🚨 Ever wonder why some viral reassortants establish and spread while others disappear? Us too! Led by @ricardoriveroh.bsky.social, we studied drivers of viral reassortment across hantaviruses and found that it varies dramatically among lineages (1/3) Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...

THIS: "“LLMs export their trust to external content moderation strategies that exist on sites like Wikipedia or Reddit or Quora or StackExchange."" Yes, and those content moderators are often unpaid volunteers. LLM AI companies benefit from the free labor pf people just trying to be in community.

My paper on Agnes Arber and her understanding of teleology is now part of the topical collection "Histories, Cultures, and Practices of the Botanical Sciences": link.springer.com/collections/... The collection is still open for submissions, so #plant people: hand in your manuscripts! #HPBio #HistSci

🎉Exciting news! My new article, 'The ‘fancy of the private collector’: Walter Rothschild’s global animal procurement network and collaboration in the animal trade' has been published in BJHS Themes as FirstView and is available OA: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #naturalhistory #animaltrade

Today, the AAUP released the Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2025–26. It is sobering. Full-time faculty salaries are down about 0.4% in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Average full-time faculty salaries remain 9.5% below fall 2019 & about 5.8% below fall 2008. 1/

Next week, we welcome Samantha Muka ‬(Stevens Institute of Technology) in our lecture series. Samantha will speak about coral reefs and how they are defined in modern conservation biology. 🪸 Just register here to participate 👉 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #HPBio #PhilSci

📢 Call for Abstracts -> PhilML'26! (please share) 4th Philosophy of Machine Learning Conference October 7-9, 2026 at LMU Munich. Extended abstracts (up to 1,000 words) due July 1. No participation fee! @lmu.de @lmu-mcmp.bsky.social @munichcenterml.bsky.social sites.google.com/view/philmlc...

This is absolutely nuts: hackers are hijacking high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI chatbot to change the email on the account. Meta's AI does it, hacker gets password reset code, they're in. A staggering security issue www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

Several people have asked for possible content and structure for comments regarding the proposed OMB regulations. With some suggestions from others, I have posted on example (as a Word document) for downloading). jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g... I hope this is helpful.

Interesting new tool to extract phylogenies from images (Tremble). It is crazy that this is still something we have to do. doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

My colleague @stephseifertphd.bsky.social just published new groundbreaking work on hantaviruses in the United States as part of our shut down @viralemergence.org project. Want to prevent hantavirus outbreaks here? Fund her work. wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

Beyond hero and villain narratives in ecology and conservation science 🌎 @aibsbiology.bsky.social academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Day 5 of my #Coverbirds Birdathon for @birdscanada.bsky.social Today’s coverbirds are… not easily identified. I have the good fortune to live in a very ducky place, but honestly most of the time they are just so far away 😂. I would love to have some help with ID so I imagined a guide (1/7) #birds

So is there any positive evidence for the value of AI in actual learning? I see the case for helping already-trained professionals work faster, but not for new students of a topic. www.404media.co/nature-retra...

We parsed 3.6 million historical names with 96% accuracy by moving away from expensive frontier models to fine-tuned Qwen 3.5 models. We also found that switching our output format from JSON to YAML dramatically increased stability.

Highly recommend!

But more seriously, PIs, what will you do when years your research data are wiped clean because you tolerate or encourage vibe science in your research group?

🎉 New paper out in Biological Reviews! 🎉 With 19 brilliant co‑authors from the IUCN SGA's Working Group on Chimpanzee Cultures, led by Crickette Sanz and me, we provide a much needed toolkit on how animal cultures can be built into conservation. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals. The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

Culture was assumed to be unique to humans, but recent scientific discoveries have revealed that it's in fact widespread in the animal kingdom. This #PhilTransB issue is the first to present a comprehensive picture of the science & implications of this: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

"the fact that it takes three clicks to reach says something about how much Google wants you to find it."

