Notices by Albert Cardona (albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz)

Position available: Assistant Professor in Neurobiology (tenure-track) at Tufts University: School of Arts & Sciences: Biology.

https://apply.interfolio.com/193894

#neuroscience #academia #FediHire #PhDJobs

@thomasfuchs

Weizenbaum's opening is quite something:

«Science promised man power. But, as so often happens when people are seduced by promises of power... the price actually paid is servitude and impotence.»
—Joseph Weizenbaum

#ComputerScience

@thomasfuchs

Thankfully it can be undone via about:config (set browser.nova.enabled to false). But indeed very annoying and for no reason whatsoever.

The Bernstein Conference also warns of scams affecting attendees, just like the Gordon Research Seminar I posted earlier:

"Beware of Scam Emails"
"We are aware of an increasing number of scam emails related to scientific conferences, including fraudulent accommodation offers. Please note that all official conference communication will be sent exclusively through our verified channels."

https://bernstein-network.de/en/bernstein-conference/

What has the world come to, predating upon a bunch of scientists attending a conference ...

That plus the actually predatory conferences, and the carbon footprint problem, all advocates for videoconference only, despite the many shortcomings.

#academia

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@libreoffice/117172222073531706

A must-read for anyone who uses LibreOffice and cares about the possibility of continuing to use it. Note:

“Advertising-supported software is funded by attention; subscription-based software is funded by the ability to revoke access; and data-driven software is funded by surveillance. TDF has ruled out all three of these options, leaving only the possibility of donations.”

And if you use LibreOffice at work, get your company to buy it. It’s the right thing to do, in the best interest of the company.

A student was telling me, they haven’t read some papers I asked them to read because it takes them a very long time.

Well, let me tell you: it took me 20 days (with 2-4 hours per day) to read a single large paper in my field, to understand the multiple years of work that went into it with its many implications for my own research and for the broader field. 20 days. And it was worth it.

There are no shortcuts.

#academia

The lab of Xiaotang Lu is hiring, at University of Illinois. From her lab's webpage:

«Three Postdoc positions are immediately open

a) Biochemistry: experience in protein engineering, molecular probe design, preparation, and the application of advanced imaging platforms to complex tissue samples.

b) Neurobiology: experience in systems neuroscience, circuit neuroscience, and related diseases.

c) Computational science: experience in large imaging data segmentation and analysis, and/or computational protein design.»

https://neurolab.chemistry.illinois.edu/recruit

See also her research page, on the chemistry of #connectomics
https://neurolab.chemistry.illinois.edu/research

#neuroscience #PhDJobs #FediHire

"Efficient robot navigation inspired by honeybee learning flights", Ou et al. 2026 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10461-3

" ‘Bee-Nav’, a highly efficient navigation strategy inspired by the visual learning flights of honeybees. In equivalent robotic learning flights, a tiny neural network is trained to map omnidirectional images to a home vector based on path integration. After learning, the robot can fly far away from home, come straight back using path integration and cancel integration drift using the visual homing network"

"In real-world indoor and outdoor experiments, a small drone successfully returned to within 0.5 m of home for 100% of 30–110-m flights and 70% of 200–600-m flights in windy conditions, using 3.4-kB and 42-kB neural networks, respectively."

Honeybees still do better, but hey, it's a good start. Now imagine we had the whole honeybee #connectome mapped.

#neuroscience #robotics #honeybees #drones

@ariadne

Gentoo, on the other hand, has a clear policy against it:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy

I wonder what they'll do about the linux kernel itself.

2+2 years position for a software engineer / data scientist with serious programming chops in my lab at the #MRCLMB to develop tech for #connectomics and #neuroscience :

https://fa-evzn-saasfaukgovprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/UKRI-Careers/job/2250

Please do share with suitable candidates, and feel free to reach out via email to discuss details.

Deadline for application: May 10th.

Starting date: any within 2026.

Requires Masters plus industry experience, or a PhD in a suitable field – and demonstrable experience in software engineering.

Please help disseminate – either here or by copy-pasting onto emails or messages. Thank you!

#PhDJobs #neuroscience #SoftwareEngineering #jobs #ScienceJobs

So much energy, right over our homes, that can be harvested, used, stored.

Gale winds over the UK right now.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/04/04/2200Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-3.67,56.09,607

#RenewableEnergy

@sellathechemist

“Limited but cheap”, one wonders how we got here.

Biological Laboratory – a Lego set proposal, created by one of our lab members, Chu-Cheng.
https://beta.ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/ab52d2c2-0688-48e7-a7d1-77ae54a6aa4b

In his words: "The playability, esthetics of this design, together with the most important, educational value, make it a perfect set for Lego ideas product."

Still some days to support it, needs to gather a lot more support beyond the present 2,100 to reach manufacturing. How many scientists are there in Mastodon?

#Lego #science #laboratory

An editor from a Springer Nature journal, a company that posted $2.1 billion in revenue in 2022 [1], from an industry with double-digit percent profits (~30% [2]), kindly asked me, an academic in the UK where salaries continue to plummet [3], whether I would be pleased to review a paper for them, for free ... so I kindly asked whether they would consider paying me. It is only logical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Nature
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
[3] In UK academia, "Pay has fallen significantly in real terms since 2009, as have pension contributions, and redundancies are rife. Short-term contracts and precarious work arrangements are common, especially for younger staff, as universities struggle to balance their books." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/28/vice-chancellor-salaries-university-bosses-rich/

#ScientificPublishing #academia

I keep hearing about the "slopocalipse" coming to scientific publishing, and I can't but think: it was already happening before LLMs became "good enough" at writing academic prose. What hasn't been addressed is the root cause: the incentives. The publish-or-perish approach to science evaluation, for grants and positions.

Want a solution? Limit publications to one per author per year. You can publish more when in collaboration, i.e., make it fractional. The end goal: make people think what brick they want to supply to the edifice of science. As a bonus, *reward* scientists when they publish *less than* one paper per year.

And the business models based on journal APCs can all die a sudden death now.

#ScientificPublishing #academia #slopocalipse

@GenomeBiolEvol

Hardly surprising but good genetic diversity of chicken livestock was measured.

An ethical committee approval is needed to work with 1.5 millimetre-long squids in the UK, says the Home Office officer who just came back from a trip to the Mediterranean that included many a meal with 25 cm-long grilled squids.

Oh, you are working with late embryos prior to hatching? Then no ethical permits are required. The honorary primate status, i.e., "sentient beings", is only for hatched, free-living cephalopods.

So prior to hatching, cephalopods aren't sentient beings?

In any case, bear in mind these 1.5-mm squids have ~30,000 neurons, about 1/5th of those in the brain of a fruit fly that the same officer doesn't hesitate to squash with an adroit flick of the hand. And for which no permits are required, whatsoever.

And a honeybee, with 600,000 neurons in its brain, is not a sentient being?

None of this will ever make any sense to me. It is not science. Perhaps not even politics. I don't know what it is.

#academia #cephalopods #UK #neuroscience

"The official European joke", by @ploum
https://ploum.net/the-european-joke/index.html

Hilarious. Because it's tragic. Because it's true.

#jokes #EU #Europe

@adredish

This is not normal. What a time. If mid-term elections aren't held, or the result – hopefully an overwhelming tide against the current regime – isn't held, the whole world will pass on the US.

@adredish

True. By who?