Great thread. The last things that I think are essential to consider are 1. the AI -> deskilling and dangerous loss of digital sovereignty and 2. Long reach of impending demographic change

21st Century Book burning.

New paper in Science Advances! Ants traded strength for numbers, and it worked 🐜 Our study comparing 500+ ant species shows how the evolution of cheaper workers fueled bigger colonies and faster diversification, shaping ants’ rise across the planet. 🔗To read here: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adx8068

🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜 Initially for 6 years: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...

Congrats @arthurmatte.bsky.social @economo.bsky.social ! arstechnica.com/science/2025...

@patrick-kennedy.bsky.social talks about so many fun social evolution dramas at @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting #wasplove

Lately I have identified a serious lack of whimsy in our lives in this era. Therefore, I am starting to report on nice instances of #whimsy when I see them #whimsyreport

So much #wasplove at the @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting!! Probably at least 50% of talks/posters.

@rmash.bsky.social from @ucl.ac.uk opening @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting in Leuven! #CareAsACapacitor

Our dispatch: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225014691 on the recent Hydra volume EM paper by Zhang, Rafa Yuste and colleagues: #connectomics, without synapses https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225013090 #neuroscience

New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I really believe that if people knew how cheap it is to verify thousands of fake accounts for a platform like X or TikTok and properly absorbed that knowledge, they would treat the online information environment very differently...

so it begins

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

Analysis of the DNA and proteins of a range of animals has revealed that sperm’s molecular toolkit arose in our single-celled ancestors, perhaps more than a billion years ago

Our preprint doi.org/10.1101/2025... getting media coverage (!)

I relied on corporations announcements of Black Friday to figure out when Thanksgiving would be, and it turns out they were a week off, and consequently, I’m celebrating Thanksgiving the weekend before rather than the weekend after… still yummy

There once was a man from Tennessee Who went on a criminal spree To commit his crimes He wrote them in rhymes And gave them to ChatGPT

We just released a new major version of TrackMate (v8), the cell and organelle tracking plugin of Fiji. It ships many new features, detailed below, but that are articulated around the following:

Had a great visit to @sussexneuro.bsky.social and @neurofishh.bsky.social today. Such a pleasure to chat with a bunch of clever and interesting folks, see a menagerie of interesting creatures and see the sea.

This is such a cool study. A parasitic ant queen tricks worker ants into murdering their own queen, so the parasite can take over the colony.

I am bewildered that this labour of Sisyphus is being carried out by volunteers, while Southern Water, which has admitted responsibility for the catastrophe, is doing nothing to remediate it.

Every ad now

Just gonna put this here for now www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... bsky.app/profile/jlst...

It was a pleasure to speak today at an event on Reproduction and Sustainability organized by @cambridgezero.bsky.social and @cam-repro.bsky.social so many fascinating talks across so many disciplines! I spoke about this @socialtransfernet.bsky.social project: doi.org/10.32942/X2C...

Come and join us here in Cambridge! Applications open for a new faculty position, for a researcher in computational and/or theoretical biology, based jointly in Genetics and Mathematics. Happy to answer questions about research, teaching and working here. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/faculty...

Thrilled to have been awarded a BBSRC grant to research metabolic cooperation between bodies (in ants). Stay tuned for open positions!

As a Californian abroad I still have strong feels about the state of the US. So glad that there was a massive left leaning sweep across CA, NYC, NJ, VA. Maybe my CA vote will finally have a little more power.

I went as an AI hallucination this year. I actually felt very dated because I was trying to get the LLMs to build the messed up text characteristic of a year or so ago and they won’t do it anymore!

so…bot farms. Just thinking back to the last 9 years and all the hearings and investigations into the ways platforms like FB could be manipulated, and into how these platforms were manipulating their own algos: in the absence of good regulation/enforcement, that turned out to be just R&D

Gorillas likely experience menopause, according to an analysis of over 30 years of data from wild mountain gorillas in Uganda, which shows that females can live for a decade or more after their last baby. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/kxyz50Xf1ER

“Ultimately, the collective strategy of AI companies threatens to deskill precisely those people who are essential for society to function(…) automation of knowledge and culture by private companies is a worrying prospect – conjuring dystopian and outright fascistic scenarios.” — @olivia.science

This video shows mouse sperm entering a zebrafish egg. Don’t worry, scientists aren’t out making mousefish. This fertility research actually demonstrates that mechanisms guiding sperm toward eggs may be shared across distant species. buff.ly/MJ1ILD1

Gary Larson is making new cartoons ! www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/

Interesting paper quantifying behavioural interactions across 5 naked mole-rat colonies over time: learn more about the strong social bonds of breeders & more here www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I’m thrilled to share my postdoc work and the first paper from the McKinley Lab! 🎉 @karalmckinley.bsky.social We built the first transgenic model of menstruation in mice. We used it to uncover how the endometrium organizes and sheds during menstruation. 🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

These are hilarious.

“The path to a better Amazon doesn’t lie through consumer activism, or appeals to the its conscience. Corporations, being artificial, immortal colony-organisms that use humans as their inconvenient gut flora, do not have consciences to appeal to.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Start independent research at the JIC with us 👇. Really interested in finding those with an interest in structural biology and biochemistry of plants and microbes. Please do get in touch by email if you'd like to know more 👍

Although highly topical, kleptoparasitism does not get nearly the attention it deserves! Here, a plant exploits the kleptoparasitic behavior of a fly that likes to snatch ants killed by spiders. 🕷️🐜🪰🌿 So the thief itself gets taken advantage of. Nice going, plants! www.cell.com/current-biol...

When harmful fungi invade their carefully cultivated crops, fungus-farming termites fight back with the precision of skilled gardeners, a new Science study reveals, smothering them in soil clumps enriched with microbial allies that inhibit fungal growth. https://scim.ag/4nsAqCu

Google Docs trying to "correct" the use of data as a plural noun. Suggestions for grammatical correction are "If some data has..." and "If data is..." No wonder I can't get students to do this correctly in a world of Grammarly and AI and whatnot. 🫠

If you are from the US and interested in applying for a PhD with me (or anyone else @camzoology.bsky.social @cambridgebiosci.bsky.social), your deadline for the gates scholarship is October 15! (You’ll need to write a research proposal, so contact PIs now) www.gatescambridge.org/programme/th...

BREAKING: Royal Society to reconsider expelling Elon Musk Violent rhetoric in address to anti-immigration rally pushes science academy to reassess billionaire’s fellowship (Free to read) www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-c...

Very proud of this extremely collaborative piece: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... Here, we show that divergence in visual systems - in response to differences in the light environment - leads to rapid divergence in sexually selected colour traits. Work brilliantly led by Madeleine Carruthers. 🐟👀🎨

We are delighted that our Winter Meeting 2025 in Leuven 🇧🇪 is approaching! Abstract submissions now open: www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings Date: December 18-19 Abstract deadline: October 15 Host: Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution at KU Leuven Plenary: Ido Pen & @rmash.bsky.social

don't underestimate how daunting this task will be, two centuries from now after the internet is gone, when all the data we unquestionably put in the cloud evaporated, the silicon-based electronic storage devices degraded or lost, Windows, Linux and Python languages dead and forgotten