📄 Comparative population genomics reveals convergent adaptation across independent origins of avian obligate brood parasitism 🧬🐦 ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📄 Telomere-to-telomere genome assembly of the Dipteran Bactrocera dorsalis from a single individual 🧬🪰 ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Promises kept...

Fascinated to learn that we are still discovering new species at the highest rate ever. Mapping Earth's biodiversity is far from over, and while we learn more and more about it, let's protect what we do know as well as we can! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Ukraine gave up nuclear warheads for security promises that collapsed when Russia attacked. 🧵 1/3 ⬇️

Nature research paper: An ancient recombination desert is a speciation supergene in placental mammals go.nature.com/47UiBWa

What are the mechanisms behind terrestrial arthropod declines? @bmwildermuth.bsky.social and colleagues have some answers www.nature.com/articles/s41... @bexplo.bsky.social @idiv-research.bsky.social @jena-experiment.bsky.social

Putin: ‘Russia is ready to keep fighting until the last Ukrainian dies.’ Western politicians & press: ‘Peace talks have stalled…’ Russia has zero interest in peace. Calling Kremlin demands for Ukrainian surrender ‘peace talks’ is just another way of spreading their propaganda.

Macit, @socialinsectlab.bsky.social investigated selection in response to climate and a geographic mosaic of coevolution between two ant species, a social parasite and its host. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf293 #evobio #molbio #coevolution

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

While "peace" negotiations continue, remember that Russia could simply stop the war at any time.

Excited to share our new review: The evolutionary role of mutational robustness: theoretical insights, in Trends in Genetics! Our review distils the main theoretical insights into when robustness evolves and how it shapes evolvability. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New study on arthropod declines @natecoevo.nature.com 🪲 In two time series @jena-experiment.bsky.social & @bexplo.bsky.social we show how community (dis)assembly underpins local biomass declines. It mostly boils down to species loss, with identity losing relevance. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nature research paper: Convergent genome evolution shaped the emergence of terrestrial animals go.nature.com/4i0i61w

Does Russia really want peace? This year, it killed 26% more Ukrainian civilians than in 2024.

The ant queen is dead. Long live the queen! Some parasitic ant queens can sneak into other species' colonies and douse the true queen in an acid that compels the workers—her daughters—to turn against her. After the workers kill their queen, the usurper swoops in. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/s...

With two ant enthusiasts, Taku Shimada and Yuji Tanaka, I published a paper as a corresponding author that discovered a novel host manipulation: temporarily socially parasitic ant queens incite host workers to commit matricide. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... youtu.be/_aWvS_5iY24

This Perspective discusses how the field of behavioural ecology has contributed to fundamental science and global challenges, ranging from understanding how natural selection leads to adaptation to optimizing biocontrol of pest species www.nature.com/articles/s41... Free to read: rdcu.be/eRKbv

🔴 Russian forces attacked Zaporizhzhia overnight, injuring 18 people. The attack caused destruction across multiple districts of the city, damaging 31 apartment buildings and 20 private homes, according to the regional governor.

Fujiwara et al. performed WGS and RNAseq of the termite Zootermopsis nevadensis, finding that gene duplications contributed to eusociality, and that lineage-specific Doublesex-related expression underlies caste diversification pathways. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf284 #evobio #molbio #eusociality

New in @currentbiology.bsky.social "Genomic evidence of a complex supergene system linking dispersal to social polymorphism" #Myrmecina_graminicola Mona,S., Gay,E.J., Ducancel,J., Laso-Jadart,R., Chifflet-Belle, P., Doums,C. @isyeb.mnhn.fr @ephe-psl.bsky.social et al. 🐜 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Everything in Trump's russian plan —undoubtedly also a corruption pact—is disgraceful, rotten, and unacceptable. But I would like European leaders to show much more indignation about one thing in particular: it absolves the russians of their crimes—a full betrayal of Nuremberg's legacy.

Trump’s world view: cynical, self-interested and money-grabbing on.ft.com/44hD4Dj | opinion

I just dipped a toe in the cesspit that used to be Twitter, and I think the surest indication that the “28 points” were translated from Russian is the number of Russian mouthpiece accounts busy shouting, unprompted, that that is absolutely not the case and they were drafted in the White House.

Population genetics simulations and analysis of experimental datasets in yeast, Drosophila and E. coli show that beneficial mutations are abundant but transient, as they become deleterious after environmental turnover (antagonistic pleiotropy)🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🕯️ Ternopil is mourning after a deadly Russian strike leveled residential buildings, killing 26 people, including three children. Locals held a moment of silence at the ruins this morning.

A Russian drone and missile attack on Ukraine's western city of Ternopil has killed at least 25 people, including three children.

Nice to see this great write-up about our recent paper in Molecular Ecology. "Chromosomal Rearrangements Might Play a Central Role in Adaptation" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

ASN VP Symposium: Phenological Shifts in Plants and Pollinators over a Century Disrupt Interaction Persistence by Zoller et al. Read now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Online now: Playing dice with behavior: drivers of stochastic individuality

"RevSyntax enables an efficient workflow for RevBayes analysis in VS Code" doi.org/10.32942/X2V...

My book 'The Tree of Life' is published in the USA and Canada today. Available as book, on kindle and as audio. I would be really grateful for reposts. www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So... www.amazon.ca/Tree-Life-So...

New online! Convergent evolution of a conserved molecular network underlies parenting and sociality

Independently evolved supergenes control colony social organization and queen reproductive strategies in several ant lineages. Sigeman et al. uncover a novel 9 Mb supergene controlling queen size and social organization in Myrmica ruginodis. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf255 #evobio #molbio #ants

Functional genetic elements of a butterfly mimicry supergene www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Loss of macroevolutionary species fitness explains the rise and fall of clades 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Comparative Evolution of Social and Ecological Traits in Bumble Bees - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The Side Effects of Pesticides on Nontarget Arthropods - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...

Mosquito cell atlas is now published! Congratulations to @nadavshai.bsky.social and @oliviagoldman.net and the many other collaborators that contributed to this resource. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

What do the naked mole rat and bowhead whale (lives to ~200 years) have in common to explain their remarkable longevity? Enhanced DNA repair www.nature.com/articles/s41... erictopol.substack.com/p/a-long-awa...

Russia on Wednesday unleashed a broad attack that hit a kindergarten, power plants and other sites in Ukraine, killing six people. The barrage came hours after President Trump said he was putting off a planned meeting with President Vladimir Putin to avoid a “wasted” effort toward ending the war.

Russia attacked Ukraine overnight, killing at least six people and leaving parts of the country without power as temperatures drop. More than 400 drones and 28 missiles were launched.

🔴 BREAKING: President Zelenskyy shared images of a kindergarten in Kharkiv targeted in Russian attack earlier today. One person was killed and seven others were injured in the attack on the city, mayor says.

Snow leopards have the lowest genetic diversity of all big cats due to persistently small population sizes throughout their evolutionary history, which may make recovery from human hunting and habitat loss challenging. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/HM3350XeeBY

Across scientific disciplines, US university departments are cutting the numbers of PhD candidates they plan to accept in the current application cycle, for students due to begin in 2026, according to a Nature news article. Some plan to pause admissions altogether. #Academicsky 🧪

ICYMI: New Online! The new era of single-molecule RNA modification detection through nanopore base-calling models

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint: “Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

In 2021, Wellcome Open Research launched the Tree of Life Gateway with the goal to publish the genome sequences of every species. In 2024, the Gateway published the 1,000th Genome Note. Explore this milestone with our recent blog post 🔗spr.ly/6009AxyLP @sangerinstitute.bsky.social