Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

We're excited to be recruiting an NSF funded postdoc to work in the Villanea lab at CU Boulder. We're specifically interested in candidates who want to work at the intersection of population genetics, ancient DNA, and computer modeling. Please RT jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

First shot: sugarcane The backbone of Puerto Rico's agricultural economy since colonial times Still used to make rum of course!

Last time the Seahawks were in the Super Bowl I was still at Washington State. That was really embarrassing but we got Left Shark that year at least.This was a better showing and we got an even more amazing treat for halftime.

Cause that's what heroes do.

That was hands down the best halftime show ever. It was filled with so many references to Puerto Rican culture and history. The sugarcane fields, the casita, the streets of NYC, and the power lines. All of it resonated so much. Boricua por siempre. Seguimos aquí. 🇵🇷

“Racism, among other things, is a kind of chauvinism, a belief in one’s inherent superiority, based on nothing other than a meaningless accident of birth.”

Interested in using aDNA time-series datasets to estimate selection? Our study "Assessing Ancient DNA Sampling Strategies for Natural Selection Inference in Humans Using Allele Frequency Time Series Data" is now out in GBE! doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... @genomebiolevol.bsky.social @cegamorim.bsky.social

Honestly, yeah, LFG. Maybe this is meant to feed biotech AI slop but we can outcompete them with good scientific proposals. If you’re interested in a post-doc applying neural networks to better integrate ancient DNA to demographic models reach out to me. I’ll help you tool the application for “AI”.

Holy shit: it's an RFP for the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB). Hello old friend www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

For PIs hiring post-docs, do you usually as for a letter of recommendation (or letters) in addition to the CV and cover letter?

anyone know if there is childcare at @official-smbe.bsky.social 2026 this year? #SMBE2026

As per always on this most holy of mammal holidays, Groundhog's Day, March Mammal Madness launches our annual tournament page! #2026MMM @mmmletsgo.bsky.social libguides.asu.edu/MarchMammalM...

We sequenced #ancientRNA from an 18th-Century human lung and recovered a rhinovirus genome. Take a look at our preprint. Feedback welcome.

🚨 Job alert! The University of Tübingen announces a W3 (Full) Professorship in Early Hominin Evolution in the framework of the DFG Cluster of Excellence 'HUMAN ORIGINS': uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet... Application deadline: 11.03.2026 🚨

Buscamos una/un postdoc entusiasta y motivada para unirse al grupo de Paleogenómica y Biología Evolutiva en @liigh-unam.bsky.social para liderar un proyecto enfocado a muestras humanas prehispánicas. Interesadxs ​por favor enviar CV y ​​carta de intención a [email protected]. Por favor #RT.

Our work on the generalizability of polygenic scores (PGS) from the @arbelharpak.bsky.social Lab is now officially out! We examine the accuracy of PGS predictions at the individual level. We make 3 observations that expose gaps in our understanding of PGS “portability.” rdcu.be/e0LAr (1/27)

We discuss 3 key observations: (1) Genetic distance explains only a tiny fraction of the prediction accuracy; (2) Portability trends can be trait-specific, due to underappreciated factors; (3) The measure of prediction accuracy can alter qualitative trends of portability. (4/27)

On the importance of preprints, regardless of whether you are Team Sponge or Team Jelly: 'King says that she wishes she had posted the study as a preprint so that the errors could have been caught sooner.' www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Federal agents in Minneapolis wrestled Alex Pretti to the ground and secured the handgun he was carrying moments before shooting him multiple times, according to a Washington Post analysis of video footage. Read more: https://wapo.st/4qGOx8M

Footage taken moments before a struggle shows that the man was filming, holding a phone in his right hand, backing up. His left hand is up, visible, palm facing out, as he backs away from the area. An agent uses his right hand, on the torso of the victim, pushing him back, while the man complies.

A new preprint from the lab, with postdoc @deboraycb.bsky.social and collaborators @aidaandres.bsky.social and Tim Connallon: “Characterising the detectable and invisible fractions of genomic loci under balancing selection” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Balancing selection alert!! 🧬🧪 New preprint where we try to quantify how likely (or rather, unlikely) it is for balancing selection to maintain stable polymorphism, and how easy (or rather, challenging) it is to identify its signatures in genomes. #Popgen #MolecularEvolution #EvoBio #Science

@gokcumenlab.bsky.social I really like the spinning-top model for explaining the prevalence of auto-immune conditions!

