A real highlight of the conference (also, it’s my photo)

Exciting to finally experience my personal equivalent of ‘is there a doctor on the plane?’ 🕊️

Taking? Its already been took. Even in the rural Altiplano some of the most popular music on the radio was Q-Pop (Quechua K-Pop) five years ago

And all at historically low borrowing costs…Osborne hated green support, given apparently zero understanding of high up front installation costs followed by cheap energy. They then flogged off the Green Investment Bank to Macquarie in 2017… A staggering lack of strategic thinking across the board…

1) New manuscript preprint up: we model adaptation to changing environments under mating systems ranging from random mating via mutual choice monogamy through to female choice polygyny. 🧪https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.30.715329v1

Thrilled to see a leading journal run a special issue on null results — good practice for science, and especially important for conservation where what works should matter more than whether it makes a splashy and positive paper

Pleasure to speak once again to the BOU #BOU2026

The combination of a political demand on the right for ICE-style deportation campaigns, and the woeful data-management of the Home Office, looks like a calamity waiting to happen. Windrush should cast a longer shadow than it does. www.economist.com/britain/2026...

Read the full piece. Read the heinous filth this guy was sharing. And then consider that when we went to the Green Party with all the evidence, *this* was their response. Pathetic words of "solidarity" from the Green leadership mean less than nothing if they simply choose to ignore this.

🚨NEW SCIENCE ALERT!🚨Read our new, open-access publication in Scientific Reports (@nature.com) describing #biofluorescence in #cassowary casques! Very excited to unveil this after keeping it secret for 5 years⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41... NYITCOM @akiopteryx.bsky.social @jonathanberman.bsky.social

Science cuts are occurring globally but those in the USA are particularly egregious. Given what a high % of global science is American, this will mean a permanent loss not just to the USA, but humanity overall

Extremely glad that Wikipedia has decided to remain what it has long been: a towering pinnacle of HUMAN cultural achievement

"It's not fair of environmentalists to point out that in addition to being finite resources that are actively destroying the planet, fossil fuels also leave us at the mercy of fragile supply and logistics chains significantly controlled by autocrats in geopolitically chaotic parts of the world."

Think Tristram Hunt is right (he almost always is when it comes to museums) a tourist levy is a much better solution, for the reasons he sets out well here:

In what kind of sane world is this not a typo? £300,000 from an individual not even resident in the country is a good, wise limit? £3000 at a pinch. £300 would be good.

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

All voluntary organisations in Britain, be it natural history clubs, political parties, the national trust, the masons, etc. have a bimodal age distribution — and the older peak is significantly larger than the younger one

the same way eliminating car dealers, realtors and other parasitic right-wing industries needs to be a goal of the left for its own survival, eliminating chriorpactors, the supplements industry and other quack medicine needs to be on the agenda too

Spending time with rural peasants who expend every spare bit of energy to ensure their kids get email jobs has made be viscerally despise the ennui of modernity bollocks. If you find it soul sapping to do a comfortable and well paying job, go to church/shul/mosque etc. or get a hobby.

The Home Office is a cruel institution which needs liberalising reform (or abolition), not more restrictionist legislation

it's comforting and easy to financialize markets to talk about these topics in a detached and seemingly rational manner but the world's ability to feed billions of people is predicated on a stable supply of Nitrogen adjuncts. It's genocidal via 2nd and 3rd order impacts

I have repeatedly had this arguement with people who are supposedly green and climate concious. 'No transition until just transition, do it right, its a little extra time and expense.' No. A climate emergency means something. We need to move quick and at huge scale. Thats what a emergency requires

The world does not need more undergraduate history essays but does need more people who can write good ones.

Only tangentially related but Labour consistently had at least one OE MP between 1923 and 2010, and has had one since 2024

What are the impacts of the UK mainstream press failing to adequately report on the climate risks associated with declining soil health? Antal Wozniak and Jill Hopke discuss this in a new Geography Directions post 📝 Read more: https://ow.ly/CpK150YsKC2

Whichever way you look at it, the future is either clean energy or ruin.

