interesting bit in a Lancet article re: Australia's teen social media ban: surprisingly the amount of socialising in person hasn't dropped significantly in the past 25 years, and certainly not by the average amount of social media use.

New preprint 🌊🫶 "A diverse community constitutes global coccolithophore calcium carbonate stocks" Three large coccolithophores together hold about half of the global CaCO₃ stock! G. huxleyi <10% ➡️ climate models need to include this broader diversity! 📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025... #protistsonsky

I offer you a guy in these troubling times

trait-space maps are cool.

#Arctic #algae aren't immobile or entombed. They're not just surviving either—they're gliding into record books phys.org/news/2025-09... Ice gliding #diatoms establish record-low temperature limits for motility in a eukaryotic cell www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #protists #microbes #extremophiles

X-Mapper 🦠🧬🧪 - a sequence aligner developed for microbes, now on Bioconda! 🚀 • 11–24× fewer suboptimal alignments (same for human genome) • 3–579× lower inconsistency • improves on ~30% of reads aligned to non-target species github.com/mathjeff/map... bioconda.github.io/recipes/x-ma... #microsky

Check out our new paper on adopting a trait-based framework for protist diversity! We make the case for a unified protist trait database, how to build it, and how it could transform research on protist ecology and evolution. #protistsonsky

A microscopic horror story. The brown stuff is 3 billion year old organic matter. The milky white stuff is the modern fungus that is eating the ancient organic matter. #geology #paleontology #fungus #protists

Sometimes you meet absolutely incredible bioinfo-magicians. It was a huge privilege when @shenwei356.bsky.social joined our group for a year on an @embl.org sabbatical. While here, he developed a new way of aligning to millions of bacteria, called LexicMap 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The New Yorker asked me “how bad” today’s Supreme Court ruling was. I boiled it down to one paragraph: link.newyorker.com/view/5bda429...

🚨 Save the date! Thrilled to be co-organizing the next iteration of the @embl.org Symposium on the Cellular Mechanics of Symbiosis (📅 March 17-20), w/ @floravincent.bsky.social, @hassansalem.bsky.social & Tom Richards. www.embl.org/about/info/c... #EESSymbiosis #Symbiosis #SymbioSky #MicroSky 🦠

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

🥲

Plasmids can be lost from a bacterial community even under positive environmental selection: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Why can you breathe Earth’s atmosphere? The answer isn’t that the Amazon rainforest is producing excess oxygen on the surface. (It’s not.) It’s that fossil fuels exist. I didn’t understand this at all before reading @peterbrannen.bsky.social’s new book. heatmap.news/podcast/shif...

I realize the world is burning, but here is the abstract of a talk I will give multiple times in different formats this month. With the feedback, I hope to write up something substantial on the theme in the remainder of the year.

If you put a tree figure without the FASTA, the newick and the alignment you are dead to me

This is one of those probability facts that drives my usual advice to people seeking intution for probability theory: Stop seeking intuition! It's not intuitive, and that's why it is so useful. You can learn examples and reform your intution in time. But better to just trust the axioms and compute.

bacteria? humble, by no means 'simple', still relevant... the legacy of the luria-delbrück experiment revisited. great read!

I gave a symposium talk at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 2025 (#eseb2025) meeting last week and this was my title slide showcasing how I was speaking as an independent scientist because @dalhousieu.bsky.social @dalhousie.bsky.social has locked us out.

amazing thread on evolution and ecology

cultural/technological evolution is a fascinating topic

I've added a few new features to {grateful}, the package that facilitates citation of #rstats packages, and I'd love feedback before submitting to CRAN 🧵

Here is a press release/ summary blog post about our new paper. Key conclusion: For every single professional use that scientists used to use Twitter for, Twitter is much worse now than it used to be, and Bluesky is better that Twitter currently is. www.southernfriedscience.com/twitter-suck...

