The Spanish public television has published the first audiovisual map showing the 6,000 mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the subsequent Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975). A testimony of what happens when fascism wins -something unknown in most of Europe.

ICE vehicles waste a whopping 80% of the energy in their fuel. Electric vehicles are propelled by entirely different mechanisms. Energy enters the vehicle as electricity, which directly powers the drivetrain: EVs need not convert one form of energy to another resulting in much higher efficiency.

@lntran.bsky.social @castellanoed.bsky.social @ryangutenkunst.bsky.social introduce a systematic permutation approach for interpreting haplotype matrix-based methods in population genomics. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf250 #evobio #molbio

Can consciousness arise purely from computation, or does it require the biological mechanisms that allow computing? The tension between computational roles and biological realizers may hold the key. Check this paper by @neddo.bsky.social @mkhochb.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🧵1/ Excited to share our new paper in Molecular Biology & Evolution! 👉 [https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf250] It started as a lab-meeting sanity check for another project — and ended up turning into a new way to interpret machine-learning models in population genomics.

#Solar becomes main source of electricity in the #EU for first time. More than half of the EU’s #electricity in the second quarter of 2025 came from #RenewableEnergy www.independent.co.uk/tech/solar-p...

Exciting news! The next #PopGroup meeting will take place in Lille 🍟, France, 7–9 January 2026 – just 1 hour by train from London, Brussels, and Paris. This year, PopGroup will also host ALPHY, the annual meeting of Evolutionary Genomics. More info: populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk See you there !

Mathematician Hilda Geiringer was born OTD 9/28/1893. In philosophy of science, best known for translating and adding to her husband Richard von Mises' books on probability and statistics, in biology for seminal work on genetic linkage. www.bbc.com/future/artic... #philsci #evobio #probability #math

So exhausting..

Proud to announce the project I've been working on 🏳️‍⚧️🧬 Had hoped to have more ready, but the events of the last week stressed the importance of speaking up against fascism NOW I'd appreciate your support in spreading the word, esp if you work in life sciences research, healthcare, or biotech

Women, non-native English speakers & those form low-income countries are disadvantaged in science but by how much? We found that women with non-English first languages from low-income countries publish up to 70% fewer in English than their counterparts. 1/5 doi.org/10.1371/jour... #languagebarriers

@adameyrewalker.bsky.social Nice to see you here!

Giving a little boost to this appendix to #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines: "Limitations of Mathematical Modeling" https://expandingpossibilities.org/a4-limitations-of-mathematical-modelling.html It starts with static network models, then shows how to include dynamics […] [Original post on spore.social]

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin. It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

With two months to go, @alwaysrong.bsky.social is dominating the Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament leaderboards. Jump into the competition to help dethrone Stephen! Glory, money, and authorship are all on the line! ghi.st

Chapter 12 of #beyondtheageofmachines is out! "Was lange währt, wird endlich gut" we'd say in German. It's called "The World is Not a Set." https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/12-the-world-is-not-a-set.html

Curious to hear thoughts from #popgen, #humangenetics, #genomics folks on recent paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Directed mutation" in specific human pop'ns seems unlikely to me. DM didn't stand up as proposed in bacteria, but there are hot spots shaped by past selection. Plausible here?

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Biology never ceases to amaze!

The SMBE 2026 Annual Meeting in Copenhagen is open for symposium proposals from Sept 1 to Oct 15, 2025. Details at https://smbe2026.org/symposia/. Looking forward to your submissions! #conference

Our latest preprint led by @conjustover.bsky.social with fantastic undergraduate Sam Gibbon and @ryangutenkunst.bsky.social! Read Justin's thread below for more information on this fun project diving into mutation-selection balance in tetraploids! #polyploidy 🧪

New Preprint! This one led by Sam Gibbon, an outstanding undergrad I've worked with for the past year. We take a look at whether segregation patterns in tetraploids (disomic v polysomic) affects mut-sel dynamics. We found some surprising results, and some subtleties: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

SimHumanity: Using SLiM 5.0 to run whole-genome simulations of human evolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673541v1

When Ted Turner asked Carl Sagan if he was a socialist, Sagan gave the answer America keeps failing to learn.

