I am shocked I tell you. SHOCKED.

Why do schizophrenia GWAS signals look so flat across the genome? In our recent preprint, we explored why psychiatric disorders — and, more broadly, brain-related traits involving the central nervous system — appear to have unusual genetic architectures. 🧵1/n

11 grants funded by NIGMS since March 15th. 11.

The @cssl.bsky.social is reporting zero snow water equivalent this morning, with just a little snow left around the property. It’s the earliest melt out of the lab’s snowpack since 2015. Median March 30 snow water equivalent is 34 inches. #CAwx

Take a break, take 12 tonnes of kitkats.

California Spring #BloomScrolling

New lab preprint from Maya Wilson Brown, with Adrian Platts & Rebecca Panko investigating genetic variation and introgression in NYC Capsella bursa-pastoris www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#NoKings Davis, CA

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

Spun off a lightweight python package “pedigraph-sim” for simulating meiosis on arbitrary pedigrees. It tracks how crossing over produces segments of local ancestry and contains convenience functions like exporting the tree sequence to tskit for analysis: github.com/pmckenz1/ped...

Wonderful research from @projectceti.bsky.social showing other sperm whales, including non-kin, attending the birthing process of a female. #whales #cetaceans #childbirth #assistedbirth #anthropology #biology #animalcognition

My god. Have you ever seen close-ups of sea star skin? 🧪🌊🌿

Open postdoc position in my lab at Cornell, conducting comparative and experimental studies on transcriptomic responses to diet and toxins, utilizing the milkweed-insect community. Background in molecular bio & herbivory desired. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31867

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

As the first reanalysis data become available, I think I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the March 2026 heatwave will go down as the most anomalously extreme heat event ever observed at any time of year in the southwestern U.S.

Celebrating submitting grades. Getting out before everything in California turns crispy. #BloomScolling

Point cloud local ancestry inference (PCLAI): continuous coordinate-based ancestry along the genome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.23.713813v1

Peak snowmelt is happening nearly two months earlier than normal in most of California. “A melt of this rate is a big deal any time, but in March it’s unheard of,” said Mike Hittle, a hydrologist at the California-Nevada River Forecast Center.

Lenticular clouds capped Mt. Shasta for a few hours this morning. Spotted on ALERTCalifornia's Mt. Bradley 1 camera. See the view live at: https://bit.ly/4t1hhJX

We (with @yanwong.bsky.social) are advertising a 3 year postdoc position for a project on ARG inference and methods! Based at Oxford stats. Closing date noon 7 April, full details at my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

That time of year where I remember again that the University registrar system and Canvas don't alphabetize student names by the same rules.

Now with pages @systbiol.bsky.social ! "Social Environment and the Evolution of Delayed Reproduction in Birds" with @pseudacris.bsky.social and Rick Prum Some comparative support for the hypothesis that the evolution of complex social contexts restructure life histories doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

Some quite elegant work from Kenta Tomihara and my PhD-twin @pinharanda.bsky.social: They mapped genetic variation in a caterpillar structure between wild and domestic Bombyx to a cluster of three Wnt genes, then narrowed down on the functional gene with a CRISPR mKO-based hemizygosity test.

Really excellent paper on the genetics of caterpillar butt ornaments journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Evolutionary biology colleagues: please consider to submit a title and Abstract suggestion to our forthcoming theme issue in "Methods in Ecology & Evolution" on time-dependency in micro- and macroevolutionary rates […]

NEW: For the first time, ProPublica has been able to quantify how many U.S. citizen children have been directly affected by Trump’s immigration crackdown: more than 11,000 kids had a parent detained — and that’s an undercount. 1/ 🧵 www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Happy birthday to one of greatest mathematicians of all time Emmy Noether (1882-1935), here with her eponymous theorem, the backbone of modern physics. 🐡🧪👩🏼‍🔬🧮🎢 #histsci Noether’s theorem links any symmetry of a system with a conservation law. In my portrait, I chose to depict a young Emmy in front 🧵

The limits of information in precise regulation of early multicellular life cycles https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.19.712848v1

Applications to the Gordon Research Seminar in Speciation are now open! We encourage PhD students & postdocs from all geographies, backgrounds, disciplines to APPLY! This 2d seminar in beautiful Lucca 🇮🇹 will be followed by a 5d conference open to the broader community. www.grc.org/speciation-g...

California Spring #BloomScrolling near napa valley. Given how hot it is, it's going to be a short wildflower season

New mutation-selection balance example for teaching. A recessive allele (?) from a quick google

Really cannot overstate how bonkers the heat wave out West is. Just obliterating records. 🧪

"What also breaks is the architecture of trust...that enables a graduate student to defer income for a decade...a community to enroll in a clinical trial to test an unproven treatment..[or] a young faculty member to stake their career on a question whose answer may take years to emerge.

Fossil crinoids have a holiday: Happy St. Cuthbert Day! A legend tells of fossil #crinoid columnals that were collected from nearby rocks & threaded into rosaries known as St. Cuthbert's beads. Columnals are actually disarticulated fragments of crinoid stems!

Sometimes you just get that shot. Anna's hummingbird with a little friend, in my yard. Davis, CA. #birds #ants

Hello BlueSky 🌞 my group has a large project growing arms and legs, and we've decided to graduate from post-its to a project management software (kanban or similar). Any recommendations from academics? Ideally with clear project roles, a task tracker, and as lo-fi as possible!

Are you interested in domestication selection and conservation physiology? Newest paper @evolappjournal.bsky.social: Highly and Lowly Domesticated Endangered Fish From a Conservation Hatchery Diverge in Their Thermal Physiology, Transcriptome, and Methylome onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Xkcd does it again! m.xkcd.com/3221/

Be fair, they might get as far as a flock of these...

Jurassic park would have been a lot less watchable if it was just hubristic press releases.

Wild rice is a perennial, creeping plant. The secret to its perennial growth habit lies in a developmental reversal directed by small RNAs. This image illustrates how combining perennial genes with prostrate growth genes allows cultivated rice to mimic wild rice. Learn more: https://scim.ag/40GOjDb

Someone at work gave me a kind gift of candies, which had three of each kind. It was only after I started eating them that I realized they were perhaps in groups of three because we have three kids. I felt some guilt but ate the lot, because once there was <3 of a kind it wouldn't be fair to kids.

Looking forward to leading this one again!

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California lawmakers say they'll change name of César Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day following sexual abuse allegations.

Only two more days to submit abstracts for the Bay Area PopGen conference! Registration still open for the low low price of $0. bapg-conference.github.io

I had an inversion joke, but I'll just ti xim up.

it's a terrible consequence and symptom of Americans no longer believing in their own story, their own country, for absolutely no reason this is all self-inflicted no foreign power, no natural disaster, just boredom

1. In the most extreme bathroom ban moving in the nation, Idaho's House has passed a bathroom ban with a potential 5 year prison sentence for 2nd offense-using the bathroom. It even counts "offenses" of using the bathroom in other states. It now moves to the Senate.

On April 25th, CalBotSoc will be having our 2026 Annual Banquet and Mixer! We have recently added a Student Poster Presentation to our agenda! Use the QR Code on the right to submit your poster for our upcoming Banquet. Make sure register and purchase your tickets for the Banquet and field trips!

It’s me!