Hot take 🔥: two years after Tony Blair was elected as PM in 1997 🇬🇧, Labour saw a continuous [>50%] decline in council seats throughout their time in govt. What’s different now is that it’s not the Conservatives picking them up.

I know everyone wants there to be a Giant Cretaceous Octopus but after looking at methods and tables, I really don't think this is a reality.

Ecologists love response ratios for meta-analysis❤️ But… they can’t be converted into other effect sizes—making it impossible to have a unified dataset of all published effect sizes in ecology I fix this with a conversion to Hedges’ d to help unify our data! (Link to Ecology Letters paper below):

I have a joke about philanthropy but it won’t have any impact.

This response far better reflects my experience of how collections managers are really striving to do the best by the people they care for By @sarahtarlow1.bsky.social & @livnstutz.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

AI generated presentations are the Comic Sans of our time. May future generations look back on us with grace.

Flashbacks to first day as a grad student: “Imagine not an escape room, but an escape building. With enough challenges that it will take you a day to solve them so, not an hour.”

The danger of superhuman AI is not what you think. This essay in @noemamag.com by @shannonvallor.bsky.social is brilliant. Well worth a read. www.noemamag.com/the-danger-o...

We just don't end papers like this any more. Maybe the world would be better if we did? ⚒️🧪

We're glad to amplify the good work of @bioone.bsky.social! We celebrate this milestone of Subscribe to Open (S2O), a model that is emerging as a promising means of funding sustainable #OpenAccess for publishers & library systems of all sizes.

🚨 PhD position in annelid genomics (EuroWorm) 🚨 If you love biodiversity, evolution & bioinformatics — apply or share! 🪱🧬 Details here: www.senckenberg.de/de/stellenan... #PhD #Genomics #Annelida #MarineBiology #EuroWorm

When the original authors and those who find errors in their work, pull together for the sake of correcting the record and moving science forward, it's a beautiful thing Retracted paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Linking the narrative with data, code, methods, and context is something everyone wants to see, but at some point most people most of the time want to draw a line under a project, mark it complete and move on. Will that change? 2/2

During a dive last year in the Atlantic Ocean off Argentina, researchers documented a giant phantom jelly, a deep-sea species rarely seen since it was discovered a little over a century ago. “There was a mixture of excitement and disbelief,” said one marine biologist. trib.al/HfkWfp4

“…as we use AI models, let’s keep asking ourselves if we are knowledge generating or merely output generating. Are we adding information to the world, or just words?”

Please share: Pew Research Center will provide $3,000 each for 19 new papers using our recent global datasets. We encourage reuse of our Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures data! https://www.pewresearch.org/2026/01/16/seeking-research-using-recent-pew-templeton-global-religious-futures-datasets/

Hallucigenia ate comb jellies www.newscientist.com/article/2511...

Meet Duobrachium sparksae: a newly described comb jelly that looks like a glowing hot-air balloon drifting just above the deep seafloor. Transparent, delicate, and unmistakably transfixing, it reminds us how much biodiversity is in the deep oceans. www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-stor...

Globally, no single day in 2025 was cooler than its 1991-2020 average. climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima...

So sad, but she achieved so much. An inspirational science leader.

In 2023 I became obsessed with videos of dads in cargo shortswaiting in parking lots during Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. So when she came to town, I grabbed a camera and headed down to talk to them. I thought it'd be funny. It turned out to be something else entirely.

A paper in Nature presents a detailed map of human chromosomes within the nucleus. This resource provides a foundation for an improved understanding of how the physical layout of human DNA is associated with biological expression. go.nature.com/4pI8knB 🧬 🧪

I’m guessing most Americans don’t know this, but because I lived in the UK for 8 years and still watch the BBC via VPN, I can tell you that the BBC iPlayer’s volume dial goes to eleven.

Something like 99% of all international data travels through subsea cables protected by UNCLOS. Freedom of Navigation and overflight are enshrined in UNCLOS. EEZs and sovereign rights over seabed resources are created and enforced through UNCLOS.

Help us shape our grant making priorities for the future!

Still think this was one of the best power moves of all time www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Me: “Oh cool - the Amazon forest is bouncing back” 🌳☁️ Also me: “Ooooooh… 🙄” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Surely emphasis should be cracking down on LLM generated papers (and their authors) rather than the #openaccess datasets themselves. Bizarre precedent that proprietary data would be seen as more trustworthy. www.science.org/content/arti...

[New Paper] names Chaetoderma naga, a gigantic (>13 cm) new worm-mollusc from a cold seep! Like its sister-species C. shenloong, it probably relies on endosymbiotic bacteria for energy. We named it after Nāga, a snake-god from Asian mythologies! Out now in Moll. Res., LINK: doi.org/10.1080/1323...

🇧🇸 Conch 🐚 Cay 🏝️ Nassau 📍

Blue lobsters might not be as rare as once thought: www.bbc.com/news/article...

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Climate change is not a con-job. If you want to know more about the evidence for and causes of #ClimateChange, head to our website: royalsociety.org/news-resourc...

Check out MARMORIS - a new NGO founded to explore #deepsea habitats in The Bahamas ewnews.com/new-bahamian... Beyond excited too see a fellow Bahamian passionate about deep-sea research. Way to go Denley, @katycroffbell.bsky.social and team!

This used to be an absolute plague in Brussels. Until the council said the companies were responsible for it and they'd start fining them. And then - as if by magic - the problem got solved, pdq.

Lucinid bivalves are chemosymbiotic, partnering with microbes which oxidize sulfide and give them food. How do they breathe in such a sulfide-rich environment? In their burrows, one end leads up to oxygen, while another set of branching burrows lead downward, mining sulfide (203)

Dr. Berry Billingsley ‪at Swansea University‬ is reimagining how classrooms engage with questions that transcend subject boundaries. On @storiesofimpact.bsky.social‬, she discusses how to equip students to explore queries on life, the universe, and existence. 🎧 bit.ly/47BzVAL

This *Osedax* comic by @thefuzzyslug.bsky.social is just amazing! 🤩 #MarineLife #Invertebrate #SciArt 🦑🌊🐡

Deepest know chemosynthesis-based ecosystems!

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

“Digital asbestos” is such a perfect descriptor! bsky.app/profile/katr...

This thread on storytelling from @toriherridge.bsky.social keeps haunting me…

“Data is like people. If you torture it for long enough, it’ll tell you more or less whatever you want to hear.”

Junior researchers are often given poor [or no] advice about trans national shipping of scientific samples. Academic societies could really help their members by commissioning good advice on this topic, e.g. @ASMicrobiology helpful document: asm.org/guideline/pa... —- www.bbc.com/news/article...

Harvard was partly founded on a donation from overseas immigrants from the nascent colony of Eleuthera (Bahamas) - 'It was the largest gift the college had received (up to that time) since the original Harvard donation, and is known as the Eleutheran donation’ www.harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/cast...

Success in academia often has more to do with luck, patronage and the job market than “hard work”. Good academics acknowledge this. I worked hard, but I was in the right place at the right time on occasion. Historians far more talented than I have fallen between the cracks.

Not sure how other folks pick journals. When I was starting out I wanted a breadth of journals. Now I prioritize ones that are owned by scientific societies. I have no interest in paying APCs to anyone other than a society. That makes @royalsocietypublishing.org one of my favorites #OA or not.

I once held a door open for Sir David Attenborough…

The hypothesis that land-dwelling iguanas rafted across the Pacific Ocean helps explain how iguana lineages from South America dispersed so easily throughout the Caribbean & The Bahamas, with some reaching small islands surrounded by deep-ocean environments. theconversation.com/we-discovere... 🧪🦎