due to a frustration at a lack of what could be described as a "bodybuilding forum for information science professionals" i decided to make a discord. then everyone clowned on me and told me to make an oldschool bbs. so i did. presenting scope and content: scopeandcontent.com/forum/ join + share!

Just over a week left to apply for this PhD project (unfortunately UK students only). If you're interested then please get in touch!

soundcloud.com/tek_cashay/c... deep cutz for a lazy saturday

Very happy to see our ice-fishing paper on the cover of @science.org this week! 🎣🎉 We tracked large groups of Finnish competitive ice-fishers to study how social foragers use social information when searching for resources. 🐟 Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (contact me for open access)

Want to gain hands-on experience using STBayes? Join our pre-conference workshop on 25/02, led by @mchimento.bsky.social 🤩

New blog post!!🚨 Michael Chimento gives an overview of the new R package STbayes, designed for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission 🌍 🧪 Read the blog here 👇

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Want to socialise ahead of the conference? Join the Early Career Researchers drinks on the evening of 25th/02! 🍻 An excellent opportunity to meet fellow researchers in a relaxed way. Contact us to join. Reminder: conference and workshop registration is still open (forms on our website) 🔎

There is still some time to submit for our Special Collection on social cognition and anthropogenic environments! We are looking forward to hear from you! link.springer.com/collections/... Please do get in touch if you have any questions. #openaccess #socialcognition

Happy New Year from the Culture Conference organisers 🎉 We wish you a year filled with kindness, curiosity, and fruitful research. We still have a few spots available for presentations. Feel free to send us your abstract if you’d like to share your work with us in February!

📖Published! STbayes: An R package for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission This framework can be used to infer complex transmission rules🖥️ 🧪 Read more:

Happy new year! I wanted to share my new Python package called chatter that streamlines the process of applying AI/ML models to animal communication 🦜🦇🐋🐵👨‍🌾 masonyoungblood.github.io/chatter/

🎉🍾 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

Great to see this one published in Molecular Ecology 🐦 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... with @sheldonbirds.bsky.social @nilomr.bsky.social @jon-slate.bsky.social

Quick post on @jonaspotthoff.bsky.social new paper! We found people looked more at novel foods at an experimental buffet, including insects that they find gross! People suppress disgust avoidance when making foraging decisions. Blog: www.dalmaijer.org/2025/12/fora... Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.fo...

This new issue of #PhilTransB expands the field of cultural #evolution and shows why it matters for today’s biggest challenges. It highlights research funded by the @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social's Transformation Fund, which focused on #DEI: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

if you need more frameworks for fighting this good fight, @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I have you covered: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Registrations are now open 📢 Want to join the conference and/or the workshop? Head to our website: culture-conference.com/registration/ As every year, attendance at the conference is free 🎉 (the workshop has a small fee). Reminder: Abstract submission closes soon—submit yours before Monday!

New paper out today w @dalmaijer.bsky.social @barbaraklump.bsky.social and @lucymaplin.bsky.social as part of the Phil Trans special issue doi.org/10.1098/rstb.... Over 2 years, we studied a population of cockatoos thought to be the source of the innovation of bin-opening.

V proud to have worked on the editorial team for this special issue, out today 🥳 Many interesting CE papers and perspectives inside, incl. our new study on human-wildlife conflict between sulphur-crested cockatoos and residents of Sydney stemming from the bin-opening behaviour of SCC. thread soon

The perceived embodiment of proper disgust is entirely different than that of “political disgust”, which actually closely overlaps with anger. Excellently timed preprint, with @disgust-nerds.bsky.social starting tomorrow. Hope someone brings this up in the “Is moral disgust really disgust?” debate!

I am pleased to announce that from Jan 1 2026 I take over as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biological Theory. My first act, with the support of the editorial team, is to bring the journal to BlueSky from X. Please follow us @biologicaltheory.bsky.social. We will be posting about all our articles.

Loved this idea. Reading is nowadays often practiced individually and in silence, but we learn how to read by being read aloud and reading aloud ourselves. Teaching students the different ways of reading should not stop once they can decode long sentences. #reading

Are you working on a project where you need to infer whether individuals are socially learning? pathways, correlates of, and individual variation in sensitivity to social transmission? Consider joining the hand-on STbayes workshop to learn about the latest update to the NBDA framework

Come join this exciting workshop on social network analysis and social transmission, all within a Bayesian framework!! 💻 And many thanks to @danielredhead.bsky.social and @mchimento.bsky.social for conducting it, I'm looking forward 🤩 More information below 👇

There's still time left to apply to join us for the 2026 field season! Deadline: Dec 1 👇🏝️🏕️📊👥

Excited to introduce the Latent Layers Framework – now out in @behavecol.bsky.social – to help think through when and why network differences confound inference in (comparative) social network analysis! 🧵 tinyurl.com/3k3yahwy

In an increasingly divided world, how do strangers become friends? Parakeets might have something to teach us! New paper on formation of affiliative relationships, led by Dr. Claire O’Connell doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New amazing open Postdoc position, w/t opportunities to 1) get closely involved in our next @themanybirds.bsky.social study on innovation and problem-solving; 2) work with @ecobird.bsky.social on avian innovation, cognition & invasiveness. Advert: www.ugent.be/en/work/scie...