Next ESEB meeting will have an innovative format, across four hubs. The aim is to make it easier to avoid plane travel, and to diversify the locations that can host a meeting #ESEB2025 #ESEB2027

Hello, community! My boss has organised a fantastic competition in the field of population genomics inference. Take a look and get involved if you (truly) think your method is the best!

Me promoting the Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament at #eseb2025! ghi.st Population geneticists: join, compete, earn cash, become an author, learn, help the community! ghi.st

Surely one of the all-time best conference outreach activities: an evolution-inspired decorated street for Les Festes de Gràcia #ESEB2025

If you're interested in learning #JuliaLang and are currently an #RStats user (or even if you're not!), then here's a little introduction to getting started! 📊 Blog post: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #QuartoPub #Julia @tidierjl.bsky.social

Folks going to #ESEB2025 : To help people connect on Bluesky, I've started making starter packs. Here is a first one with the names that were available when I started. Ping me if you want to be included in the next one!

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

RFK Jr. is upset that a recent large Danish study in Annals of Internal Medicine, conducted over 20 yrs in 1 M kids, found no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines & 50 different health conditions. His request for the retraction was rejected. 🧪 www.reuters.com/business/hea...

At the same time, we made thousands of synonymous mutations in endogenous yeast genes and measured their growth. We used careful statistics and controls. Only 3%, 204 of 6874, had a fitness effect! This goes against a controversial recent result that most synonymous mutations had fitness effects.

Exhilarating to see organismal agency in evolution at such a large scale! Organisms chose where to live and what to eat, and only after tens of thousands of generations and after much later speciation events the efficiency was achieved www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you're new to demographic history inference from population genomics, try this webapp I created to illustrate how dadi fits bottleneck models to site frequency spectra: ryangutenkunst-dadi-two-epoch.hf.space . It even outputs files for submitting to the GHIST competition! ghi.st

So says the Computational model of cognition which is profoundly flawed. See our writing on it in The Blind Spot. Also... www.everymansuniverse.com/p/you-are-no...

Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵 New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social 1/8

Estimating the reduction in genetic diversity from background selection under non-equilibrium demography and partial selfing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.30.662370v1

working link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is one of the best ideas I've heard in ages.

AI folks have now discovered “thinking”

Wow. What a way to close out the scientific content of #SMBE2025! Qiaomei Fu takes us through ancient DNA's contribution to our understanding of #HumanEvolution over the past couple of decades, culminating in her revelation this month that we now know what #Denisovans looked like.

🎒 Getting ready for #ESEB2025? 📨 Check your inbox! We have sent out key updates and logistical details.  𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐞? The entire scientific schedule is online.  👉 Explore the agenda: https://lnkd.in/d6MSyPPa

The first photos from the Vera Rubin Observatory are stunning — thanks in part to the University of Arizona, which helped build its mirror. Proud to see Arizona leading the way in space science.

New preprint about open science in eco-evo! We sampled 110 journals, 550 articles, and assessed whether data and code are accessible: (1/5) ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... #ScientificPublishing #OpenScience #ecology #conservation #EvolutionaryBiology #paleobio #systematics #archeology

Birds are such a strange kind of dinosaur, we would be astonished by them if they weren't around us all the time. Goblin-like puppeteers behind a screen of feathers, as described by Gary W. Kaiser in his book The Inner Bird.

"Many talented scientists, disillusioned by constant financial insecurity, leave academia altogether, resulting in a significant brain drain that deprives the field of diverse perspectives and innovation." @drcraigmc.bsky.social‬ nails why I'm no longer a working scientist: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Two big levers of decarbonisation: 1. Shifting from fossil fuel power to clean power 2. Shifting from molecules to electrons Many countries are now doing well on (1). Slower on (2), but this is where a lot of potential lies. Explainer at @ember-energy.org: ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

New preprint: we advertise DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly eco-evo-archaeo journals. 1/6 #AcademicPublishing #ecoevo #archaeology #EthicalPublishing #SocietyJournals #DiamondOpenAccess doi.org/10.32942/X24...