The mainstream British right has embraced blood and soil ideology. These words aren’t from Rupert Lowe or Tommy Robinson, but from non-Reform member Tim Stanley. It’s immoral, an as David says, frankly evil.

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I already agree with this in principle - citizenship is an untouchable status or it is nothing - but also for reasons of prudence. “The Home Sec can revoke citizenship when he/she deems someone’s online output sufficiently offensive” is a v dangerous precedent to set with Reform leading all polls.

We’re in the fascist international’s cross hairs and ought to prepare accordingly

Shamima Begum was the beginning of something in so many ways, one of which was 'the last government's inability to just do its job properly (in this case by passing legislation that would have allowed it to prosecute her here at home) and instead going 'no option but to undermine all our rights'.

Pam was right in the Don Pacifico affair and Starmer is right with Fattah — “As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, Civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that …. England will protect him”

At least one of my Spanish ancestors was in what would later become part of the USA (Puerto Rico) by 1570, glad to know I’m an ultra-heritage American

New research by Stewart, K., Venditti, C., Carmona, C.P. et al. highlights an urgent truth: protecting bird diversity requires both threat abatement & targeted recovery. Prioritizing unique species can save vital ecosystem functions. 🐦 💡Full study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02746-z

Academia is and always has been global — a republic of letters. It’s arguably already much less international than it once was, at least in spirit, and the nationalist attacks on it will serve only to further breakdown the republic of letters

Unbelievable that lead #fishing weights are still driving wildlife declines decades after we understood the threat #Ornithology

Doubt raised about whether Rice's whale (close relative of Bryde's and Eden's whale) should be a species given that genetic divergence could be caused by a recent bottleneck from whaling, and not true inability to interbreed with other species onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

We have to be pretty plainspoken about this. Exterminationist ideas are mainstream now

🎉🍾 very excited to see this out before 2025 ends doi.org/10.1111/2041... with Will Hoppitt in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. This paper is an overview of our new R package STbayes, a user-friendly toolkit for performing Bayesian NBDA analyses. @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Elephants along with red deer, horses and wolves on the Spanish coast, not so long ago 🐘🦌🐎🐺🐾🇪🇸 #megafauna #lastinterglacial phys.org/news/2025-12...

Amid the miasma of institutional and Edtech-commercial hectoring on the imperative rapidly to embrace GenAI tools for research and writing, a simple pearl of wisdom to share with students and colleagues in 2026 (or even 2025).

New paper alert! Microclimate temperatures are more extreme than we previously thought! Near-ground temperatures are amplified in hot weather, cool refugia is lost and replaced with heat traps ☀️🔥🥵 escape from heat will be very hard for small ground-dwelling organisms doi.org/10.21425/fob...

I think this is both correct and, quite frankly, our standards of Governance have not improved since we all sobered up. RETVRN

2025 Georgina Mace Review now out in #ProcB - How monitoring matters for nature #conservation: 15 reasons framed in a theory of change #OpenAccess royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

No one has been more vindicated in how the politics of devolution would embolden more nationalist politics than Tam Dalyell

NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

Increasing human ecological impact over the Holocene (11,700 - 150 years ago) led to biodiversity gains in Europe. Why? From ~8,500 years ago, the spread of farming created heterogeneous, habitat-rich landscapes that enhanced biodiversity. Read our new paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/geb.... 🌏 🧪

What a great way to start day2 #ASABwinter2025! @toshitakaszk.bsky.social can really understand the language of birds and shared it with us! @asab.org @asab-meetings.bsky.social

Our scientists have been busy this year! From dinosaurs to diatoms, they have helped to describe an amazing 262 new species from all around the world! 🪸🐠🦎🦋🪱 Read more about this year’s new species list 👇🏻 www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

How to be a convincing leaf! Learning about the spectrum of leafiness with @benitoexplains.bsky.social 🍃 🐛 🍃 🐛 #ASABWinter2025

Warming oceans are having widespread and often negative effects on migratory seabirds, new research involving UKCEH shows. The study compared seasonal sea surface temperatures with seabird numbers to quantify effects on reproduction, survival & population trends. doi.org/10.1073/pnas... 🧪1/

Completely off-piste but, if liberal democracy survives these decades, there will almost be an excellent doctoral thesis to be written using Anderson’s life as a prism to understand how, in a generation, places that were the bedrock of popular socialism became the bedrock of neo-reaction

Trump is tearing universities apart and shaking them down for millions of dollars and Podesta thinks professors are the problem. We often don't even have faculty lounges anymore on campuses after budget cuts, you absolute boob.

