Notices by Albert Cardona (albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz)

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?

@rspfau I envision this as a second tab on the on-screen keyboard, one in which handwriting gets converted to typed text. How hard can it be (famous last words - a la we didn't do it because we thought it was easy, but because we thought it was going to be easy).

@rspfau Indeed, thanks, I am looking for a keyboard whose input isn't keys but a handwriting board that converts to typed words, ideally plus a list of suggested words.

If someone knows of an on-screen handwriting input application for linux - like a keyboard but for handwriting - please let me know.

The ones I found are based on tesseract OCR, which targets typed font, or use Wine to run Microsoft's Surface software. Neither is a proper option.

Kind of shocked Gnome or KDE don't have one for their on-screen keyboards.

#linux #handwriting

@nikitonsky

Yep:
https://mechanicalminutes.com/2025/05/31/water-resistant-watches-what-ratings-really-mean/

Any watch marked at less than "100M" should not be considered waterproof.

@nikitonsky

Not unlike the vocabulary that the food industry uses ...

* "fresh" means it's always been refrigerated. E.g., for orange juice, it's always been in a cold tank, perhaps for a year.
* "100%" means there aren't any other ingredients. E.g., for orange juice, after a year in a tank taste has deteriorated so extract from orange skin is added in.
* "organic" means the produce has been certified by a third-party. What the certification involves is far less clear, and includes almost always the use of pesticides that aren't "synthetic", like, say, extracted from toxic plants, which aren't necessarily good for you.

... and so on.

#FoodIndustry #MisleadingAdvertising

"nearly 70% of the human population of the Earth currently possesses a smartphone, and these devices constitute about 95% of internet access-points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/18/how-can-we-defend-ourselves-from-the-new-plague-of-human-fracking