Sharing a photo of your PhD thesis on social media should be a moment of celebration, a chance to share your achievement with your online academic community. Not so for University of Cambridge academic Ally Louks, who was inundated with hatred and violent threats after posting that she’d defended her dissertation, “Olfactory Ethics: The politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose”, with no corrections. One X user said Dr Louks’ brain was “diseased and rotted by leftism”, while another said the researcher should have redirected her efforts towards “getting married and having children”. Dr Louks said the experience was indicative of the decline of “academic Twitter” since Elon Musk bought and renamed the platform, with its algorithms increasingly amplifying far-right content and its rules on abuse relaxed. “It seems to me that X is no longer an appropriate platform for academics, as a community, to share their ideas with one another,” she said.
In perhaps another example of the ingenuity of Harvard University academics, three researchers from the department of human evolutionary biology managed to turn a week in the pub into a publication in the journal . Observing that non-human males will compete for female attention by making “investments” including the “provision of resources” – and that said investments increase when there are more males than females – Charles Davidson, Declan Buckley and Joyce Benenson decided to test whether humans display similar behaviour. To do so, they spent seven nights in three taverns, measuring how fast a social group’s “leading man” would make a beeline for the bar to buy drinks. Their conclusion? “The higher the proportion of men in a group and the fewer the absolute number of women in a group, the faster the leading man in the group travelled to reach the bar to order and pay for beverages,” says the paper published on 18 December.
Cast your mind back to your most ill-advised midweek student night out; or, more specifically, to the morning after, when you dragged yourself from your bed to the lecture theatre only to sleep through the entire session. How would you have fared, do you imagine, had your professor elected to wake you up by getting very close to your face and belting out an emo anthem – Fall for You by Secondhand Serenade, perhaps? If his TikToks are to be believed, that’s the preferred method of University of Tennessee-Knoxville lecturer Matthew Pittman, whose videos of his unusual wake-up tactics have racked up more than 57 million views. But alas, he revealed to local news station that the videos were staged for a particularly relevant class. “It is hilarious, but it was also just a skit,” Dr Pittman said. “It’s a social media class, and every now and then I gotta show the students that their professor can flex on the algorithm.”
You might expect that the head of a degree-awarding institution would have some experience in being awarded a degree of their own – but at the Florida Atlantic University of the near future, that might not be the case. University trustees recently approved a job description for their hunt for a new president, as reported, and while previous iterations mandated candidates have a degree as well as experience in higher education, neither requirement appears in the latest version, a decision made after a series of “listening sessions” conducted by the search committee. FAU trustees seem somewhat divided on the move: one noted that the state’s top-ranked institution, the University of Florida, requires presidential applicants have “some level of academic accomplishment”, while another said the degree requirement “would eliminate many Fortune 500 CEOs”. Finalists for the presidency, graduates or not, are expected to be named next month.
From Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, popular culture is replete with depictions of hubristic scientists who pursued their research to ruinous ends. In real life, the looming threat is not from dinosaurs or reanimated humans but from “mirror microbes” – and scientists are sounding the alarm. A group of 38 acclaimed researchers, among them multiple Nobel laureates, have called on scientists and research funders to stop working towards the creation of microbes that “mirror” their organic counterparts, warning that “mirror bacteria” have the potential to devastate the natural world. “The threat we’re talking about is unprecedented,” University of Pittsburgh evolutionary biologist Vaughn Cooper told . “Mirror bacteria would likely evade many human, animal and plant immune system responses and in each case would cause lethal infections that would spread without check.”