I participated in the II Meeting of the Brazilian Society for Evolutionary Biology that took place 15-17 July 2026 at UFMG in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil (where I currently live). It was a great opportunity to integrate back into the Brazilian community, meet old friends and initiate new collaborations. The organization was impeccable, innovative […]
Category: science
Posts about science in general, usually related to academic publishing, open access/science, and outreach.
I went to the 10th Meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology that took place in Glasgow, Scotland (9-12 June 2026). I’ve been to EED’s meetings since 2012, and this was the first after starting my position in Brazil. It was great to catch up with everyone again and meet several people that […]
EvoDevo journal rebranding I saw today that EvoDevo, one of the key journals in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, has been rebranded as Developmental Biology Advances. The announcement frames it in a positive light: This change marks an exciting new chapter, continuing to highlight the integrative research that has defined EvoDevo while expanding the […]
I would like to share with you a minimal set of principles that I’ve been using to organize my research papers. These principles aren’t new or revolutionary… in fact, they’re basic, even boring. However, they are the ones that stood out to me over the years as the most fundamental; the ones that nudge me […]
The other day I stumbled upon this passage in the Wikipedia page of Piseinotecus, a genus of beautiful nudibranch sea slugs: The name Piseinotecus comes from the Portuguese sentence “pisei no Teco” (I stepped onto Teco). Teco was the name of a dog of the zoologists Ernst Marcus and Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus. While they […]
“Science is merely a process of asking questions and searching answers, along with the combined knowledge accumulated from this search.” “The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz” by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig I like how casual this definition is. Science is often portrayed as something only professional scientists can do, […]
Last June, I went to the conference of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology, or EuroEvoDevo. It’s a meeting that I’ve been going to every edition for the past decade. This year it was hosted in Helsinki, Finland. The venue and organization were impeccable, and I thoroughly enjoyed the program overall. My feeling is […]
spotLights is a podcast-like, interview series to highlight the people and stories behind the latest preprints. It is part of the preLights initiative organized by The Company of Biologists. The first spotLights episode is out, and it features… me 🥸 The conversation was about the cephalic furrow preprint, which was also reviewed by preLighters earlier […]
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Confocal excitation
The pipetting marathon I went through the other day was worth it—the experiment worked! Now I get to image some exciting and colorful samples in the confocal microscope, and experience that thrill of seeing something for the first time, once again 🌈🔬
Science is exciting, right? You explore, you experiment, you make discoveries. You see things for the first time! Science is fun. But, it also has its boring parts. Today, for example, I spent four hours pipetting, non-stop. 280 tubes. No robots, no multichannel pipette. Just manual labor. The pipetting marathon is for an experiment, which […]