genus Dysdera colonized the Canary Islands and underwent an extraordinary diversification. Notably, their genomes are ne
doi.org
Reposted by James Galbraith
rachelmoran.bsky.social
First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Top left: Results of genome-wide association study (GWAS) for sex in E. caeruleum, E. radiosum, and E. spectabile showing sex chromosome turnover has occurred repeatedly. Top right: Phylogeny showing sex chromosome turnover in darters and non-darter percids. Chromosome 9 is the putative ancestral sex chromosome, shared by Perca flavescens and multiple members of the orangethroat darter complex (e.g., E. spectabile, E. pulchellum). Bottom: Schematic depicting repeated turnover of sex chromosomes as a mechanism to resolve mitonuclear conflict and promote speciation.
Reposted by James Galbraith
tomtanuki.bsky.social
HOW NEO-NAZIS CAPTURED THE MARCH FOR AUSTRALIA

WATCH: youtu.be/GLRoFdeI_5Y

Documenting the crowd manipulation tricks deployed by the National Socialist Network to transform nationalist 'Marches for Australia' into, effectively, national socialist marches.
Reposted by James Galbraith
gulbruth.bsky.social
Sorry for the sass, I'm just sick of seeing articles in what I thought were reputable journals, painting a canvas of futuristic AI as the Messiah that will save us from war, climate change, famine and disease "soon" with "PhD level knowledge".
gulbruth.bsky.social
Just leaving this here for any academics who still get LLMs to summarise literature for them without any critical examination of their own. Check the authors of Nature opinions pieces pumping 'AI'. Many are employees of Microsoft etc., the only people who truly profit from this.
rebeccasear.bsky.social
“The study authors asked GPT 4o-mini to evaluate the quality of 217 papers. The tool didn’t mention in any of the reports that the papers being analyzed had been retracted or had validity issues.

In 190 cases, GPT described the papers as world leading, internationally excellent, or close to that”
ChatGPT tends to ignore retractions on scientific papers
Study finds the chatbot doesn’t acknowledge concerns with problematic studies
cen.acs.org
Reposted by James Galbraith
joelpick.bsky.social
🚨Introducing the @sortee.bsky.social Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology🚨 doi.org/10.32942/X24...

Increasingly E&E journals are recruiting data editors. We provide standardised guidelines for journals with data editors and those wanting to recruit them 🧵
The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
doi.org
Reposted by James Galbraith
sagitaninta.bsky.social
Mike Ritchie reminded to publish in your society journals to keep things rolling. Overpriced journals from big publishers did not circle back their money to society!

Surprised the EU still need to be reminded, I thought many funding bodies acknowledged review-community platforms.

#ESEB2025
Reposted by James Galbraith
iwriteok.bsky.social
Ed's got a significant scoop here, an under-the-hood look at GPT5 that suggests why it feels like such a step back to users. The incompetence from OpenAI here is truly remarkable.
edzitron.com
Here's a bonus ep of Better Offline. I report on how OpenAI’s new "router-based" ChatGPT-5 makes it impossible for OpenAI to cache the static prompt for any model or tool it uses every single prompt, doubling token burn for mediocre gains.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...
Linktr.ee/betteroffline
Exclusive: How GPT-5 Actually Works
Podcast Episode · Better Offline · 08/22/2025 · 29m
podcasts.apple.com
Reposted by James Galbraith
englishse.bsky.social
To be, or not to be, part-time in academia?
This is a tricky question that has faced many of us and in @elife.bsky.social we discuss the benefits and challenges of being part-time. With @emiliapsantos.bsky.social and a fantastic, interdisciplinary team!
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
Point of View: To be, or not to be, part-time in academia
Part-time working can be beneficial for individual academics, and also for academia as a whole.
elifesciences.org
gulbruth.bsky.social
Does selfing allow or even lead to massive genome reshuffling, expansion and sky high homozygousity? Come and find out at posters 29 and 42 this afternoon, only at #eseb2025 and learn about an organism whose genome looks like it went through a blender and came out high repetitive and homozygous.
Reposted by James Galbraith
cwarzel.bsky.social
Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it
AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event
Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.
www.theatlantic.com
Reposted by James Galbraith
bdelloid.bsky.social
The original circos plot? From the 1947-1948 Carnegie Yearbook, the page prior to McClintock's Mutable Loci in Maize paper.
An old image of a salivary gland chromosome from Drosophila melanogaster, with lines across different segments indicating contact points.
gulbruth.bsky.social
Is anyone else having problems with #NCBI Datasets today? It's completely broken for me on both macOS and Windows.
Reposted by James Galbraith
heinersalomon.bsky.social
I am wildly paraphrasing, but the best commentary I have seen so far is this:

Bringing AI into a learning institute is like bringing a fork lift to the gym. Sure, both accomplish the task at hand better than you, but you still fail do accomplish the thing you went there for in the first place.
gulbruth.bsky.social
Waiting with for next week's announcement of a deal with McKinsey to find more roles for consultants within government departments
danmcquillan.bsky.social
'OpenAI signs deal with UK to find government uses for its models' www.theguardian.com/technology/2... Neatly captures the abject state of technopolitics. We should start with people's basic needs then ask if LLMs are the most appropriate answer (guess what, they aren't!)
OpenAI signs deal with UK to find government uses for its models
Wide-ranging agreement with artificial intelligence firm behind ChatGPT comes after similar UK deal with Google
www.theguardian.com
gulbruth.bsky.social
A good example on why when you find nonsense papers it's worth checking an author's previous work - you often end up finding gems like.