Pajic & @gokcumenlab.bsky.social synthesize the evolution of VNTRs in mammals, including mutational mechanisms and selective forces driving their evolution, and propose a theoretical framework for their persistence through evolutionary tradeoffs. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf250 #genome #evolution

New preprint! and my first single-author paper, so bear with me. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Malaria population genetic studies have found some puzzling patterns: Ne estimates spanning orders of magnitude, genome-wide negative Tajima's D, and over a quarter of genes with πN/πS >1 1/n

Pretty sure erosion makes us Boulder.

New work from @miyapan.bsky.social and our team, bringing ant, bee, and wasp labs together. @chuanxinyu.bsky.social shows that the ANTSR locus we discovered in ants has determined sex for 150+ My across bees and stinging wasps 🐜🐝, despite virtually no sequence conservation 😮 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Oh, look! A paper about the coolest piece of software I've ever built!

Here's my latest contribution to the @nytimes "Lost Science" series. Brenna Henn's sweeping study of African genetics has been frozen. Gift link: nyti.ms/3Ypmm1A

Come and join me and my colleagues at the Department of Biology, #LundUniversity in #sweden! We have am open position as Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity. Apply here no later than February 11 2026: https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:848749/type:job/where:4/apply:1

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... It's finally out! Meriam Guellil expertly led this project from the first HHV6 detection to the final paper. We found both human herpesviruses 6A and 6B in ancient remains going back 2500 years.

And here’s my other human origins countdown to close out the year! 🏺🧪

Did you know there are 2 types of avocado varieties? A-types switch from female to male, B-types male to female, within a single day. This reciprocal sex alternation promotes cross-pollination and has a simple genetic basis. Read more in this recent preprint from the final chapter of my PhD thesis 🥑

Super excited to announce that my review article from this summer, "Post-pandemic inequalities: Evolutionary anthropological frameworks for long-term impacts of the 1918 influenza pandemic," is now available open access!🔓🔓🔓🔓 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn’t Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden or Alice In Chains

Make a bond movie academic: GoldenEye: Incomplete dominance of OCA2 in the melanin synthesis pathway.

Number 7 in our year-end countdown of most popular @royalsocietypublishing.org papers takes a look at a twist in avian biology: up to 6% of individuals in five wild bird species naturally switch sex, a discovery that could reshape conservation strategies. https://bit.ly/4qihFCL

Come be my colleague! The CU Natural History Museum has a welcoming community, great leadership, and connections with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. I believe museum faculty also get a summer stipend, in addition to the 9 month salary listed here.

Curator of Education job (tenure-track Assistant Professor) at the Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado Boulder! Salary $90-$100K, 9 month full time position. Apply by Jan 21. jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

This is a really cool paper

It's the scientific community's duty to fight misinformation, bioessentialism, and eugenics That's why we're launching Beyond X&Y, an educational campaign combating the rise of unscientific political propaganda used to attack trans and intersex people Subscribe to our newsletter at beyondxandy.org

In fact, they appear to be eerily similar. The per generation mutation rate seems to lay between 10-9 and 10-8 per bp in all animal taxa surveyed to date–despite vast differences in environments, life histories, and three orders of magnitude variation in the generation time: 4/n

It’s almost 70 degrees on December 22nd in Colorado but NCAR is the problem????

bsky.app/profile/ferv... Called this one three months ago. It is just an insane paper. The fact that the stolen clonal line is morphologically similar but different implies an unique evolutionary trajectory. Two species evolving from one mom.

My colleague Ryan McRae and I wrote our annual round up of top discoveries in human evolution from this year for the @plos.org Sci Comm blog - enjoy! scicomm.plos.org/2025/12/19/t...

This is a good time to talk about the TRUE genetics revolution brought in by sequencing the human genome: The genetic underpinning of traits is not simple, will never be simple. Complex gene-gene interactions are the rule, not the exception 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Our findings resonate with important prior work by @kuhlwilm.bsky.social & @cedricboeckx.bsky.social which argued that evolution of human-specific traits involved cumulative changes across gene networks, encompassing not only fixed sites but also variants at high frequency in present-day humans.14/n