🚨 Come join the fantastic long-tailed tit team 🚨 🐦We are recruiting a field technician to collect behavioural data on a long-term studied population of wild long-tailed tits (passerine birds). 🪶20 months contract in Sheffield, UK. 🌲Deadline: 23/11/2025. jobsite.sheffield.ac.uk/job/Technici...

A special type of fishing takes place in southern Brazil: dolphins drive the prey into the net. The fishermen work so closely together that even their heart rates synchronise. Discovered by a research team led by #UniKonstanz @cbehav.bsky.social biologist @hanjabrrr.bsky.social: t1p.de/d56g3

recorded a frenetic, genre swerving Halloween mix over the weekend 🎧 trying to up my gif game youtu.be/mf_Ct44rus0?... #dj

Social relationships promote access to food and information in wild jackdaws https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.25.684536v1

Social relationships are powerful predictors of fitness across social animals. But *why*? In our new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper, we outline testable predictions for why relationship quality and quantity adaptively vary across socio-ecological contexts. tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7

Also, our first workshop on cultural evolution at #alife2025: thanks to invited speakers James Borg and @uchiyama.bsky.social for their talks in session 1! In session 2, we had an interactive generative game with some creative creatures and cultures emerging. Thanks to all who came along 👾🫟🦠

"Dunbar's Number" is a zombie that lives forever in the science press it seems. Estimates of Dunbar's Number with 95% intervals, for a range of model specifications (from doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... ):

loudly thinking "wtf are you talking about" while reading a paper

🦅PhD position 🦅 in my new group at @fbm-unil.bsky.social in Switzerland, studying how the social and resource landscapes shape the learning process for soaring flight. Deadline: Oct 30. Pls repost! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...

Today is #alife2025 day 1! Workshops under way... We have our own workshop tmw on Cultural Evolution of Planet X, 13.30-16.30, room 4F. Exciting keynotes from James Borg and @uchiyama.bsky.social. Join us!

#COSMOS2025 in Tokyo concluded last night with the epic farewell party with DJ Thèque Cachée (@mchimento.bsky.social)! Thank you all brilliant COSMOnauts for coming from all over the world and creating this wonderful community. Have a safe trip back home. See you again soon!

ACE Teaching Innovation Awards empower scholars to incorporate high-quality cultural evolution course materials into their teaching. This is a great opportunity for those from majority-world countries and ECR academics, but everyone can apply! culturalevolutionsociety.org/grants-and-a...

Most people are right- some left-handed or ambidextrous - and so are honey buzzards when turning in thermals! But, unlike us, mastering flight means these birds must overcome laterality as they grow. A gem of a preprint led by @enourani.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here we propose adding an 11th criterion to UNESCO’s framework to protect animal cultures—habitat protection alone isn’t enough. Excited to collaborate with philosophers @merikatariina.bsky.social & @birchlse.bsky.social on this! Message me for access ;-) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Last days to submit! 🚨 Join the Workshop on Cultural Evolution of Planet X at @alife2025.bsky.social (Kyoto, Oct 7). We welcome abstracts on cultural evolution and emergent culture in artificial systems. Work presented elsewhere too! 📅 Deadline: Sept 20 🔗 sites.google.com/view/planetx...

Abstract submission now open for the next Cultural Evolution Society conference in Rabat, Morocco next May @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @ces2026.bsky.social

Celebrating the publication of our big collaborative spatial-social meta-analysis of density-dependent transmission effects, out now in Nature Eco Evo! doi.org/10.1038/s415... (or rdcu.be/eD6eB)

This is fascinating: www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/I... Someone “worked on a book with ChatGPT” for weeks and then sought help on Reddit when they couldn’t download the file. Redditors helped them realized ChatGPT had just been roleplaying/lying and there was no file/book…

Journal publishers *are* bundling your papers up in "data licensing agreements" for big tech companies to use for AI model training. Our publisher, T&F, got £75m from Microsoft for that last year alone.

why is it that on 🤌Italian🤌 highways, every 5 km there is construction that consists of 3-4 km of cones, an odd pile of rubble, and no obvious improvement? it feels like a scam but what is the scam? does the EU provide a set amount of funding per roadwork? what's the deal