Tens of thousands of papers published in 2025 contain fake/hallucinated citations, an analysis by Nature and Grounded AI suggests By @miryamnaddaf.bsky.social and Beth Quill | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Major conference catches illicit AI use — and rejects hundreds of papers. The papers’ watermarks allowed organizers to detect use of large language models in peer review. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

LongcallR for competitive SNP calling and haplotype phasing, and simplified allele-specific analysis with long RNA-seq reads. Found ~100 junctions affected by SNPs per sample with most junctions novel. Developed by Neng Huang. Published in @natmethods.nature.com. Read at rdcu.be/faKhL

How much protein diversity can Life on Earth actually generate? With DIAMOND DeepClust, we show how billions of proteins across the tree of life can be clustered at low-identity for downstream analytics tasks. 📚Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💻Code: github.com/bbuchfink/di...

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉 An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊 Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #DataViz

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately* Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code. GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH github.com/settings/cop...

Entomologists and particle accelerator physicists have collaborated to produce a new 3D atlas of what makes up an ant, including muscles, nerves, digestive tracts, and exoskeletons. The images are free to access. spectrum.ieee.org/3d-scanning-...

🔴 The historic city center of Lviv, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is under attack by russian drones. Mayor Andryi Sadovy shared this picture, other channels show several fires across the city. In daytime, Russia unleashed dozens of drones over Ukraine.

The russians have just violently bombed Lviv city center, there's fire in at least two residential apartments, one of them is right next to the St.Andriy's church. Two people are severely injured. The city is still under attack.

I wrote a short Nature Methods News & Views piece on deep learning based gene finders such as ANNEVO. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

ANNEVO uses a deep learning approach to advance accurate and scalable ab initio gene annotation of evolutionarily diverse genomes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A decade of research in review For Nature Biotechnology’s 30th anniversary, our editors look back at a few of their favorite papers published in the past decade go.nature.com/4sWhZs1

Ants are experts at telling nestmates from foreigners via subtle differences in odor profiles. In this new paper, we explore the conditions under which ants develop and maintain tolerance to foreigners. Turns out the ant recognition system is surprisingly plastic. www.cell.com/current-biol...

kuva v0.1.4 released - 4 new plots (Polar, Ternary, Ridgeline, Density) - A completely reworked legend system - SVG rendering 50-70% faster, and Manhattan plots 22× faster at 1M SNPs - Many bug fixes and extra features github.com/Psy-Fer/kuva crates.io/crates/kuva #rust #bioinformatics #dataviz

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

NEW: for @nytimes.com, I wrote about a new study showing that queen bumblebees can breathe underwater, surviving submerged for a week the “remarkable” study stems from a lab snafu, when a co-author thought she accidentally drowned several bees—but later found that they were alive 🧪 gift link 🎁

Butterflies and moths are key indicators of functioning and healthy ecosystems. A Review in Nature Reviews Biodiversity describes the evolutionary history of the order Lepidoptera and tracks shifts in researchers’ understanding of the clade in the genomic era. go.nature.com/4r0kbgS 🌍 🧪

New Review 👇 The molecular evolution of vertebrate organs: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Margarida Cardoso-Moreira discusses rates of evolution of organs and cell types, molecular mechanisms of organ evolution and how complex traits contributed to the diversification of vertebrates.

Thanks to micro-CT and www.antscan.info, you can now explore high resolution, 3D ant images from anywhere in the world. Fantastic work from Julian Katzke, Francisco Hita Garcia, @economo.bsky.social, Thomas van de Kamp and colleagues just dropped: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

On sabotage of our young scientists, by @holdenthorp.bsky.social @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📄 A sterility-associated long noncoding RNA involved in honey bee caste determination and adult queen and worker fertility 🐝 ⬇️ www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Phylogenetic and functional analyses across 34 Lepidoptera and 183 plant species show that hexenal isomerases found in Lepidoptera exhibit functional convergence with those found in plants despite having evolved independently from unrelated enzyme families 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Recently we're working with SNPs from whole genome assemblies to estimate ARGs. It's a pain to go from alignment files to vcf, keeping track of masked and invariant sites. So we wrote a snakemake/SLURM pipeline. Hope it's useful to others, and don't hesitate to post issues if there are problems!

A new documentary "Secrets of The Bees" will air on National Geographic on 31 March and land on Disney+ on 1 April and our bees are in it! See here for the trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mej2...

📄 Repeated evolution of supergenes on an ancient social chromosome 🐜🧬 ⬇️ www.cell.com/current-biol...

If we are making lists of non-ignorable "complexity" in biology, how about the interaction of selection and development? Many biologists find it boring (unnecessary complexity) or threatening (old naive adaptationism called into question). @mauriciogforero.bsky.social does good work in this area!

📄 A parasitic, parthenogenetic ant with only queens and without workers or males 🐜 ⬇️ www.cell.com/current-biol...

🔴 Over 212,000 Russian war crimes documented in Ukraine since 2022.

It is four years ago today that the Russians launched their full scale invasion of Ukraine. Many in the west wrote Ukraine off and prophesied a “shock and awe” Russian victory. Instead Ukraine defied its attacker and their fight for freedom became decisive for the future of European freedom.

Four years have passed since Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia was supposed to win in three days. Instead, Ukraine reinvented modern warfare, built a drone industry, and can destroy a thousand Russian soldiers in a day. Ukraine can win.

📄 Topological approaches in animal comparative genomics 🧬 ⬇️ www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

New online! Annotating genomes at increased scale and resolution

📄 Increasing applied pesticide toxicity trends counteract the global reduction target to safeguard biodiversity 🐝🧪 ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here’s one lobster that you might not want with a side of butter: the lobster moth! Named for its lobster-like larval form, this wide-ranging insect inhabits parts of Europe & Asia. While it resembles a crustacean, it can also mimic ants as a way to deter potential predators.

New Article! Tutorial: annotation of animal genomes

New online! Evolutionary causes and consequences of gene duplication

📄 No evidence that haplodiploidy favors the evolution of eusociality 🐝🐜 ⬇️ www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Anything you can do in Obsidian you can do from the command line. Obsidian CLI is now available in 1.12 (early access).

New online! The genetic foundations of convergent traits

ICYMI: New online! Emergence and evolution of protein-coding de novo genes

For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. A feature in Nature describes how some researchers are calling for a more harmonious approach. #evosky 🧪

Disgusting.

I wrote today about AlphaGenome, Google DeepMind's AI for DNA. It's powerful, experts told me, but it won't solve the mysteries of the genome overnight. Gift link: nyti.ms/4k5NFIl

A paper in Nature presents AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that can predict the function of long DNA sequences, up to one million base pairs. The tool can predict how DNA sequence variations affect different biological processes. go.nature.com/4t5JQa7 🧬 🧪

A phylogeny of 4'854 #insects --- with structural #genomics shedding light on protein functions & remote homologs www.nature.com/articles/s41... #biodiversity

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

This is Kupiansk today. Once a thriving town of 25,000 in Kharkiv region, now nothing but ruins and ash. Russia obliterated it. Murdered or drove out its people, and bombed it into dust.

📄 A beginner's guide to structural variants in eco-evolutionary population genomics 🧬 ⬇️ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Ever seen a pink grasshopper? A genetic mutation called erythrism (overproduction of red pigment) leaves some individuals looking pretty in pink! Though these rare insects are beautiful, their vivid coloring makes hiding from predators more difficult. Photo: Back from the Brink, CC BY-NC 2.0, flickr

russia is preparing another massive combined attack to freeze us, Ukrainians to death. This is a large-scale crime against humanity, unfolding right now, live.