💡 The laser was a solution that preceded every problem it would solve. Nobody in 1953 could list its applications, because those applications did not yet exist. That is what foundational research looks like before anyone knows what it is for.

This week someone targeted my family for harm with a false report. We’re physically OK, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t harmed. I am beyond furious. Whatever your politics, this is awful, wrong, and can never become normal.

Finally, AI finds its ultimate use case. A diffusion model trained on burger recipes "discovers the classic Big Mac without explicit supervision and generates novel burgers optimized for deliciousness, sustainability, or nutrition." ASI= automated slider intelligence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Perfect

Making sure people at #Evol2026 see this. "The agency’s biology directorate, for example, has been cut by $200 million from its FY 2025 level of roughly $800 million" "Program managers would normally rush to inform [...] the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut." 🧪

(also I'm here at the #Evol2026 meeting 😅)

#Evol2026 I’m launching a new research group at UNC Charlotte in January 2027. Prospective students, postdocs, and collaborators are welcome to get in touch: [email protected] More at jakeberv.com, lab website coming soon.

#Evol2026 the word of the day is déjà vu

Please join me next Tuesday at 3:15 PM (Room 21) at #Evol2026 to learn about the complex history of complex trait loss, extinction, and evolutionary radiation in extreme ecosystems in a clade of thousands of fishes!

I am SO VERY EXCITED for this

with zenodo API + codex, it would be trivial to just make a better version of biorxiv for basically zero dollars make your paper in markdown, push to github, get a zenodo DOI. peer review through github issues. why don't we do this?

I am recruiting a #postdoc to work on assembling and analyzing #genomes of the amazing Furnariidae. Let’s unlock the secret behind their #evolution. The official application portal will be available soon at www.uno.edu/careers. Feel free to contact me for details at [email protected]

lol

Peak Michigan

CT technician position available at the U-M Museum of Zoology/Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

I was told that I needed to request permission to collaborate with physicians from European countries before testing the effects of patient mutations they identified on an enzyme we study. For each collaborator, NIH is asking for email, institution, street address, phone number (!!). Insane.

Shelly is an amazing scientist! Great opportunities at the interface of genomics and AI in this future lab!

Hey Gandalf, what animal is closely related to maize?

There are exciting opportunities to contribute new things here. Theory needs to be built into the way these models learn.

New paper from our group by Christina Harvey in Proceedings B @royalsocietypublishing.org on the fascinatingly, unexpectedly complex evolution of vertebrate skeletal muscle myosins. Thanks to collaborators Matt Fuxjager, Eric Schuppe, and Michael Brainard. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Congratulations to our 2026 Huxley Award recipient, Matheus Januario Lopes de Sousa, for the educational resource: “evolved: an open-source R package designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate instruction in evolutionary biology”! Read more: shorturl.at/1ZdFE@mjanua...

My favorite Sam Neil fact will always be that he designed a future Australian flag that replaces the union jack with the aboriginal flag for Event Horizon and insisted the film use it.

😥

I had no idea I wanted a Giant Cretaceous Octopus until I found out I can’t have one.

"Dude" The Earthset abides. I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that.

Incredible discovery. At the Corktown Place shop inside McNamara terminal at DTW it is possible to buy an edible sandwich, drink, and a bag of chips for 8.95. what is this 1995 time warp

The only thing inevitable in the deep sea is discovery. Deep-sea wildernesses are more important than the promise of seafloor mining. news.mongabay.com/2026/04/deep...

Said it before: we need to make that Cambridge computer scientist the prime minister

its just a matter of time before someone puts an LLM into a johnny 5 and tells it that it IS johnny 5. chew on that.

Society for Avian Paleontology and Evolution will be in Christchurch NZ 19-23 Oct 2026 sape2026.org

This is Brandy. She practices self-care by dissociating in the bathtub. 13/10 honestly no notes (TT: monkeyshinekennel)

Please remember when you swim in the ocean: 200 meters below you, there is a layer of fish that stretches all around the world. It is so dense, that when it was discovered during WWII it scared the navy so bad they bombed it. This is the ocean's thin inner shell of fish [🧵]

Cleaned up Reid Wiseman's earth-eclipse circulating around (just some denoise and sharpening). DM if you want the file.

this paper on manakins plumage maturation is now typeset so i am going to drink beer and explain what the heck is going on here, because I think manakins and molt are amazing and I fear a lot of the evolutionary wonder runs the risk of getting lost, so to speak, in the sauce doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Big news, gulls eating bugs today

Out now in @newphyt.bsky.social with @joannarifkin.bsky.social, @jotlovell.bsky.social, @spicybotrytis.bsky.social & more! Our high-quality pennycress pangenome is a striking example of genome architecture shaping different kinds of genomic variation, including some surprising centromeric movement

Lot of recalled products down there.

Car manufacturers who sell vehicles in the U.S. have once again, missed the train. The trend for huge gas guzzling vehicles has once again met high fuel prices and the only manufacturers who will be able to sell anything will be Asian as they still offer viable and reliable frugal choices.

We’ve been talking in our lab meetings about sexual conflict and sexual dimorphism, and have some thoughts. What if animal genomes are far more sex-specific and less cosntrained than we assume? @linley-sherin.bsky.social pulled it all together here www.zoology.ubc.ca/mank-lab/pdf... 1/n

If you score 99/100 on an exam, and you come to office hours to discuss "what you missed", you are getting this look.

New market for chicken leather get in while you can

This is intense.

New report from us: Can you prompt inject your way to an “A”? As LLMs increasingly are used as judges, people are inserting AI prompts into letters, CVs & papers. We tested whether it works. It does on older & smaller models, but not on most new frontier AI: gail.wharton.upenn.edu/research-and...

If Artemis is going up then it gives me an excuse to once again post this photo, the only one to contain every human being in the universe but one.

This really seems like a historically dire time to be an ECR. It's genuinely feeling like academic research will completely unravel if this keeps up for 2-3 more years

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

I respect screaming babies on airplanes because they're the only ones providing honest feedback about the overall air travel experience

I have a story today about the quest to turn eggs into low-cost factories for medicines. Gift link: nyti.ms/4bzSabB

I'm super pleased that #xenocanto has launched this new feature: detailed annotations for its animal sound data! https://xeno-canto.org/article/318 Xeno-canto is the most valuable #birdsong/#animalsound archive. This will help even more!