Game day at FC St. Pauli

First baby names, and now this? I love it arxiv.org/abs/2605.070...

Hailstorm in May!

lol

IU locked down the laboratory of Distinguished Professor of Biology Roger Innes on Thursday night. An email from Vice President for Research Russ Mumper said the lockdown is the result of a "U.S. Department of Agriculture activity." @weiss-a-woni.bsky.social Read more: www.ipm.org/news/2026-05...

I'm thrilled to announce that my book LOST IN CURIOSITY: Field Notes from Scientists' Adventures into the Unknown is available to pre-order now and has been chosen for Indies Introduce, the American Booksellers Association's list of best summer/fall debuts! www.instagram.com/p/DYCj597DTp... (1/N)

New paper from our group by Christina Harvey in Proceedings B @royalsocietypublishing.org on the fascinatingly, unexpectedly complex evolution of vertebrate skeletal muscle myosins. Thanks to collaborators Matt Fuxjager, Eric Schuppe, and Michael Brainard. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

👊

The Barrick & Lenski Labs in Dept of Microbiology, Genetics, & Immunology at Michigan State Univ seek a Research Assistant II to manage their research operations and participate in projects related to microbial evolution and synthetic biology. See details below. careers.msu.edu/jobs/researc...

Please circulate: I will have a postdoc opening soon, ideally with a start date sometime this summer or fall. If you're interested in empirical population genetics, computational methods development, and/or evolutionary modeling via simulation, don't hesitate to reach out. For more info on the lab:

The red line in Figure 6B (% of 6-authors papers in all IEEE proceedings) is unreal

Here’s hoping some of those classic posts (iykyk) don’t get lost from the archives in the handover…

Applications now open for the UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evolutionary Biology (31 Aug–5 Sep 2026, Lausanne)! For PhD & postdocs interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology (incl. social evo, life-history, species interactions). Scholarships available, Pls RP! shorturl.at/fo1GA

🌟 ISCB proudly congratulates the 2026 Class of Fellows! 🌟 This prestigious recognition celebrates a career of significant impact and dedication to the #computationalbiology community.  ➡️Read more about this year’s Fellows and their contributions here: https://tinyurl.com/mtuf6m5b

Statement from The Atlantic:

Wrote a fun little thing on gene tree discordance: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mzPI3QW8S...

Ran my first 10k today! (It finished inside the Olympiastadion)

👋 👋 SSE members, I hope you'll join me May 21 for the virtual SSE Presidential Symposium: Navigating Uncertainty: Individual Resilience and Collective Action in Evolutionary Biology Pls RT to help get the word out!

I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here: mhibbins.github.io I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!

Spread the word! UChicago BSD is currently searching for an instructional professor (open rank) to help develop and support graduate training in quantitative biology at UChicago. This is an Instructional Professor position (open rank). apply.interfolio.com/183517.

😱 Super excited to be named as a Guggenheim Fellow!! 😱

was once New Amsterdam.

THE DALAI LAMA IS WEAK ON MONETARY POLICY.

Whoa—machine learning strikes again (in a good way) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Spring break hits different in Europe

New paper led by Yu Mo, with @psudmant.bsky.social Ever wonder how extreme genealogical discordance can help you to find the genetic basis for trait variation? Wonder no more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are there any problems in the country right now larger than the words people to your left are using

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

I had a strange dream. I woke up as the boss of a large Australian university and went straight to work fixing it. Fewer international students, harder degrees, students back onto campus. The real product isn’t the degree, it’s the trust that comes with it. Then I woke up. buff.ly/wWfB0fp

Too funny not to share: alignmentalignment.ai

Canberra Earthquake March 2026

🌿 Postdoc opportunity in plant evolutionary ecology/genetics! My lab in the Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to start Fall 2026. We study plant adaptation, using weeds as model systems. #Postdoc #EcoEvo Pls RT!

Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11. www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...

This is an amazing piece of scientific satire by @russcd.bsky.social. The first sentence alone is a banger: "The defining goal of the academic endeavor is to establish a single perfect value that completely summarizes entire careers’ achievements." academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

That's a good name for software: MKado: a toolkit for McDonald-Kreitman tests of natural selection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

David Marques was an amazing speciation genomics researcher, a passionate birder, and a wonderful friend, husband, and father. May he rest in peace. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Good piece from Jerry Brewer in the Athletic yesterday The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room www.nytimes.com/athletic/706...

A question about Falconer's formula. The standard formula is: h^2=2*(r_MZ - r_DZ) My question is: can I replace the mono- and dizygotic twin correlations with terms for full-sibs and half-sibs? It's the same ratio of genetic relatedness, so I don't see why not. What am I missing?

So excited to share this manuscript led by the inimitable Cara Brand, who discovered that Topoisomerase II evolution causes hybrid female lethality in Drosophila. Congrats to Cara, @nickbr0wn.bsky.social, Anirban, and @buszczaklab.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

TIL that some childhood cancers (especially neurological ones) lack obvious driver mutations and are likely caused by misregulation of epigenetic marks. 🤯 e.g. www.nature.com/articles/nat...

The Guerrero Lab at NC State University seeks a postdoc in computational evolutionary genetics. Ideal candidates have quantitative skills. Apply by March 10, 2026, via [email protected]. More info: rguerrer.org #postdoc

We (as a society) are good and truly f*cked

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point. I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

Calibrating and documenting host-switching and evolution of incompatibility loci for two closely related Wolbachia clades https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705778v1

get the kid in the brown hoodie a scholarship

Relatedly, @mweissensteiner.bsky.social recently told me that the German science foundation (DFG) has changed its policy to allow AI review: www.dfg.de/de/aktuelles... (only in German, sorry)

A reviewer just very clearly used AI to write a review. What do I do (as an author)?

his appreciation evolved over time, apparently

In celebration of #DarwinDay, here are his decidedly mixed first impressions after landing on the Galápagos (17 Sept 1835; from 'the Voyage' Chap X): "Nothing could be less inviting..."