Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 34m

@cdelawalla.bsky.social that thing your grandma thinks about dirt, pets, etc and the immune system is probably a misconception of the hygiene hypothesis en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene...

It's legit that avoiding microbes has implications for your immune system (though nothing to do with vaccines)

Hygiene hypothesis - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 1h

I personally think this is a terrible idea. Don't replace human biases, that we can ask and reason about with AI model biases that we can't

Anand Ray @anandray.bsky.social · 8h

Excellent idea. I wish we could replace human reviewers (and their inherent biases) with AI some day soon. Be it in publishing or in grant evaluation.

Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 2h

Are there any data protection policies in place?

I tend to be pretty open with stuff, but a major barrier for a lot of people is worry that their grants or manuscripts are going to get sniped, and a lot of journals have explicitly policies about sharing manuscripts in review

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 23h

Nice work! Now redo it in @typst.app and have something cleaner and more robust 😉

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Reposted by Kevin Bonham

Laurel Joy Gabard-Durnam @laurelgd.bsky.social · 1d

LOVELY people, collaborative place, excellent top 10 program! Incredible opportunity, please help us share widely!

Joshua Curtiss @psychonetrics.bsky.social · 1d

🚨Job Alert!! Please share widely!!🚨

Where: Applied Psychology, Northeastern University

What: Clinical Professor (open rank), as new program director for our Master of Science in Counseling Psychology

Why: We are a fun department 🎉 Please apply!!

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 1d

Calvin and Hobbes has a whole story line where Calvin clones himself to have someone to do his chores while he gets to play, but the clone doesn't want to either, and clones _himself_ and on and on.

Not quite the same thing, but ballpark?

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 1d

Oh yeah, I didn't mean to suggest you were implying that. Only saying that it is hard to think of the shape of the Phoenix coming out of the ashes, as opposed to clawing back the (admittedly imperfect status quo

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 2d

There's the tiniest sliver of truth in some of the criticisms of the funding regime as it existed. But that model, for its flaws, was incredibly successful at generating knowledge and fueling innovation.

I have plenty of ideas for incremental improvement, but very worried about burning it all down

Dr. Katharine Dickson @metaomicsnerd.bsky.social · 2d

I believe there is an opportunity lying somewhere in the heap of destruction that Trump is wreaking on our national scientific apparatus.

How can we build something even better than what we had?

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Reposted by Kevin Bonham

Nicholas Bauer PhD @bioturbonick.net · 3d

Hey @massgovernor.bsky.social , what are you doing about this?

Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 3d

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago

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A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 5d

"fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone."

Any institution planning to capitulate needs to articulate why they disagree with this. Powerful message from MIT 🧪

orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart

orgchart.mit.edu

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 5d

Typst is the #julialang of typesetting languages - I hope to never write LaTeX again!

Now, if I could only convince my bio collaborators to use it for manuscript writing + git version control 🤔

Typst @typst.app · 5d

We need your help to get Typst 0.14 over the finish line: The release candidate with accessible PDFs, character-level justification (not even in LaTeX!), and more landed today! Check your documents, packages and against "Typst 0.14.0 Testing" on the web or the new compiler.

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 6d

Ah yes, I remember this chapter in that science philosophy classic "Conjectures, Refutations, and Making Shit Up", by Karl Popper (1962) 🧪

archive.org/details/karl...

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Reposted by Kevin Bonham

Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 6d

"We're doing the studies to make the proof."

This is not how Gold Standard Science works. Or any science. You do the study to TEST THE HYPOTHESIS, not to prove yourself right.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 6d

RFK Jr on Tylenol and autism: "It is not proof. We're doing the studies to make the proof."

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 6d

Make complex shapes in inkscape! Video 4 in an ongoing set of tutorials - using Inkscape for scientists 🧪

youtu.be/7SfNC-QCDQQ

Inkscape for scientists 4 - Complex shapes

YouTube video by Kevin Bonham

youtu.be

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Reposted by Kevin Bonham

Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 6d

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

nyti.ms

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 7d

Reviewer 1: I didn't believe it will work

Reviewer 2: she's certain it will work, so clearly not ambitious enough.

