Here are a few of the graphics that scientists are regularly asked to make: Visual Abstracts Posters Experiment setups Schematics Presentation slides Did your university ever provide you with any design training? @AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter #phd

Read more about this work in David Gokhman's awesome thread!!

I'm thrilled to have been a part of this awesome work on human skeletal evolution and adaptations such as #bipedalism!

Excited to share that my master's work on skeletal regulation was accepted to @nature.com as the cover story! 🦴🧬 Huge thanks to our lab & collaborators, especially Taka Inoue & Yizhi Yan and to @david-gokhman.bsky.social for his guidance. 📄The paper: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-1…

Humans are far more prone to degenerative skeletal diseases than other apes. Our new @Nature paper uncovers the genetic changes that shaped our skeleton and uncovers a major clue to why it is so vulnerable to degeneration.🧵👇 nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

Very excited to see this out🤩. Great job @nadavmishol and Yizhi! and huge thanks to @maayanvisuals for designing such a beautiful cover!

Awesome cover art by the talented Adara Koivula! Art direction by yours truly :)

🚨Just IN: If you've used ChatGPT for writing or brainstorming in the last 6 months, your creative ability may already be permanently damaged. A controlled experiment just proved the effect doesn't reverse when you stop using it. 3,302 creative ideas. 61 people. 30 days of tracking. Researchers split students into two groups. Half used ChatGPT for creative tasks. Half worked alone. For five days, the ChatGPT group outperformed on every metric. Higher scores. More ideas. Better output. AI was making them better. Then day 7. ChatGPT removed. Every creativity gain vanished overnight. Crashed to baseline. Zero lasting improvement. But that's not the bad part. ChatGPT users' ideas became increasingly identical to each other over time. Same content. Same structure. Same phrasing. The researchers called it homogenization. Everyone using ChatGPT started producing the same ideas wearing different clothes. When ChatGPT was removed, the creativity boost disappeared -- but the homogenization stayed. 30 days later, same result. Their creative range had been permanently compressed. Five days of use. Permanent damage 30 days later. A separate trial confirmed it. 120 students. 45-day surprise test. ChatGPT users scored 57.5%. Traditional learners scored 68.5%. AI reduces cognitive effort. Less effort means weaker encoding. Weaker encoding means less creative raw material. You're not renting a productivity boost. You're financing it with your originality. The interest rate is permanent.

Academia feels increasingly like playing Monkey Island, if you miss something as absurd as picking up a rubber chicken with a pulley in the first scene, you only realize much later that you’re stuck and can’t pass to the next stage. I was interviewed today by @ScienceMagazine about the funding crisis following the ERC announcement. I argued that when a grant rejection can hinge on something small, and you then have to wait years to resubmit, the cost becomes so high that instead of suggesting “high-risk high-gain” plans scientists will prepare more cautious, less ambitious proposals. It turns into a perverse game of simplifying your ideas and trying (unsuccessfully) to predict what an overstretched reviewer pool will find easiest to digest. "Abrupt change to European funder’s rules leaves researchers shut out | Science | AAAS" science.org/content/article/…

בשבוע הבא אני משתתפת בסדרת הרצאות על אבולוציה של האדם במוזיאון הטבע ע״ש שטיינהרדט! Steinhardt Museum of Natural History 27/4/26 18:30 נקודת מפגש: ישראל כמקום אסטרטגי באבולוציה של האדם. מרצה: פרופ' הילה מאי. 19:15 דיוקן של נערה דניסובית: שחזור אנטומי ללא שלד. מרצה: מעין הראל. תגללו לראות סרטונים מהתהליך! פרטים וכרטיסים בקישור :) smnh.tau.ac.il/mw_event/mp27…

RT @JonHaidt: Karma is finally coming for Meta, through the legal system. As we await a verdict in Los Angeles on whether social media pla…

First cover of 2026 is out! How do symbiotic organisms like corals and cnidarians identify their symbionts as such, rather than as debris/food/ etc? Appropriate symbiont selection is required for sufficient host nutrient acquisition and could even be tailored to increase cnidarian stress tolerance. The research here reveals integrins as important receptors for symbiosis establishment and sheds light on the evolutionary functions of integrins during phagocytosis. Read more at @emboreports Congratulations to Victor A. S. Jones, Megan Ferguson and Annika Guse and co-authors @LMU_Muenchen This was a very fun piece to work on, and a fascinating topic.

this is incredible

A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to speak to graduate students, post-docs and PIs at the @WeizmannScience about how to use visual tools to communicate their science more effectively. This was part of a course in Adobe Illustrator given at the department of Life Sciences. It's really exciting to me to see how the institute is giving better tools to its trainees to achieve publication-level graphics and beyond. I'm hoping to have lots more of these types of sessions! Thanks to everyone who participated and I have a blog post here with lots of resources that can help with scientific figure design, posters, grant figures, and data visualization! maayanvisuals.com/post/visua…

Amen

I don't understand how people can be anti-expert. I love people who've been doing their thing for years. I had to buy a suit and the woman who helped me could eyeball me and pick the perfect dress shirt. Everything fit perfectly on the first try. I recently had a pipe burst in my apartment. The plumber was efficient and professional. The investigator from the insurance company was knowledgeable. My default attitude to people, whether it's a university professor or a roofer, is "This is your domain, please educate me."

This is fine.

🥁We are recruiting PhD students/Postdocs with strong proven background in developmental/molecular/cell biology & related areas, for various projects- check out our lab website👇🏼 We offer: competitive stipends, super equipped lab, fun international team! yanivelkoubylab.com/