One of our top-rated posts on @altmetric.com this past week was published open access in @natcomms.nature.com. You can read 'Nesting behaviour predicts heat tolerance evolution and climate vulnerability in bees' here: spklr.io/63321E3xQ1

The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to the R Project. #RStats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026

A new Science study shows that bumble bees can position a ball underneath a fake “flower” to reach a reward, suggesting they can exhibit spontaneous problem-solving and challenging the notion that such advanced cognitive abilities are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates. https://scim.ag/4vs08dC

The first single-cell three-dimensional lamprey brain atlas reveals that the vertebrate common ancestor already had a highly regionalized brain, and subsequent neuronal specialization likely drove vertebrate brain diversification. Learn more this week in Science: https://scim.ag/4whLqXp

Minibwa is a hybrid of bwa-mem and minimap2 and the successor of bwa-mem for short-read mapping. ~4X/2.5X as fast as bwa-mem/bwa-mem2 for WGS reads at comparable accuracy. Native support of directional bisulfite-seq. Applicable to long reads. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2606.15357

Academic freedom assessment across the world. The US is on a steep decline, below >120 countries www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-...

The heaviest Russian air attack on Kyiv in two weeks saw several people killed and the Pechersk Lavra monastery, a symbol of Ukrainian spiritual and cultural history, catch fire, authorities said.

Nineteen russian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and Shahed drones are raining down on Kyiv right now. This is horrific. The UNESCO-listed Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra has been targeted. A thousand years of Ukrainian history, faith, and culture are once again under attempted destruction.

Brault et al. propose guidelines for standardized π estimation, systematic reporting of summary statistics, and the adoption of richer metadata to ensure that population genomic data remain comparable and reusable across a wide range of systems. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... #genome #evolution

New Article! Structural variant calling using Sniffles2

"Phylogenomics beyond the “bag-of-genes” model" by Siavash Mirarab & colleagues "[T]he time is ripe for a paradigm shift in phylogenomics to account for genomic position in all analyses." FREE till July 16th at authors.elsevier.com/a/1nAUrcQbJI...

📄 OrthoFinder: improved phylogenetic orthology inference with enhanced accuracy and scalability 🧬🖥️ ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gene body methylation suppresses intragenic transcription and permits epigenetic inheritance in a cnidarian www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@hugodarras.bsky.social @chuanxinyu.bsky.social @bfeldmeyer.bsky.social @temnothorax.bsky.social et al. identify two large genomic rearrangements that determine an extreme reproductive polymorphism in an ant. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag115 #evobio #molbio

We still remember the London Blitz, which lasted eight months. Ukraine has been under attack for fifty-one months. You can help defend Ukrainians from missiles and drones. u24.gov.ua/news/timothy...

'Standing in his laboratory, Harvard professor Sean Eddy gazes at a row of vacant work stations. More than a year ago, this lab was filled with over a dozen researchers. "Seeing these labs empty — this is not the way it's supposed to be," he says. "This was a very vibrant lab."'

Why AI cannot do good science without humans With the arrival of ‘AI scientists’, it’s as well to remember that human wisdom, empathy and sheer messiness are as much part of progress as are process and efficiency.

Why AI cannot do good science without humans. With the arrival of ‘AI scientists’, it’s as well to remember that human wisdom, empathy and sheer messiness are as much part of progress as are process and efficiency. | Nature - Editorial www.nature.com/articles/d41...

📄 StringTie3 improves total RNA-seq assembly by resolving nascent and mature transcripts 🧬🖥️ ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📄 Beyond formic acid: Peptides in carpenter ant venoms aid in disease protection 🐜🧪 ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Countless ecologists, evolutionary biologists and conservation biologists will have been inspired to follow their careers by David Attenborough (including all of us here at NEE) Here's wishing him a very happy 100th Birthday 🥳 www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

How Sir David Attenborough changed the world in 100 years www.channel4.com/news/how-sir...

#ProcB’s Darwin Reviews are invited articles from leading researchers, highlighting major advances in #BiologicalScience with broad relevance. This year’s #DarwinReview is “Population-scale long-read DNA sequencing: peering under the hood of the new evolutionary genomics.” buff.ly/CiepDls

Pleased to share with you our latest article "Ten common mistakes that could ruin your enrichment analysis", featuring Anusuiya Bora, Matthew McKenzie. This article condenses what we've learned about best practices in pathway enrichment analysis over the past 15 years. We hope you find it […]

TxPert: using multiple knowledge graphs for prediction of transcriptomic perturbation effects - @alisandra-denton.bsky.social @valenceai.bsky.social @recursionpharma.bsky.social go.nature.com/3QZW9WQ

60 Minutes goes in search of rare birds in a former war zone. Sunday.

Once in a while, 60 Minutes travels so far off the beaten track that there’s hardly a track at all. That was the case when Anderson Cooper went to the mountains of western Colombia in search of birds you can find nowhere else on Earth. Sunday.

Our memory gets worse as we age, but this isn't true for common wasps. Annaline Mattens &co show that as they age, the parts of a wasp's brain involved in memory make up more of their brain size. This is handy in their new role finding food for the nest journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size @PNAS.org

10 years after the first FAMSA paper, its successor is now published in Nat Biotech! We believe that FAMSA2 can enable analyses of large protein collections that were previously unattainable. Thank you, Andrzej and Cedric, for great collaboration www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Species descriptions should not be confined to "summary" PDFs only providing access to a fraction of the data underlying the conclusions. We here argue for "digitally native species" built around structured, specimen-linked, machine-actionable evidence from day one. rdcu.be/fcbwh

A U.S. blockade of oil deliveries to Cuba has contributed to power blackouts that have plunged the island nation’s science and health care communities into darkness. https://scim.ag/4vg2EVk

Introducing RustQC: 60x faster RNA-Seq quality control! We used AI to reimplement 15 RNA-Seq QC tools (dupRadar, Qualimap, RSeQC, Preseq, samtools, featureCounts) into a single tool, written in @rust-lang.org: ✅ 15 h analyses → 15 min ✅ Identical outputs ✅ Drastically reduced I/O

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 🎁