It is indeed a better response than those we’ve heard elsewhere. But if the UK has managed being a multiethnic, multicultural society better than many others (and I agree it has), then why is Shabana going full steam ahead with shifting our approach towards the old West German Gastarbeiter model?

Interesting new paper in Nature on how sterilization and castration increases lifespans across vertebrates. Accords with life history theory, which says that there is a trade off in investing in survival and in reproduction. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

The cordon sanitaire between the centre right and the far right had completely broken down — which is terrifying, since the right will win at least some of the time, and a state can’t long survive if every election is an existential contest

Good basic field biology describing important behavioural aspects of a species — precisely what we need more of imo

It was an honor to work with this group... and the paper is excellent, but the implications for tropical ecosystems make me really sad. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In 1941 Vichy France my great-grandmother Alice Barbier, a teacher, was forced to sign this declaration, swearing she had never belonged to - and never would - any Masonic or other subversive organisation. An example of what happens when right-wing conspiracy theories are enforced by the state.

This is the trouble with basing university finances on international fees — eventually the foreign universities get better. Even without policy mistakes on our end (and there’s been a lot), the improvement of mid tier Chinese & Indian unis was always going to undermine this model

One reason why Britain’s debate over education and the economy is so bad is there is so much snobbery about what the course provider is *called*: a high quality vocational course is…not that different, in cost terms, to a degree with a placement year, and only our snobbery means we don’t notice this

Dear god, man, you came back for another round of this? You do realize that the skills base that high-productivity production relies on is now heavily college-based. right? American manufacturing output *has* gone up while employment goes down. You are not getting back the Fordist compact...

The GOP has long been hostile to wildlife protection (who can forget Helen Chenoweth-Hage’s “endangered species bakes”), but now they seem bent to use the power of the state to prevent civil society from advocating from biodiversity protection when it upsets corporate interests

Ignoring the membership’s clear favourite

I’ll be annoying and say this applies outside of the humanities too — if you’re working in the neotropics there’s a wealth of scientific literature in Spanish and Portuguese. And tbh, older papers in French or German can be useful

Ngl the loss of academic freedom is really what makes me consider leaving academia — after all if it goes from being a calling to do what you’re truly passionate about to just another job, why not leave and actually get paid enough to pursue other interests outwith the job itself?

'Academics warned that rising teaching loads forced them to prioritise projects they believed funding boards would view as low risk.' 'Through a wave of restructuring--often on the advice of consultants--they are removing the last vestiges of academic freedom.' Sharing link for 3 non-subscribers.

So excited to share our new work out in @evolletters.bsky.social today! doi.org/10.1093/evle... Sexual signals and preferences for them often differ across groups, contributing to reproductive isolation. But how do new signals evolve if females already have preferences for existing ones? (1/4)

We are discovering new species at the fastest rate ever. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Happy to see this article. To me it is a great mistery how functional ecology can thrive without an evolutionary background. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

the reason its bad to run universities like businesses is that almost all businesses fail on any reasonable timeline of evaluation. hudson's bay made it the longest and even they only got to about half an oxford of longevity

The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn/No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed/For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn/Or busy housewife ply her evening care/No children run to lisp their sire's return/Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share

White: strong fitness costs for young (3-5 yrs, many primiparous), and senescent (11+ yrs) mountain goat ♀️, almost no cost for prime-aged ♀️. Reproduction also reduced by winter snow. No impact of reproduction on ♀️ survival 🧪https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2656.70137