The left-handed bestseller
By Simon Fisher (@profsimonfisher.bsky.social) · Bluesky
Four billion years of right-handed DNA, and the 50th anniversary edition of the most famous book ever written about genes puts the helix on backwards. Fisher's pun does the rest of the work: a truly selfish gene would twist whichever way it pleased. Somewhere a cover designer just learned what chirality means.
The $289,364 stipend
By Margaret Alexander (@margaretalexander.bsky.social) · Bluesky
The real F31 stipend is about $28,000, which is why a doctored NIH page reading $289,364 detonated every academic group chat this week. For one beautiful afternoon, postdocs across America ran the numbers on quitting their jobs to re-enroll as trainees.
The title defense
By DrZee Dee Sistrunk (@zelmo1922) · Threads
Five degrees, and the internet wants to litigate whether she gets to be called Doctor. Nobody ever asks a surgeon to drop the title. The credential panic only ever flows in one direction.
The ledger
By Michael McMurray's lab (@mcmurraylab.bsky.social) · Bluesky
Read past the deadpan and this is the academic social contract, itemized: 17 reviews given, 9 manuscripts shepherded as an editor, two grants in the queue, one of his own waiting 114 days for a verdict. None of it paid, all of it load-bearing. The karma line gets the laugh, but the ledger is really a love letter to the invisible work that keeps science moving.
The Word document
By Harmit Singh Malik (@harmitmalik.bsky.social) · Bluesky
There are two kinds of scientists: TeX people and Word people, and both are lying about which one hurt them more. Move a figure in Word and the image jumps three pages, the caption stays behind, the text reflows like it is fleeing. The real gap in the CV is the afternoon the figure would not sit still.
That’s the five. See you next Tuesday.
- The Digital Benchtop
Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe free to get The Digital Benchtop every Tuesday.