Why did consciousness evolve at all? A superb special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org brings together experts across disciplines to explore the functions of consciousness and why it emerged in some species but not others. @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Is there a mathematics of discontinuous behavior? Christopher Zeeman was a leading proponent of Catastrophe Theory, a topological approach to sudden change that underpins much of today’s work on tipping points. This is his beautiful 1976 paper in @sciam.bsky.social www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2...

We just released a @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social describing the *microntology*, a lightweight controlled vocabulary that we have been using for a while to tag metagenomes with contextual data. Study by @fullam.bsky.social @vishnuprasoodanan.bsky.social et al: 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” — Ray Bradbury. In the name of their freedom, autocrats have always treated books as enemies. This documentary is well worth watching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykll...

📢Coming up, workshop at #Behaviour2025 on our swaRmverse package! 🗓️Tue 26/8, 13:10–14:40 💻Theory & R practical (feel free to bring your data) 🎯Discussion on comparative analysis & metrics 🙏Come & recommend features for version 2.0! 👉RSVP on the app More info: behaviourindia2025.in/workshops.html

What is the origin of diversity in allometric laws scaling across species? Check our new paper led by Andrea Tabi where we propose a new theory of metabolic scaling grounded in thermodynamics and stochastic fluctuations at the cellular level. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Genomic divergence across the tree of life 🧪🌐https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2319389122

Can synthetic biology help save endangered ecosystems? Our new paper with @vmaull.bsky.social explores how engineered genes can spread through soil microbes. We model how synthetic gene transfer can support biodiversity. @vdlorenzo.bsky.social @guimaguade.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

and first task done!! ✅ to hug @cpavloud.bsky.social after many many #MVIF events working together (online) @microbiomevif.bsky.social

📢 Dryad & @openrxiv.bsky.social are excited to announce a new partnership & integration. Beginning today, authors posting #preprints to @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social will have the option to upload #opendata to Dryad at the same time. Read more ➡️ bit.ly/4nHtcdA #preprint #openaccess #datasharing

Can science ever escape its demons? Enjoying these three brilliant books by historian of science Jimena Canales. They remind us that science isn’t a straight line. History, time, imagination, they're all up for grabs. @gemmadlc.bsky.social @jordipinero.bsky.social @seanmcarroll.bsky.social

Mediterranean olive groves🫒, which have long been symbols of tradition and culinary heritage🫘🥘 are threaten by serious erosion rates of 29-47 tons per ha annually. Read the Nature Article @soilolive.bsky.social . t.co/BUnwiZePKe

Can cellular life be created in the lab? We are not yet there, but clearly getting closer! Check this paper where a new scenario for protocell replication is presented by Job Boekhoven and co-workers @manlius.bsky.social www.cell.com/chem/pdf/S24...

What is emergence? This is one of the most central ingredients of complexity, and a challenging one to formalize. Here's a paper by @seanmcarroll.bsky.social & Achyth Parola that attempts to classify different forms of emergence. @manlius.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15468

Mathematicians have made an advance toward understanding the gray areas between order and disorder.

Really exciting and important tree microbiome paper published in @nature.com ‘A diverse and distinct microbiome inside living trees’ 👏 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do you like coastal/estuarine microbiology, time-series data, and/or metagenomics? Have we got a dataset for you #NSFfunded Metagenomes and 1,313 metagenome-assembled genomes from a northern Gulf of Mexico coastal time series www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

You can watch Hadley's keynote at this link: www.youtube.com/live/ctc2kx3... #useR2025

For the past four decades, finding the fastest route to every destination in a network involved sorting the routes by distance. This meant that algorithms could only work as quickly as they could sort. No longer.

Lin et al. Climate warming fuels the global antibiotic resistome by altering soil bacterial traits www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Just about to push a big update to our R package TaxSEA where we've spent a lot of time collating data from the BacDive database so it's readily usable in a metagenomics analysis. See example below from the HMP IBD data. #metagenomics #bioinformatics #microbiome #microbiota

#DYK? 🌱 Of 30 000 edible plant species, just 30 feed the world. 🥣 And 5 grains (rice, wheat, maize, millet, sorghum) provide 60% of global calories! It's time to diversify our plate. 🥬🍠 fao.org/seeds/en

Today, error-correcting codes are operating behind the scenes everywhere your data is stored or transmitted — even on Netflix. Tune in to The Joy of Why: www.quantamagazine.org/how-can-math...

Have you explored the NMDC Field Notes mobile app yet? Check out our new tutorial video for a quick walkthrough! buff.ly/Dohg4gH 🧪

Stoked to finally have a preprint out for Phold, our tool that uses protein structural information to enhance phage genome annotation #phagesky 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New online! Viromics approaches for the study of viral diversity and ecology in microbiomes

A fundamental technique in AI lets researchers transfer knowledge from a large, expensive “teacher” model to a smaller, cheaper “student” model.

What can be predicted when dealing with the real world? What are the limits of prediction? Watch this fantastic talk by @evamirandag.bsky.social on the nature of undecidability. With Turing, fluid turbulence, computation, chaos theory and ... rubber ducks www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsJ8...

