1/ 📢 We’re hiring at Brunel Psychology! We have ✨TWO sparkling ✨ new permanent roles in Clinical Psychology as we grow our clinical provision, including our new MSc in Clinical Psychology launching this September. Come and help shape what we’re building 👇 @brunelgradschool.bsky.social 🧪

1/ Important retraction news 👇📰 A recent article using “national IQ” data to claim that a country’s “national intelligence” causes economic growth has been retracted @rebeccasear.bsky.social was among those who raised concerns - a good example of the importance of responsibility in science 💪 🧪

📣 NEXT WEEK All welcome!

🎥 Introducing Brunel Psychology’s new YouTube channel 🤩 because obviously what the internet needed was academics doing 40-minute deep dives. You’re welcome. Daniel sits down with Brunel’s @aiyanakoka.bsky.social to talk religion, gods and why humans are so committed to meaning-making 🧠✨

97% of r@pists walk free in the UK. Survivors don't. Let's change that! This petition calls for free civil legal support for survivors, creating a real route to accountability where criminal justice often fails - and helping prevent repeat harm over time. therightwordsproject.org/petition-fre...

Ayesha Ali as Sekhmet the Egyptian lioness of war and healing 🦁🔥🩸 @aiyanakoka.bsky.social as Inanna the Sumerian goddess of love/war and fertility 🌹🗡️✨ @michelleakline.bsky.social as Brigid the poet & smith 🛠️📜 @loraadair.bsky.social as Hekate, the Greek goddess of magic, crossroads & the night 🌙🗝️

The Spirits and Sources folks attended the Goddess Conference last week 🧙‍♀️🪬🧚 lots of fieldwork 🏞️🔍, participant observation and ethnography 🧑‍🤝‍🧑📋🖊️, and community building 🌐🤝🏘️ as well as embodied experience 🙏💃🌀 @brunelpsy.bsky.social @brunelgradschool.bsky.social

🧵 1/ CCEs @michelleakline.bsky.social , @nicolewen.bsky.social and Nachita Rosun all contributed to ….“Meet A Field Guide to Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning” 📣💪🤩 edited by the lovely @sheinalew.bsky.social

@michelleakline.bsky.social @ehbea.bsky.social @ehbea2025.bsky.social @durhampsych.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @eslr.bsky.social @bjjbarrett.bsky.social @nataliabdutra.bsky.social @rebeccasear.bsky.social @acerbialberto.com @nicolewen.bsky.social @iyadrahwan.bsky.social ‪

New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.

'Vacations.' The word is 'vacations.'

reposting with alt text

I keep coming up on this with student essays. The refs are made up, or it cites real papers for things that have nothing to do with the evidence in the papers.

【🚨ACE Seminar Alert🚨】We're excited to have Dr Ryutaro @uchiyama.bsky.social joining from Singapore on Tuesday 29th July at 7pm in Tokyo (6pm in Singapore/12am in Berlin)! You can sign up for the mailing list to get the zoom link by sending a blank email to [email protected]

This quote is fire (male practice in the 1840s = medical doctors, as contrasted with local female healers)

Are you working at the intersection of the humanities/social sciences and the natural/technological sciences? Apply now for the NLTG 26/27 – a unique 5 month residency for interdisciplinary research teams at NIAS and organize a workshop at the Lorentz Center. nias-lorentz.nl/nltg-theme-g...

Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing *identical* journal names, and likely similar business model. What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it? A 🧵 the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

I asked chatGPT for quotes from the very fake book "Pipes, Pipes, Pipes: The Hipster Tobacconist Snowboarder's Guide to Tidyverse Code" by Will Gervais. It happily provided a quote about how snowboarding is like coding, as well as code for a deranged halfpipe. Thanks, chatGPT!

Come visit our FANTASTIC group @brunelcce.bsky.social with one of two Wolfson fellowships. The first is a 1y (or flex visits over 2y) fellowship *including relocation costs for scholar + family* DEADLINE SEPT 4: royalsociety.org/grants/royal...

My reading treat for this work week...

Scholarship for Durham University Students £15,000 for a full-time student from the North East of England and from a lower income household to study full-time for a STEM taught Masters degree for the year 2025-26. Durham people please spread the word! Application form 👇

Wow all those people reading his dissertation must have been super honest 🫶

My friend Claire deserves to be able to go about her day to day life in peace. We *all* do. There is *nothing* feminist, and *nothing* good in this obsessive transphobic cult.

According to a 2021 report, the University of California system: • generated $82B in economic activity in California • supported 529K jobs in the state • generated $21 in economic output for every $1 received Public divestment from higher ed makes no sense, even in the narrowest economic terms.

Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences just published a paper which argues that East Asian psychology evolved to cope with cold winters, and that ancestral climate may have "plausibly stunted" the development of East Asian & other populations around the globe. Sounds vaguely familiar, for some reason...?

📢 CES launches Advancing Cultural Evolution (ACE) Course Design Awards! 🎉 $4000 award + global impact for your cultural evolution course materials. Course must be college/grad level with 10+ hrs content. Application link: vuw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... #CulturalEvolution #Education #Grants

📣 New paper by myself @djsmith90.bsky.social and colleagues published today in @royalsociety.org Proc B 📣 Grandmothers are often seen as key carers, but this isn’t always the case. We explore why in Agta forgers reflecting on the implications of demography for evolution of grandmothering 👵🌍

😭 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article....

For fun I am going to share the worst AI response I received in this study. Subtweeting myself 1/n (FYI - I do have ethical approval to share direct quotes without attribution, participants through Prolific cannot be identified by me or anybody, and this is DEFINITELY AI, as you will see.)

Today is a writing day for me, but instead of writing all morning I have had to sort through the data I collected via Prolific to exclude AI-based responses 👎-- a thread 1/n

I think about this comic at least once a week

I'm THRILLED that our book is out. This book, with other 60 contributors from across the globe (!!!) is a love letter to the science we want to do, and a how-to guide for how to do it. Please read it and share it!

Choose Science. Choose Europe. A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open. With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond. Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

To reiterate one of my academic themes for 2025: It’s a real problem that students feel incapable of operating without genAI, particularly given that they do worse with it. I don’t care if slackers slack, but if insecurity x manipulation shields well-meaning students from their education, I care.

Don't forget to put in your application for our 2025 awards!

Jumping a fire for Beltane in Glastonbury with @loraadair.bsky.social and @michelleakline.bsky.social. #BestFeildsiteEver

The demographic drivers of cultural #evolution in #bird song CurrentBiology

Co-first authors 😝

I could not resist a Kickstarter for wool spun from sheep living on London's City Farms. YES there are sheep in London, and YES I plan to visit them while wearing whatever I knit with this 😘 www.kickstarter.com/projects/137...

👏👏👏👏👏

@heidicolleran.bsky.social starts her #ehbea2025 plenary with a manifesto to get behind: bring more demography into cultural evolution, and more ethnography into demography

Thanks 🤩 Paper just accepted today 👀 and can’t wait to explore the many unanswered questions about reproductive and child rearing overlap further ❤️

My students can't even get AI to pass their 1st year essays, soooo...

Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I shall henceforth be known as Snow White because a robin landed on my hammock while I was reading and also I am pasty AF after such a long dark and damp English winter.

My reward for doing all the paperwork this week

If you're one of my US colleagues and unfamiliar with the UK funding landscape - there are many trusts and foundations with a myriad of funding schemes. Lots include ways to folks to visit from abroad - worth a look if your funding is subject to right-wing politics & you need another option.