{tinytable} 0.13.0 for #RStats can now draw interactive tables with sorting, filtering & pages! And the 📦 is still an ultra-simple, powerful, and 0-dep way to create beautiful tables in basically any format: tex, typ, docx, pdf, png, md, etc Gallery & Docs: vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/

Introducing "The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology" The first standardised set of data editor guidelines. Led by SORTEE with input from numerous data editors across ecology and evolution. 🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X24...

A defined microbial community reproduces attributes of fine flavour chocolate fermentation www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

A shot in the dark, but does anyone know a good paper showcasing python or R #GIS usage in context of microbial #metagenomics study? 🧬💻🦠🧫

I feel compelled to point out for Prochlorococcus fans out there w/? that the 91% ANI quote on the slide (from the reference) is an <average> within clades, while within-clade values go as low as 65-80% ANI, and inter-clade values within Prochlorococcus as low as about 60% ANI (Doré et al Fig 3).

I love this diagram

Uhhh, ouch.

Here are some bonus (remarkable) UExM images of Oophila algae from my lab cultures (not directly related to the study) @dudinlab.bsky.social: your protocol (www.protocols.io/view/u-exm-o...) worked pretty well the first go!

The grave risks for science as the whole of leaving fundamental scientific infrastructure in the hands of for-profit capitalist company. Essential scholarly services should be internationally curated by value-based societies/orders/colleges. 🧪

Excited to share new #program, STEPS, which can simulate #dynamics of the E. coli Long-Term Evolution Experiment (#LTEE) or other microbes in serial transfer regime. telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2025/08/12/s... STEPS developed by @devinmlake.bsky.social, Zachary Matson, Minako Izutsu, and me.

A new 4 year PostDoc position in our lab! Modeling + experiments to explore dynamics of carbon fixing hot-spring microbiomes. Part of an exciting multidisciplinary team with Sophie Nixon, @brockhurstlab.bsky.social & others Please share & get in touch if interested! tinyurl.com/e7j7bha3

Sponge spicules, composed of silica, in thin section. The ornate end structures are used to attach one spicule to another to form an internal skeleton that is flexible enough to sway and bend in flowing water (from Three Kings Islands seafloor, northernmost NZ). ⚒️🧪🌊

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

📢 We're seeking a postdoc to work on a project funded by HFSP @hfspo.bsky.social at the intersection of bacterial physiology, ecology and evolution. You can find more details about the project, the position, and how to apply here www.dalbellolab.com/hfsp-project! #bacteria #ecosky #MevoSky #microSky

The hard thing is to encourage market entry and competition - in some ways academic publishing is a natural oligopoly, bc of prestige effects (e.g. all those "Nature" journals). Regulating the author side by changing career incentives would help too.

I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.

See @rmcelreath.bsky.social's "Science is like a Chicken Coop," www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Lq...

I was a PhD student when this paper came out. I printed it out with excitement and brought it to the lab next morning. My advisor Michael Ferris skimmed through the supplementary material and said "this is cryptic growth with As resistance". I was shocked and learned something essential that day.

Papers often conclude "more research is needed" without explanation. This is a missed opportunity. You are the expert. This is your time to shine. Explain what the remaining uncertainties are, and give justified recommendations on what the research needed to resolve them should look like.

My latest post on @carpentries.carpentries.org blog is a call to action for the community to engage in curriculum development for workshops about genAI. How can we help our target audience make more informed choices about when and how to use it? carpentries.org/blog/2025/08...

New protist supergroup: Promethea! From @zlatogursky.bsky.social et al #ProtistsOnSky

One of the countless examples of why protists are an endless reservoir of non-textbook biology #protistsonsky

🧬🖥️ I am strongly of the opinion that bioinformatics needs to move away entirely from text-based and "loosely" structured file formats for essentially any type of data. File formats should be binary-first, and designed for *correct* and *efficient* machine parsing 1/3

:)

This is cool! I think this is a marine foraminifera, perhaps Allogromia sp? The first bit of the video is a timelapse, followed by real-time footage. I just love to watch it use its pseudopodia (the stringy bits)! I’d love your thoughts on this organism, am I right in my identification? #plankton 🦑