Karl Schmid
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kjschmid.bsky.social
Karl Schmid
@kjschmid.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1.1K following 110 posts
Professor of Crop Diversity and Breeding Informatics, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany
Website: https://evoplant.uni-hohenheim.de
Mastodon: https://fediscience.org/@kjschmid
Opinions are my own.
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kjschmid.bsky.social
Karl Schmid @kjschmid.bsky.social · Jun 25
New preprint led by our bioinformatician Mireia Vidal Villarejo on the demography of a maize fungal pathogen in Switzerland 🇨🇭.

Main finding: In a multiyear survey we observed a rapid replacement of established by exotic, tropical genetic lineages of the pathogen.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Figure of from research paper showing the dynamics of maize pathogen straints over time (years)
Reposted by Karl Schmid
chenxinli2.bsky.social
It should surprise no one that most contemporary scientists are woke. As far as I can tell, most of us are into improving the human condition, minimizing hardship across the board, empowering the underprivileged, and ensuring the prosperity of our society for the future.
June 1, 2025 at 11:23 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
elinck.bsky.social
I've slowly been reformatting notes from my population and conservation genetics course at Montana State University into a web book—a rough draft is now live here: elinck.org/popgen_conge...
December 22, 2025 at 9:32 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
clauswilke.com
I'm convinced large labs are a survival mechanism in a hypercompetitive funding environment. You need the critical mass to write the big papers that allow you to get the next round of funding. 1/2
carlbergstrom.com Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 4d
I've often wondered why so many academic scientists want large labs (i.e., numerous graduate students, postdocs, etc).

Today it occurred to me that we learn how to run a lab from our own advisors and statistically, at least, tend model our labs on theirs.

(1/2)
December 21, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
ecoinvasions.bsky.social
No paper from me or my lab will ever be submitted to an MDPI journal - including any of their superfluous "special issues". I will very rarely (if ever) cite MDPI papers. And I will never review for them. deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/08/gues...

The same goes for FrontiersIn journals, among others.
December 16, 2025 at 4:21 AM
kjschmid.bsky.social
Unser @unihohenheim.bsky.social Kollege und Experte für Agrarmärkte Sebastian Hess gibt in der FAZ seine Einschätzung zum Mercosur-Abkommen (Geschenklink)

www.faz.net/aktuell/wirt...
Bauern gegen Mercosur: Warum das Abkommen "dämonisiert" wird
Über die Heftigkeit der Bauernproteste gegen das Mercosur‑Abkommen zeigt sich Agrarökonom Sebastian Hess erstaunt. Die wirtschaftlichen Folgen für Europas Landwirtschaft hält er für geringer, als es v...
www.faz.net
December 19, 2025 at 7:31 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
golod.bsky.social
Seit gestern ist Maria Kalesnikawa frei. Heute haben wir die belarusische Oppositionelle zum ARD-Exklusiv-Interview getroffen. Auch nach Jahren in politischer Haft hat sie sich ihren Optimismus nicht nehmen lassen. Eine beeindruckende Persönlichkeit. Mehr: www.tagesschau.de/ausland/kole...
December 14, 2025 at 9:36 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
joerglau.bsky.social
„Identitätspolitik, die“
(Acht Männer in Anzügen beschließen vor Nostalgietapete das Verbrenner-Aus.)
December 13, 2025 at 10:48 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
wiegold.de
Schau an. Von offizieller Stelle würde so was derzeit wohl kaum veröffentlicht. Dabei haben diese jungen Journalisten nur öffentlich zugängliche Informationen ausgewertet. #Drohnen
They Droned Back
Young journalists expose Russian-linked vessels circling off the Dutch and German coast
www.digitaldigging.org
December 11, 2025 at 9:18 PM
kjschmid.bsky.social
A proud dad moment: The first peer reviewed paper of our son was published today, based on his master thesis at ETH Zurich @ethz.ch .

Congratulations, Paul!

nhess.copernicus.org/articles/25/...
Deep learning-based object detection on LiDAR-derived hillshade images: insights into grain size distribution and longitudinal sorting of debris flows
Abstract. Debris flows are hazardous natural phenomena characterized by rapid movements of sediment-water mixtures in steep channels, posing significant risks to life and infrastructure. Better unders...
nhess.copernicus.org
December 9, 2025 at 3:06 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
anneapplebaum.bsky.social
December 6, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
greenrobust.de
European Council and Parliament agree on relaxing rules for bringing genome-edited plants to the market - a central step for facilitating a science-based management of our current plant systems.
www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/pre...
New genomic techniques: Council and Parliament strike deal to boost the competitiveness and sustainability of our food systems
Council and Parliament reach provisional deal on a set of rules for new genomic techniques, aiming to improve the competitiveness of European agriculture and support the sustainability of our food sys...
www.consilium.europa.eu
December 4, 2025 at 8:21 AM
kjschmid.bsky.social
Yet another grant proposal (with an awesome group of colleagues) rejected today. On to the next one...
December 2, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
forscherrobert.bsky.social
Ganz unabhängig davon, wie man zu den Neuen Genomischen Techniken (NGTs) steht, gibt es natürlich einfach grundlegende Fakten, die man nicht einfach ingnorieren kann.
Leider stellt Frau Krenkel in dem Interview einige Falschbehauptungen auf:
1/
December 1, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
uniheidelberg.bsky.social
Jan Lohmann erhält Lautenschläger-Forschungspreis: Auszeichnung ist mit 250.000 Euro dotiert – Preis für den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs geht an Lukas Bunse www.uni-heidelberg.de/de/newsroom/...
#universität #heidelberg #uniheidelberg #forschung #preis #biologie #medizin #theologie
November 27, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
helsenjana.bsky.social
How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery?

Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore.

👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1
November 26, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
sachlichepolitik.bsky.social
Statt auf dem Smartphone zu lesen oder zu spielen, kann man jetzt für die Fahrt Bücher leihen – fast direkt am U-Bahngleis. In Warschau entsteht eine analoge Gegenbewegung zum Smartphone-Trend: Die „Metroteka“ in einer U-Bahn-Station lädt zum Lesen echter Bücher ein."
Polen: Eine Bibliothek in der U-Bahn
Statt auf dem Smartphone zu lesen oder zu spielen, kann man jetzt für die Fahrt Bücher leihen – fast direkt am U-Bahngleis.
www.dw.com
November 25, 2025 at 9:53 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
pnas.org
Medieval agricultural and trade practices in southwestern Germany boosted plant diversity for centuries, with biodiversity peaking around 1000 CE and declining only when human activity contracted during the Black Death. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/Q6ca50XxIvC
Woodcut illustration to Michael Beuther’s Calendarium Historicum, published in Frankfurt by David Zephelius in 1557. Image shows a person pollarding a tree and another person sowing seeds. CREDIT: The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
November 25, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
plantevolution.bsky.social
We (Nordborg & Weigel labs) need input on the next generation of genome browsers & data download modes for the #Arabidopsis #1001GenomesPlus project. We have now a curated collection of over 500 long read genomes.

Please help us by filling out this questionnaire: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Next generation of 1001 Genomes Plus browser and data download
Please indicate all features you would like to see in a browser that displays features of completely sequenced Arabidopsis thaliana genomes
docs.google.com
November 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
hernanaburbano.bsky.social
Our new collaborative work led by @taliamycota.bsky.social
Jiajun Cui & Emma Caullireau between my lab @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @cloeucl.bsky.social & the Karasov Lab (tkarasovlab.org) @uofubiology.bsky.social
and collaborators: @plantricia.bsky.social et al.

tinyurl.com/5yx2wmz5

(1/n)
November 18, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
elisabethbik.bsky.social
Next: Geoff Cumming @thenewstats.bsky.social with 'Statistical significance and p values: The researcher’s heroin'
* p values are highly unrealiable - don't trust them, don't use them!
www.thenewstatistics.com
tiny.cc/osfsigroulette
#IRICSydney
Speaker at the pedestal wearing a t-short with the link to TheNewStatistics website. Title slide
November 18, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
carlbergstrom.com
Way back in 1947, Alan Turing had thoughts on how AI would influence the demand for skilled labor.

(via Matteo Pasquinelli 2023 _The Eye of the Master_)
Roughly speaking those who work in connection with the [automatic computing engine] will be divided into its masters and its servants. Its masters will plan out instruction tables for it, thinking up deeper and deeper ways of using it...The masters are liable to get replaced because as soon as any technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to devise a system of instruction tables which will enable the electronic computer to do it for itself. It may happen however that the masters will refuse to do this. They may be unwilling to let their jobs be stolen from them in this way. In that case they would surround the whole of their work with mystery and make excuses, couched in well chosen gibberish, whenever any dangerous suggestions were made. — Alan Turing (1947) Lecture on the Automatic Computing Engine
November 18, 2025 at 4:01 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
mads100tist.bsky.social
"Postdoc in the job market"
A headline: Scientists have discovered a 'third state' between life and death
November 16, 2025 at 7:52 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
nicolange.bsky.social
Für Millionen Menschen in der Ukraine ist es dunkel und kalt. Ab jetzt 16 Stunden täglich ohne Strom. Große Teile der Stromproduktion sind beschädigt oder zerstört, dazu ein Fünftel der Heizkapazitäten. Europa hat Russland gewähren lassen. 1/3
November 9, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Reposted by Karl Schmid
unihohenheim.bsky.social
#AgriPV: Wie lässt sich #Ackerbau und #Stromerzeugung auf einer Fläche optimal verbinden? Das untersuchen Forschende der #unihohenheim ab sofort auf einer neuen #Forschungsanlage in Renningen. Unterstützung dafür gab es vom MLR BaWü! Pressemitteilung: www.uni-hohenheim.de/pressemittei...
November 7, 2025 at 9:07 AM