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Reposted by Kevin Bonham

Heran Darwin, PhD @heran.bsky.social · 8d

If it wasn't clear, this ad is for tenure track Microbiology faculty at the assistant professor level😬

Heran Darwin, PhD @heran.bsky.social · 8d

We're hiring! Check out our ad and please re-post or forward to interested #Microbiology parties: apply.interfolio.com/174783

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

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Reposted by Kevin Bonham

Jean-Yves Tinevez @jytinevez.bsky.social · 8d

Job alert!

We are looking for a bioimage analysis to work in an image analysis core facility in beautiful Paris. Can I ask you to share this opportunity with your networks?

See also on the forum:
forum.image.sc/t/research-e...

Research engineer in Bioimage Analysis for the researchers of the inIdEx FORMULA

Hi all We are looking for a bioimage analysis to work in an image analysis core facility in beautiful Paris. Can I ask you to share this opportunity with your networks? The position is in the Instit...

forum.image.sc

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Reposted by Kevin Bonham

Simon Danisch @simi.bsky.social · 8d

Finally announcing Bonito.jl! 🎉 A Julia web framework that went from "neglected prototype" to something I'm genuinely proud of.

Reactive UIs, rich widgets, Makie integration, deploy anywhere (Jupyter/VSCode/web/static HTML)
makie.org/website/blog...

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 9d

I mean that's clearly a macrophage...

Sholto David @sholtodavid.bsky.social · 10d

Recent MDPI paper including diagram of a bacterial cell with a mitochondrion 🤦‍♀️ The authors propose a mechanism for the toxicity of silver nanoparticles: "Ag+ ions in AgNPs bombard the bacterial mitochondria’s electron transport chain, resulting in cell death".

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 9d

This has been roughly my experience. I don't have nearly the same Open Source maintenance burden as Chris, but I've found claude code is fine for simple tedious stuff, but not great for anything complicated.

Chris Rackauckas @chrisrackauckas.bsky.social · 9d

Claude code sucks... but it's still very useful! Check out this blog post that details how Claude is deployed to solve problems in the #Julialang #SciML open source scientific computing infrastructure.

stochasticlifestyle.com/claude-code-...

#llm #vibecoding #physics #opensource #oss

Claude Code in Scientific Computing: Experiences Maintaining Julia's SciML Infrastructure - Stochastic Lifestyle

Claude Code in Scientific Computing: Experiences Maintaining Julia’s SciML Infrastructure So it’s pretty public that for about a month now I’ve had 32 processes setup on one of the 64 core 128gb RAM s...

www.stochasticlifestyle.com

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 10d

Is each chat a separate mind or are they each ephemeral thoughts that contribute to the whole?

In some versions of Buddhism, "reincarnation" is just that in each moment, we are dying and being reborn, as each thought arises and passes away.

(To be clear, I don't actually think this about LLMs)

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Reposted by Kevin Bonham

Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 10d

This administration once claimed they were going to make sure grants were only funded on pure merit.

Mallory Harris, PhD @malar0ne.bsky.social · 10d

IMO this hasn't gotten enough attention: a recent memo at NIH announces that peer review will be devalued in determining which grants get funded, granting more power to political appointees to make decisions based on the admin's whims over scientific merit

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Changes at NIH Give Political Appointees Greater Power To Fund or Block Research - KFF Health News

The National Institutes of Health’s long-held standard of peer review for grantmaking has been subverted by President Donald Trump and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who gave unprecedented power to po...

kffhealthnews.org

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 10d

It's probably more involved than a skeet thread will accommodate, but I think there's something about evolving with bodies in the world that led to consciousness. Intelligence or complexity alone won't do it.

But that's just a guess.

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Kevin Bonham @kevinbonham.com · 10d

What I mean is, people seem fixated on intelligence or creativity or other things to try to hold humans apart. But AI systems might reach or surpass humans on all of this and still not be conscious.

And AIs may already be smarter than some animals who are nevertheless more conscious.

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