Devang Mehta🌱🧬

Opinion | How 6,000 Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil

The rare article about AI that’s actually worth a deep read:

How 6,000 Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/o...

Meanwhile the Arabidopsis conference next year is stubbornly still going to be held in the US. I guess we may not be able to call it an “international” conference any more.

A graph showing the number of “special issues” published by different publishers (Frontiers, MDPI, SpringerNature, Wiley) showing that Frontiers and MDPI publish a majority of articles in special issues. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

I’ll just leave this here so you can draw your own conclusions. I have papers in there coz collaborators chose to publish there but I don’t choose to review or publish there myself.

IMO/E this is the most tangible difference you feel when you live in Canada vs the US (or even EU).

Why can’t people (especially scientists) see that AI generated figures and diagrams shout out that they were AI generated and look awful? You’ve spend many months designing and performing experiments only to cover the resulting masterpiece in clear plastic like a cheap sofa.

Some of us already do this.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Wtf. How can we opt out of them using our work for this?

The real problem is that we publish many more papers per scientist than before.

Will die on the hill that Word is great but most scientists are just too lazy to learn how to use it and like complaining 🙃

So when do authors preprint? Many do long before they submit to a journal (to get feedback to improve the work?); many submit around the same time (just want the work out?). Only a minority are submitting once the paper is under review [evidence against claims by some detractors]. 3/n

New version of our preprint on bioRxiv about bioRxiv up. Now that’s what I call a revision – 6 years after the first version!
It has new data about our progress and highlights from a massive user survey. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The more I read the more horrific it gets

Reading one of the first publications documenting circadian rhythms in humans and it’s essentially two professors torturing an assistant prof.

so i guess not much has changed in academia in 130 years 🙃

The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn't cheating—it's the erosion of learning itself Public debate about artificial intelligence in higher education has largely orbited a familiar worry: cheating. Will students use chatbots to write essays? Can instructors tell? Should universities ba...

“Cognitive psychology has shown that students grow intellectually through doing the work of drafting, revising, failing, trying again, grappling with confusion, and revising weak arguments. This is the work of learning how to learn”
phys.org/news/2026-02...

Loved the book. Read it before much of the ludicrous events of last year but I still wasn’t prepared for them 🙃

This whole debate was solved by the InstantPot.

No future US administration can claim to support international law until they ratify its membership of the ICC and prosecute Trump and his assistants-in-barbarity:

Thank you, this was super useful.

I disagree with this because I think what makes human writing so great is the sense of individual personhood behind it, represented in its unique combination of flaws, accents, and emotion, that no LLM can ever create tabula rasa.

Does anyone have a clear guide to what constitutes a conflict of interest in grant reviewing in relatively small scientific fields?

I've seen several recent preprints using DIANN v1.9. DIANN is great and stable in several versions, except for v1.9. We tested at least 7 different versions in a publication 👉 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
v1.9 will likely provide more IDs, but at the cost of precision.

Inside Russia’s Secret Campaign of Sabotage in Europe How Russian military intelligence is recruiting young people online to carry out espionage, arson, and other attacks across the Continent.

Eye-opening article on Russia’s low-level war on Europe by recruiting ‘single-use agents’. Inside Russia’s Secret Campaign of Sabotage in Europe www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig on her “hypothetical,” heavily reported measles essay "We were attracted to the idea of providing a play-by-play of the progression of measles in granular detail."

I was so impressed with this story about measles in the Atlantic -- the depth of reporting it would take to weave in all these details so fluidly.

Turns out, it was a work of fiction. She researched the effects of measles, but lots of fiction writers do research. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-...

This is something the Nazis used to do to Jewish children in the camps. It happened to a man I knew when he was a child in Auschwitz. The camp guards thought it was funny as hell.

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - this looks super cool, but does it really relate to the origin of life?

Many Europeans believe that their countries and governments are better than the current Trump admin and violence exercised by ICE, but it only takes a little research to see that Europe is just better at hiding its sins against immigrants.

Any fun suggestions for a name for our newest lab member?

Very proud to present, together with @plantteaching.bsky.social, Agnes Uhereczky, @yoselin.bsky.social, Sofie Goormachtig and @mehta-lab.com, our @jxbotany.bsky.social community resource paper on building a diverse and inclusive plant science community 🌱. academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-... (🧵 1/2)

Graphic recording of the workshop session. Key words, messages and topics covered are grouped by speaker(s). This visual summary is intended to capture the essence of the session, it obviously cannot resolve or explore in detail all the complex issues listed. The illustration was commissioned to the illustrator Zsofi Lang. "Building a diverse and inclusive community through effective teaching and mentoring"

Super excited to have this online at @jxbotany.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...
"Building a diverse and inclusive plant science community," a call-to-action. Thanks to @apaterlini.bsky.social
@mehta-lab.com @yoselin.bsky.social
@goormachtig.bsky.social & Agnes Uhereczky + funders!💚