One of my favorite snowy day paintings is Claude Monet's "The Magpie," 1868-69 at the Musée d'Orsay www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/...

Pre-announcement ... keep an eye out for news of our upcoming #Biodiversity #Bioinformatics Summer School 21-26 June in Germany co-organised by @sib.swiss & @denbi.bsky.social ... sign up to the mailing list to be sure not to miss it! www.sib.swiss/training/upc...

OTD 126 years ago Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, was born in Ukraine. My students already know him... #evolution en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodos...

How and when did domestic cats conquer the world? 🐈 The aDNA study recently published in Science tells a fascinating story about the human-mediated dispersal of our purring furry friends. doi.org/10.1126/scie... #MetagenomicsMonday #SPAAM #aDNA #paleogenomics #cats #zooarcheology #domestication

Recombination landscape shaped by inversion polymorphisms – a high-density linkage map and chromosome level assembly of inversion-rich spruce bark beetle genome doi.org/10.1093/g3jo... Happy to have an article where one of the co-authors is my mum :):):):)

#ChornobylWildlife Wildlife in the hard Ukrainian winter inside #Chornobyl Nature reserve. From #Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve page (www.facebook.com/zapovidnyk2018) 📸 Sergei Domashevsky, Alexandra Artemenka

If you’re in/around London next week & want to hear me speak about lots of fun early medieval isotopes + aDNA come along on Tuesday! ⚛️🧬☠️

Some breaking art historical news for you - a lost portrait of Robert Burns by Sir Henry Raeburn was unveiled today at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. It’s been missing for more than 200 years. 1/3

🦙🧬Pleased to present our new paper out in @natcomms.nature.com 🧬🦙 Palaeogenomics of early camelid use in the Atacama Desert (Chile). We used ancient DNA to revisit animals being hunted/herded >3,000 years ago. Manuscript here: rdcu.be/eVwwl #aDNA #popgen Thread below🧵 Reposts appreciated :)

Globally, no single day in 2025 was cooler than its 1991-2020 average. climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima...

The Caregiver Award is open to members with expenses for the care of children or dependent adults (including adult children with a disability or elderly relatives) during their attendance at SMBE2026. 📨 Award applications smbe2026.org/abstracts #SMBE2026

What a way to start the year!! Really enjoyed the usual friendly atmosphere at PopGroup and all the research shared. Many thanks to the organisers @popgroup2026.bsky.social If anyone is interested in joining my group or coming to Sweden please get in touch 🧬❄️

We are excited to share with you the latest SPAAM Newsletter! Inside, you’ll find: announcements, opportunities and publication highlights. www.spaam-community.org/assets/media... We hope you enjoy this edition! #SPAAM #aDNA #Newsletter #paleogenomics #metagenomics

Come and join me and my colleagues at the Department of Biology, #LundUniversity in #sweden! We have am open position as Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity. Apply here no later than February 11 2026: https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:848749/type:job/where:4/apply:1

The Canada Government will offer 400 postdoctoral fellowships to international researchers in early 2026. If you have a background in wildlife microbiome or quantitative genetics and are interested to apply to work on microbiome variation in Sable Island horses or caribou, feel free to get in touch

Evaluating inbreeding and assessing the risk of outbreeding depression in genetic rescue using whole-genome sequence data www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Big takeaways: Britain is never cut off from the Continent, migration is constant, the 7th/8thC are fascinating, people are moving into England from the Arctic to Africa & beyond! Lots more I can't get into here on 🦋 so please check it out! It's FREE to read 🙏 ❤️+ 🔁 doi.org/10.1080/0076... 10/

🌟New Year exciting new OA paper🌟 doi.org/10.1080/0076... from myself @hcaatedinburgh.bsky.social, @shakenbeck.bsky.social & TC O'Connell @cam-archaeology.bsky.social "Large-Scale Isotopic Data Reveal Gendered Migration into Early Medieval England c ad 400–1100" using #isotopes & #aDNA🧵⬇️ 1/

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪 Explainer🧵👇1/n

Absence of Mothers Curse for performance traits among divergent mtDNAs in heterozygous nuclear backgrounds in Drosophila https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.17.694680v1

Join us at SMBE26! We are in a golden period for understanding the evolution of gene regulation.

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

A still morning at Loch Maree

SMBE2026 Symposium 4 | Mining the archive: evolutionary genomics from public repositories 📨 Abstract submission smbe2026.org/abstracts 📋 Programme details smbe2026.org/programme #SMBE2026

Our new ancient DNA paper has just been published! We present 28 new genomes from southern Africa - several of them high-coverage whole genomes. Exciting to be moving towards population-level representation of ancient southern African genetic diversity! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

More layer loveliness 🥰 Just love how the scene drapes downward Just a single shot (no Photoshop) showing how the camera records what we cannot see with our eyes Just a reflection of a building in water at Canary Wharf

Cool work from my colleagues @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social just dropped! Merlin Szymanski, @janetk.bsky.social et al. developed quicksand, a fast, accurate and beautifully designed Nextflow pipeline for taxonomic classification of mammalian mtDNA from ancient sediment DNA. doi.org/10.1093/molb...