Pigeon milk.

fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo... I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study 1/

New paper from team @aial.ie! aial.ie/research/gpa... EU's AI Act Article 53(1)(d) is an obligation for GPAI model providers to publicly provide a 'summary' on their model’s training data. The team assessed published summaries along 6 dimensions & found that all big providers failed on all 6. 1/

Important thread about dehumanization by and for the benefit of tech companies w/lots of good resources

Hey genomics colleagues: are they any software programs you wish still worked on your modern OS? I’m trying to get a list of dead software that lost support and fell out of fashion, not due to method but due to software support. #genomics #evosky #evolbio #popgen #Evolution

NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11

We now have a CDC grant tracker and are collecting information on CDC terminations. If your CDC grant was terminated, we need your help to gather data and documents! Please report! grant-witness.us/submit-cdc.h...

What do we want? Fossil databases! 🐚🦕 When do we want them? Forever! 🗓️ Nice new paper highlighting how academic funding systems and digital architecture need to change, to ensure we can protect and sustain our precious fossil data 📚 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The onion remains undefeated in delivering the most accurate news. theonion.com/ai-chatbot-t...

Our newest timeline tracks actions that hamper our ability to control the spread of infectious diseases, making the US and the rest of the world more susceptible to disease outbreaks, including global pandemics: unbreaking.org/issues/infec...

Jim Olds on what worked and didn't in NSF's EEID sciencepolicyinsider.substack.com/p/when-agenc... (Lifted from Dynamic Ecology's Friday links)

Today is the paperback release day for my book The Contagion of Liberty! It’s about how Americans demanded that their governments provide inoculations for smallpox to the public as their right and also to affirm that public health is a foremost duty of government. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Join us this week on 2/6 @ 11AM ET for our next Game Changers Seminar. How can AI & open science reshape verification of the Biological Weapons Convention? Our panel will explore opportunities, risks, and what this means for global biosecurity. Registration open ⤵️ brown.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

I just logged into myNCBI to update my bibliography for NIH and apparently was given access to someone else's account (totally different biosketches, papers, search history, etc). Anyone else experiencing this?

Attention folks in the weather, climate, disaster, wildfire, and Earth science communities: NSF has just published a new "Dear Colleague" letter inviting feedback (by Mar 13) on the proposal to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). www.nsf.gov/funding/...

📣 CFP for a topical collection in EJPS: *Understanding Climate Change: A Multifaceted Inquiry* link.springer.com/collections/... Submission deadline: 01 March 2026 #philsci #climatechange

Please apply (or encourage your grad students to apply) to our awesome funded summer program by January 15th!

Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy these six absolutely amazing images of deep-sea life. www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-ot...

Great new paper! Many stinging wasps, bees, and ants have controlled the sex of their developing eggs for millions of year using an ancient segment of their genome- always the same segment- but what's weird is, *the exact DNA sequence of that segment doesn't seem to matter*.

Suppose you ask #AI for improvements to your writing. The #LLM was trained on, but doesn’t mention, Smith’s work. You adopt the suggestions containing Smith’s ideas. You don’t even realize YOU’VE PLAGIARIZED because you’ve never read or heard of Smith.

My new Gould paper is out today in Paleobiology (OA)! It is, in effect, a synthesis of some of my historical work on Stephen Jay Gould’s early career, which explores the curious position of punctuated equilibria in his early vision for evolutionary paleontology www.extinctblog.org/palaeonews/2...

A THREAD, which I am calling 'Some Of The Many Reasons Lichen And Moss Are Fucking Brilliant'. 1. They make public seating super comfy. bsky.app/profile/dj-a...

This is, not a joke, one of my favourite papers in a long time. Absolutely stellar co-authors, but also a straight line from "nitpicky little nerds obsessing over sampling" to "translational research with clear implications for management". Go read all about it here: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

I started getting reports of an unseasonal Joshua tree bloom in the last few weeks, and looking over records on @inaturalist.bsky.social it's pretty widespread! So we're putting out the call for folks to record this "bonus bloom" and help us study it 🌿 lab.jbyoder.org/2025/12/10/w...

There have been so many of these little Cyclopoida copepods in my samples the last few months. I’d love to know the species, if anyone has any idea? #marineplankton 🦑

Philosophy group at Wageningen University is hiring an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences. Position is in the Philosophy (PHI) group led by @rachelankeny.bsky.social Deadline is 12 January 2026 www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/a... #philsci #philjobs #philsky #hpbio