Excellent piece, but I think the most important part of it is this graph; for all the supposed revival of religion in Britain, it’s basically an online phenomenon primarily driven by American right wing monies rather than any organic evangelical revival

Seeing a lot of people claiming naming towns after people is un-British, wilfully forgetting the great legacy of Peter Lee, namesake of Peterlee, County Durham

I think I come down to the "you put your name on it, you vouch for it unconditionally, every word, regardless of LLM use" side of the debate rather than the "you should explicitly say if you used an LLM always" side. Too much potential to use the machine to dodge accountability

If this government had any sense of self-peservation, they'd call this 'Trumpflation' or the inevitable tax rises 'Trump Tax' (They won't)

Just had this flagged with me. This is disgusting. If Kemi Badenoch had one ounce of leadership in her, she would condemn this. I don’t want any faux sadness from her or Nick Timothy when one of us is hurt or worse. This is how low the Conservative Party have sunk.

There will be mass starvation because of President’s Trump’s war against Iran

Yea whatever one thinks of the Lords’ behaviour, it seems a bit odd to say “let’s have a revising chamber that isn’t allowed to revise”. If that’s people’s positions they should just say they favour a unicameral legislature like New Zealand or Israel

The populist right embraces a series of propositions which aren’t just immoral, but are provably factually incorrect. To pretend they aren’t would be a betrayal of an institution’s scholarly mission, for likely very little actual protection once the right starts looking for scapegoats. Its Danegeld

Not just recently. This country’s liberalism goes deep. From Magna Carta, through the bill of rights and 1688, to being the last free country in Europe when the continent was under Nazi tyranny, we have an (admittedly auto-mythological) liberal national story to tell

About bloody time!

Britain’s established church?

Can’t emphasise enough that there’s loads of books that need reviewers. If you’re an ornithologist, or a biologist or naturalist generally, check out the books received and contact me to review them

Ehrlich’s career combines deep ecological insight and passion for the environment, and popularising some of the most harmful (and frankly racist) pseudo-environmental ideas of the 2nd half of the 20th century. Genuinely a fascinating figure, but one which we’ll be grappling with for a while

Paul Ehrlich has died. Most will remember him for "The Population Bomb." But for many of us, Ehrlich and Raven 1964 was a foundational read that influenced our careers. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Yeah i think you really do have to be a stodgy stick in the mud about universalism because it’s the only way to avoid getting infected with this kind of thinking. You can’t have “as a treat” carve outs for why *this* ethnonationalism is different. No matter the context.

“Physical reality exists” shouldn’t be a fringe position

I’ve noticed on the right how all encompassing immigration now is. Crime? Education? Health? Economy? Whatever the policy area they think the solution is to make Britain “culturally pure”

Having a hard time keeping up with the fast-moving field of origin of eukaryotes/Asgards archaea? Our new perspective article can help, we review the status of research over the last decade and where it's going. The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

'In the United Kingdom, when tuition-fee income and cheap borrowing swelled university budgets through the 2010s, higher-education institutions embarked on the largest construction boom since the Second World War in an attempt to attract more students.' 1/2

Trumpism didn't happen overnight. It took decades of lies and hate all over the airwaves to make it seem even vaguely normal or mainstream. We still have time to nip that process in the bud here in the UK. We won't. bylinetimes.com/2026/03/12/g...

There are so many reasons I feel deeply disappointed by this Government and its betrayal of what Labour should be. This is one of the most pointlessly cruel.

Unless the government steps in, it’s clear that there will be a complete hollowing out of UKHE as jobs are lost and conditions deteriorate. And lest people think it’ll be restricted to post 92s, the job losses have already come to “prestigious” unis like Durham, Edinburgh, & Bristol

There’s basically three things which never poll badly in Britain — a ban, apprenticeships, and cuddly animals.

I love opera, I attend opera festivals. I’m aware that I’m one of about three dozen people under 55 who attends opera with any regularity, and I’m pretty sure I’ve met them all.