After a four-year journey, my PhD work is out in @science.org Endless gratitude to the amazing @felix-erc.bsky.social team, all coauthors and collaborators, and my loved ones. Without you all this couldn't be real! 💛🐱✨ @erc.europa.eu @nationalgeographic.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

(1/5)Thrilled to announce our paper on #ProjectPsyche is out! 🦋We describe how we’ve generated 1000+ high-quality genomes for European Lepidoptera, providing an unprecedented resource for biodiversity, conservation, and evolutionary research. #Genomics #Biodiversity www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

A PNAS Special Feature exclusively about dogs? Woof! Here are 3 of the 8 that we were involved with. Congrats to @lachiescarsbrook.bsky.social & @undeaddandy.bsky.social Dingoes! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... German Shepherds! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Imputation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

PhD studentship on antimicrobial resistance in wild baboons! Fully-funded by @swbiodtp.bsky.social Application deadline: Wed 3 Dec 2025. More details: bpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.bristo.... Apply here: www.swbio.ac.uk/programme/ho... @inesfuertbauer.bsky.social @xavh.bsky.social

🚨 Reminder to send in your abstracts for the palaeogenomics conference in Stockholm! 🧬🦠🐕💃🏼 If your results are still preliminary, my tip is to keep the abstract broad rather than skip submitting altogether 😉 See the post below for the price estimate and looking forward to seeing you there 🥳! #aDNA

I wrote about the recent autism-microbiome paper, why I think it's the most important microbiome paper this year, and what it says about the field open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

DNA Sequencing Reveals Hitler Was Type Of Fern

🦣🧬🦣🤯💥We are pleased to share our new paper about ancient RNA expression profiles from the Woolly Mammoth, now published in Cell @cellpress.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... If you want to know more, read the 🧵 below:

WE ARE RECRUITING PHD STUDENTS!!! We have three(!) funded PhD studentships advertising presently. If any of these are of interest, please reach out! Thread below with links to more information on each project. #Drosophila #Evolution #Immunity #SelfishGene #Aphids Thread with links below 🧵 1/4

For the Aussies, the zoologists and the architects out there. 💩🧊🧪 By @chazhutton.com

We are looking for a PhD student to work on an exciting plastid endosymbiosis in microbial eukaryotes. This position involves sampling, exciting microscopy such as CARDFISH, ExM and FIBSEM, single-cell transcriptomics and more. #protistsonsky 1/2

ooof this feels like most every university rn

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. " www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

We've used this pipeline a lot (and will continue), and I can only highly recommend it

"Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.251805 None of the points are really new, but it's hopeful to see academics with potential power to enforce changes endorse new solutions like e.g. @PeerCommunityIn

This hits so close to home for Higher Education too! Student: I’m asked to write a “reflective portfolio” on how _insert random theme in biology_ makes me feel. No way I’ll spend time doing it! ChatGPT to help! Academic member of staff: There’s no way I can provide feedback on all these student

I have no idea who to credit for this, apologies. But fuck, that's so accurate based on recent workplace conversations I've overheard.

Just over a month left to apply for scholarships on this project. We will run internal pre-selection interviews end of November, so if you consider applying, please reach out now. I can guarantee amazing scientific and intellectual environment at the Institute for Eco Evo @edinburghup.bsky.social

Hi Folks ! Just a few more days to register for the POPGROUP meeting (deadline = this Monday 10/11/2025). Join us in the beautiful city of #Lille just across the Channel for three exciting days of science and more ! www.hautsdefrancetourism.com/destinations... --> populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk

Applications for MCSA are up 64%! 50% now come from outside the EU. Trump effect? The European Research market just got a hell of a lot more crowded. EU should turn on the tap marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/news/msca-po...

@jdmanthey.bsky.social et al. used genome data from contemporary and historical samples of 8 Ethiopian Highlands bird species, revealing idiosyncratic shifts in genetic structure and diversity after 100 years of environmental change. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf163 #genome #evolution #naturalhistory

I've finally got around to curating a selection of films about the #climate crisis 🎥 There's lot of mediocre climate films out there, but for me these stand out head & shoulders above the rest 🎞️ They make excellent resources for classrooms, lecture halls, or community cinema's 🎬 Thread:🧵Plz RT

Introducing Salmonella Serovar Wiki! A web portal for academia, industry and public health providing comprehensive, serovar-specific information on over 100 Salmonella serovars, including their genomic characteristics and outbreak history. #mSphere: asm.social/2Fn