📢 New article out in PLOS BIology! It was truly a pleasure and honour be a part of the core team members to lead this study and work alongside 129 collaborators from 82 institutions across 24 countries - the largest ever comparative study of neophobia in 🐦! 🥰

This is so cool. Thanks for watching!

We received this dispatch from a @uop-ccep.bsky.social @uopcidd.bsky.social BTSCON viewing party. Look at all the Big Team Science FUN they're having! WE LOVE TO SEE IT!! (👀 @dremalt.bsky.social @manyprimates.bsky.social)

Other minds are foreign countries

100 years? This might as well be a short story collection of speculative fiction. "This issue is about scientific foresight, not science fiction." Okay, I mean, good luck? I think it'd be more valuable *and* enjoyable to read something like David Eagleman's "Sum" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum:_Fo...

Such a loss. Hard to understate how much Jane Goodall did for the field of primatology, and probably all of comparative psychology, animal cognition, animal behaviour... We are very much in her debt. And its also just great that still to this day she would describe herself as an ethologist.

Recently I spoke about @manyprimates.bsky.social for @liftcostaction.bsky.social about distributed research projects and teams in animal sciences! www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKrA... If you're interested in BTS projects, comparative cognition etc, have a watch

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Bringing in new reviewers after the first back-and-forth has got to be one of the biggest misuses of everybody's time

📣 New paper out (and my first one on ravens)! ❤️ "Startling ravens Corvux corax at foraging: Differences in anti-predator behaviour can be explained by age rather than personality" by Janina Weißenborn, @pesumas.bsky.social, Thomas Bugnyar and myself, out now in Journal of Avian Biology! ✨️😊

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

Richard Wollheim on Bertrand Russell.

We are currently testing highly underrated and understudied colobus monkeys for @manyprimates.bsky.social at Zoo Krefeld. It's a start - but ManyPrimates needs more colobines (and gibbons) for fair representation!

1/3 First evidence of anxiety in snails They exhibit fear responses hours after the source of their anxiety is removed. These responses can be reduced with an anxiolytic, such as alprazolam. They have also demonstrated high-level learning. (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our letter is out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social We argue against a recent claim that animals cannot make mental simulations because they supposedly do not reliably memorize sequences. The evidence for model-based animal cognition is too overwhelming. 🧪 authors.elsevier.com/a/1lKMt_V1r-...

To be clear: I'm not sure what exactly this is and it deserves further study. But if something analogous would happen in primates/corvids/dolphins someone would publish a high-profile anecdotal report about it, celebrating it as a hallmark of advanced cognition in large-brained vertebrates ...

Normalise writing a nice quick note to scholars literally every time you read and like their work. Our world is small and getting smaller. We need encouragement.

When you're stuck in a nightmare that you can't get your contact lenses out

Observe the wild Brown Dog, thermoregulating so good in the little hole he dug for himself in the cool dirt in the shade

Just another day walking by a herd of cows on my way home through central Newcastle

What are common characteristics of #power & #dominance in humans?!? 🧔🤺 ➡️ it's different in non-humans 🐒 🐦! Drew Altschul finds convergence among psyc measures - there is a general assertative factor which is stable! @dremalt.bsky.social #ehbea2025 #status

If anyone has questions about @manyprimates.bsky.social or want to know how to get involved, I will be at #EHBEA2025 for the rest of the week 🐒🦍🦧

Soula's feedback has been quite valuable today. She's very invested in the current project on dog personality. Brown, meanwhile, clearly phoning it in as a collaborator. He'll be getting last author.

While this is not exactly what's going on in the article, I am reminded that we've had modern measurement theory for quite a while now, and that dismayingly few widely-used and socially important measures survive first contact with it.

Sunny day friends

Really interesting post. The West End Games Star Wars RP system had a lot of flaws, but was (and is!) so much fun. WEG's system was always a better fit than d20. I still have all these sourcebooks at my parents' house. But there's a lot of historical impact I didn't know about, or had forgotten.

“A Voice Inside Your Head” – An AI superintelligence spontaneously manifests and it might actually be... benevolent? And help people self-actualise? A young couple must find new paths to keep from losing their identities or losing their minds. Station 11 x Neuromancer #scotwriterpitch2025

“A Voice Inside Your Head” - A superintelligent, superpowerful AI manifests in our world, seemingly out of nowhere, and radically changes the planet. Two ordinary people have to figure out how to navigate their new world without letting it psychologically destroy them. #scotwriterpitch2025

So proud of this little one. I found this succulent by the side of the road, next to a bin, desperately root bound and thirsty. Brought it home, took care of it, and it has thrived since. And now it even blossomed!

Needed a nostalgic read so I reread Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East (Broken Lands, Black Mountains, Changeling Earth/Ardneh's World) for the first time in many years. What pacing! What ideas, innovation, and fun! Crazy interesting demons! Draffut! An absolute classic of science fantasy.

Academics when they get invited to review something

Namaste from Nepal, friends

The crisis in British higher education is acute + painful right now. If you are in it you already know this, but for those who are not I want to share what is going on. As strikes start at Newcastle Uni + others will doubtless follow, now is a time for solidarity + resistance

🦍🖥️New paper on great apes in virtual environments: Chimpanzee Turning Behavior During Spatial Navigation in Virtual Environments (animalbehaviorandcognition.org/article.php?id=1390). Led by Sarah Koopman, we went back to basics and asked a simple question about object permanence and optical flow.

Unforseen support for the "use it or lose it" hypothesis of cognitive function

1/7 Humpback whale communication has human language features They have studied the songs of humpback whales inspired by the way children segment communication. When studied from this perspective, it purely follows Zipf's law. (paper) https://buff.ly/3Q5OZNf

Those three maxims, though I didn't get them from Newport, have made it bearable to try working while living with a chronic illness. Though obsessing over quality is still an obsession. And obsessions like that bring considerable anxiety.

Since I've been trying to ignore the internet, I only just learned that one of my first academic mentors, Jerry Schneider, died in December. Here's a little write-up: bcs.mit.edu/news/profess... Jerry taught me animal behavior. I can't emphasize enough how impactful it was to have him as a teacher.

This is from a couple of months ago but worth resurfacing: Octopus, the modular publishing platform @octopus-ac.bsky.social, now integrates goverment funding priorities as Research Problems, the first module in a research project. www.jisc.ac.uk/news/all/oct...

Hot take: Row Row Row Your Boat is an underappreciated masterpiece of Zen philosophy.

Gin Gin Of Sukhumvit

New paper from the big team working on big team comparative psychology

Post a photo of yourself from a different era (MIT)

Yes, big team science is for any and all taxa! If you're at #ASABWinter2024 you'll find reps from @manydogsproject.bsky.social @themanybirds.bsky.social @manygoatsproject.bsky.social ManyZoos and ManyFishes. Find your people!

Pick a movie, keep one actor - the rest are muppets The Princess Bride Fred Savage

Really interesting cross-species / developmental study of how different primate minds think about agents. Likely important implications for causal, linguistics, etc cognition

Optimist: the cup is half full Pessimist: the cup is half empty Mahayana Buddhist: all cups are empty

This article is one of the most incredible things I've ever read

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