Thanks to everyone who responded to my question about what folks should know about using LLMs to generate #rstats: I've summarised the feedback with a few of my thoughts at gist.github.com/hadley/77d42...

Check out our updated tutorial video for the NMDC Submission Portal and learn how it can help you record, validate, and submit the metadata relating to your microbiome samples! www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV8U...

The #BHLTransition is underway! ⛵ We’re charting the course to a strong and sustainable future for the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Read our latest update and, if you have visionary ideas about how BHL can evolve and grow, get in touch 🚀: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/07/bhl-...

Hiring/Seeking a *permanent* programmer in ecological modelling at my lab @unibonn.bsky.social. We mechanistically model plant communities, island biogeography, species range dynamics, eco-evolutionary feedbacks, diversity gradients, tropical forests, vascular epiphytes. Pls rt! shorturl.at/Bzzdt

Thank you to everyone who has shared & responded to our Call for Support thus far. Our Call proposes a more distributed & sustainable future where BHL is shared across multiple hosts supported by multiple funding sources. Find out more: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/06/tran... 🌱 📖 🧪 🌏 #ILoveBHL

📢 The #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary is entering a bold new chapter – and we need your help! Today we release our official Call for Support. We’re seeking new hosts for BHL’s staff, infrastructure, and services. Learn more: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/06/tran... #BHLTransition #ILoveBHL

How can we build a general theory of mutualistic communities? After five years, we finally completed a new Neutral Theory of Cooperation that is fully solved analytically and displays remarkable properties @jordipinero.bsky.social @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2506.09737

Information, complexity, evolution and computation are connected in profound ways. How? Algorithmic information theory is one fundamental piece of the puzzle. Here's one of the classic papers, by the great Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov complexityexplorer.s3.amazonaws.com/Epistemologi...

Is there an ecology of genomes? Can we see ecological communities of genetic elements behaving like species in a rainforest? In this @plosone.org paper, the authors show how genetic elements (like transposons) occupy chromosomes as species fill space in in the wild journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Very special seminar with coverage on the Human Virome Program, One Health Microbiome studies (humans and companion animals), & the microbiome Center that Curtis Huttenhower co-directs. Q&A session was quite rich with @psumbiome.bsky.social @dna-heligrace.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wK8...

As the world warms, plants in natural ecosystems and agricultural settings find ways to respond to the heat. In a new special issue of Science, researchers examine how heat affects plants at multiple scales, from the molecular level to the biosphere. (THREAD 🧵) scim.ag/44cSw3Z

Thrilled to share Drew Coughlin's project! Build LLM-powered Shiny dashboards with Posit's multilingual querychat. 🤖 It lets LLMs understand your data privately and converts plain language to SQL. Drew's ultra-runner app is a great demo! Check it out: posit.co/blog/race-st... #RStats #Python

I'm delighted to present this Science special issue on Plants and Heat! Through a series of Reviews and Perspective articles, covering topics from cell signalling to ecology there is something for everyone here. (1/8)

New paper: "Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective" (D. Krakauer, J. Krakauer, M. Mitchell). We look at claims of "emergent capabilities" & "emergent intelligence" in LLMs from the perspective of what emergence means in complexity science. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135

Subterranean ecosystems are key to water, climate, biodiversity & more. But to what extent? A @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social preprint led by @biodiversa.eu DarCo shows they contribute to 75% of classified ecosystem services by CICES: doi.org/10.32942/X2J... Illustration: @jmalumbresolarte.bsky.social

We are delighted to announce mirai 2.3.0 for advanced async computing in #RStats! Mirai allows event-driven async in Shiny & parallel processing in purrr. This release brings improvements in serialization & distributed computing. Read more from @shikokuchuo.net: shikokuchuo.net/posts/26-mir...

This isn’t innovation; it’s a hostile takeover of the money supply. Lacking anything resembling serious regulation, stablecoins are neither stable nor merely an alternative dollar payment option. They are a Trojan horse for the privatization of money. www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/t...

Simple, Universal Rules Predict Trophic Interaction Strengths #scaling #allometry #bodysize 🧪🌐https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.70126?campaign=woletoc

Different worldviews and knowledge systems influence the ways people interact with and value nature. 🌿- IPBES #ValuesAssessment All these values must be considered to effectively address the #biodiversity crisis. 🌍🧪 Read the Values Assessment Report: www.ipbes.net/the-values-a...

Interesting preprint on using genomic context predicts that > 45,000 uncharacterized proteins in Actinomycetota may be involved in phage defense www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #unknownfunctions

Quantum computing for biology: How it works, its possible applications, and the hype! I know, it's long overdue that I make another proper video, but believe me when I say that this one took me a long time to research and put together. I hope it was worth it. youtu.be/0RVQNDxMjls

The #TETTRIsEU Taxonomy Recognition Day stroke Europe from Greece 🇬🇷 to Finland 🇫🇮, from Italy 🇮🇹 to Belgium🇧🇪 and in 10+Countries! Hundreds of people joined their local Natural History Museums & Natural Gardens and learned about the importance of #Taxonomy for preserving #biodiversity! #NameItToSaveIt