K.D. Murray
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kdm9.bsky.social
K.D. Murray
@kdm9.bsky.social
290 followers 850 following 17 posts
A scientist, mostly

Naarm/Melbourne, AU & Tübingen, DE
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by K.D. Murray
aroneys.bsky.social
“Bin Chicken” is now published in Nature Methods! It substantially improves genome recovery through rational coassembly 🧬🖥️. Applied to public 🌍 metagenomes, we recovered 24,000 novel species 🦠, including 6 new phyla.
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
@benjwoodcroft.bsky.social @rhysnewell.bsky.social
🧵1/6
Logo of Bin Chicken (Australian white ibis) on a rubbish bin, pulling out a strand of DNA
November 13, 2025 at 10:09 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
celestelabedz.bsky.social
In case anyone is wondering if Watson was really THAT bad, @lpachter.bsky.social compiled a list of quotes that are absolutely not for the faint of heart.
liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...
November 7, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
euanritchie.bsky.social
Brilliant story-telling and visuals, despite the tragic impacts of feral cats www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...
Revered and reviled, cats in the crosshairs on Christmas Island
On a speck of land in the Indian Ocean, one of the world's most ambitious wars is being waged against feral cats. But not everyone is celebrating.
www.abc.net.au
November 7, 2025 at 11:27 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
custom-lab.bsky.social
This is how our customizable powder and seed dispenser for 2 ml tubes works.

Check it our here: custom-lab.de/products/48-...
October 18, 2025 at 6:12 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
jrossibarra.bsky.social
When the Hapsburgs find out corn does inbreeding better they’re really gonna take it on the chin.
October 18, 2025 at 6:56 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.
signal.org Signal @signal.org · Oct 3
We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...
signal.org
October 6, 2025 at 6:46 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
euanritchie.bsky.social
Australia's much loved wildlife and places sorely need greater care and legal protection.

Our latest for @aunz.theconversation.com.

theconversation.com/labor-is-clo... With good friends and colleagues, @drphilmccormack.bsky.social & @yungenchee.bsky.social.
Labor is close to a deal on environmental law reforms. There are troubling signs these will fall short
Labor is close to a deal on its environmental law reforms. Will they strong enough to protect nature?
theconversation.com
October 10, 2025 at 4:16 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
stuartmcdaniel.bsky.social
Lingua wanka is a hilarious moniker for scientific writing
somssich.bsky.social Marc Somssich @somssich.bsky.social · Oct 9
Fantastic editorial on #ScientificWriting. 👇
malick-mbengue.bsky.social Malick Mbengue @malick-mbengue.bsky.social · Oct 9
I wished I could have written something like this. Rude, fun and meaningful.
static1.squarespace.com/static/686d9...
October 9, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
malick-mbengue.bsky.social
I wished I could have written something like this. Rude, fun and meaningful.
static1.squarespace.com/static/686d9...
static1.squarespace.com
October 9, 2025 at 8:39 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
philippbayer.bsky.social
'In Australia we are seeing the results of running universities like businesses without adequate governance: wage theft from staff, fee theft from students, and the academic equivalent of shrinkflation.'
mehr.nz samuel mehr @mehr.nz · Sep 22
this is a very sharp piece on why it makes no sense to run universities as if they are businesses. They're not businesses.

www.afr.com/work-and-car...
The net result is the worst of both worlds. Universities invoke the rhetoric of business discipline, but they lack the governance structures that give that discipline bite. They operate without the checks that private ownership provides, yet subject staff and students to the cost-cutting and efficiency drives that profit-maximising firms pursue. The result is waste at the top and insecurity at the bottom.
September 30, 2025 at 11:25 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
deannicolle1.bsky.social
Less than 2 weeks until our arboretum open days! Here's a few of the eucalypts flowering at the moment.

These free open days only occur biannually. Currency Creek Arboretum is about an hour's drive south of Adelaide in SA. Open details here: www.dn.com.au/Currency_Cre...
September 30, 2025 at 8:01 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
carlbergstrom.com
Left unchecked, openAI and other infotech providers will destroy any remnants of the American education system that manage to escape the Trump administration.

Read the full thread.
benpatrickwill.bsky.social Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · Sep 26
OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...
Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.
www.nytimes.com
September 26, 2025 at 11:03 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
honour.bsky.social
There’s a leak - and a conceptual artist - at the Max Planck 👌
September 18, 2025 at 6:51 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
mehr.nz
new zealand government reaching new heights of stupidity

next year our public dollars will go more to AI grants ($70 million) than all investigator-initiated basic science combined ($56 million in the Marsden fund)
Reti earmarks $70m of new agency's budget for AI commercialisation grants
September 18, 2025 at 6:08 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX
lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...
September 12, 2025 at 3:26 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
elhopkins.bsky.social
www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06...
@ashleydaltonmp.bsky.social

#Longcovidkids
Kids are losing 'huge chunks' of their childhood to long COVID. Too many are being told it's 'all in their head'
They're losing their formative years to this debilitating disease. But for too many children with long COVID, finding help is a frustrating and traumatic process that leaves them feeling isolated and ...
www.abc.net.au
September 11, 2025 at 8:26 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
xkcd.com
Biology Department

xkcd.com/3140/
Comic. [Building with large sign in front of it[ SIGN: Welcome to the *Biology Department* It has been [changeable sign: 3] days since we discovered something existentially horrifying about bugs that makes you question your whole reality
September 11, 2025 at 9:24 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
mhobart.bsky.social
Must read, and not just for higher ed folks: anyone concerned about education and people’s ability to think rigorously and critically should read this manifesto.
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 11, 2025 at 7:34 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
afterclimate.com.au
Absolutely fantastic piece on the interfaces between climate risk and insurance in the Polycrisis newsletter today, by @70sbachchan.bsky.social and @katemac.bsky.social

Not a doom loop, but “communities of fate” and the moral economy of the welfare state.
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ins...
Insurance in the Polycrisis | Kate Mackenzie & Tim Sahay
The future is triage on an uninsurable earth.
www.phenomenalworld.org
September 11, 2025 at 3:59 AM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
zaminiqbal.bsky.social
Ok this is mad
"...an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste"

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
September 4, 2025 at 11:02 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
philippbayer.bsky.social
I LOVE that you can see pur Cocos Keeling voyage eDNA data on this figure. It's that straight line going north-west from Western Australia/Perth!
rayanchikhi.bsky.social Rayan Chikhi @rayanchikhi.bsky.social · Sep 3
🌎👩‍🔬 For 15+ years biology has accumulated petabytes (million gigabytes) of🧬DNA sequencing data🧬 from the far reaches of our planet.🦠🍄🌵

Logan now democratizes efficient access to the world’s most comprehensive genetics dataset. Free and open.

doi.org/10.1101/2024...
September 3, 2025 at 11:40 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
jrossibarra.bsky.social
Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!
Homepage - Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference
Visit our website to learn more.
genetics-gsa.org
September 3, 2025 at 6:51 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
drjulieb.bsky.social
Omg nerd day made
September 2, 2025 at 10:10 PM
Reposted by K.D. Murray
binomicalabs.org
I feel like there should be a "median rent in the area" based guidelines for conference registration fees. If your 3 day academic conference costs more than a median whole month's rent to live there, maybe something can be improved 🫠
August 26, 2025 at 10:48 PM