First, the article appears to be a blatant attempt to restore the reputation of the company's billionaire founder (and convicted felon). Using 'journalism' for reputation laundering is not new, but it is still cringe-worthy (2/9)
I know every company is trying to hop on the AI hype train. Maybe AI could be useful here, but I doubt it. This just seems more like marketing copy than journalism (5/9)
Is this just snake oil being sold by well-funded salesmen? I don't know, but if the soil microbial inoculant industry has taught me anything over the years, it is to maintain a high degree of skepticism (4/9)
The company appears to be using 'soil stars' (their term) to promote the company. These are all great scientists, but where are the agronomists? h/t @agronomistag.bsky.social (6/9)
The recent NY Times article on Oath (a soil inoculant company) warrants a mini-thread, so here we go: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/b... (1/9)
New pre-print out - we sought to determine if Antarctic soil bacteria are really endemic to the continent. Would love feedback. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Really useful paper explaining why richness/diversity metrics are rarely informative when applied to microbial community sequencing data: enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The article is essentially unpaid advertising touting their microbial inoculants (see text). I realize this is not a science article, but big claims require big evidence. Same goes for their website (www.oathsoillife.com/pages/scienc...) - inoculants led to a 50% increase in SOC??? (3/9)
